Memory

Question 1

The neuron in memory formation:

Neurons, Neurotransmitters, Dendrites, Soma, Axon, Axon Terminal/ Terminal Button, Synaptic Gap, Myelin Sheath

Answer 1

Neurons - Neurons receive information from other neurons, process this information, and then communicate it to other neurons.

Neurotransmitters - Chemicals that help the communication across nerve synapses.

Examples: Acetylcholine and Glutamate

Dendrites - Dendrites look tree-like. The function of dendrites is to receive information from other neurons.

Soma - The soma is the cell body. It is the largest part of the neuron and controls the metabolism and maintenance of the cell.

Axon - The axon is a nerve fibre that carries information away from the soma toward cells that communicate with the neuron.

Axon Terminal/ Terminal Button - The end of each axon has terminal buttons that secrete a chemical called a neurotransmitter whenever information is sent down the axon in the form of electrical impulses

Synaptic Gap - Between neurons is a synapse. This is the junction between two neurons where the end of the axon of the presynaptic neuron comes into close proximity with the receptor sites on the dendrites of a postsynaptic neuron.

Myelin Sheath - Acts as an electrical insulator and increases speed of neural signals down the axon.

Question 2

draw a neuron :)

Answer 2

check notes pls

Question 3

Roles of the temporal lobe including the hippocampus and the amygdala:

Answer 3

Temporal Lobe: Responsible for consolidating new declarative memories and then allowing them to be sent to the cerebral cortex.

Hippocampus:

• Formation, consolidation and storage of declarative memories/explicit memories.
• It establishes a background on each new situation.
• Allows transfer new memory to other parts of the brain for storage.
• Plays a role between emotion and memories.

Amygdala: Emotion related memory à the emotions it regulates enhance the memorability of an event.
It is used to control procedural memoires and implicit memories.

Question 4

Neurotransmitters and their roles:

Glutamate, Dopamine, Acetylcholine,

Answer 4

Glutamate

Main excitatory neurotransmitter for info transmission through the brain
Enhances info transmission as it makes post synaptic neurons more likely to fire
Plays crucial role in structural changes (growth/strength synaptic connections

Dopamine

Roles in attention, initiation of voluntary movement, experience of pleasure/reward based learning
Contributes to strengthening of synaptic connections and LTM

Acetylcholine

Involved in learning, attention, sleeping, dreaming, motor control
Found in low level in people with Alzheimer’s
Drugs which inhibit activity of Ach can cause temporary memory loss

Norepinephrine

Encoding/retention of emotionally significant memories
“Noradrenaline”, secreted during times heightened emotional arousal
Believed level of emotional arousal during time of encoding influences strength LTM

Question 5

Consolidation theory

Answer 5

Proposes that memory is permanently stored through a process where there are physical changes to neurons. It refers to the strengthening of memories over time and is thought that any memory that is permanently stored will involve the process of consolidation.

Question 6

Memory decline over the lifespan

Answer 6

LTM

Declarative memory: Semantic memory

Elderly people perform just as well as younger people but may take a little more time to encode and retrieve information.

Declarative memory: Episodic memory

Declines with old age.

Procedural memory

Procedural memories tend to last for a long time, despite ageing. Such cleaning our teeth, does not disappear with age.

STM

Question 7

Memory decline over the lifespan

Answer 7

Motivation

Some elderly people lose interest in trying to learn and later remember information that is of no consequence or interest to them.

Confidence in memory

Some elderly people worry about their capacity to learn and remember new material and therefore do not make as much effort in this as younger adults.

Measures of retention

Older people tend to experience more difficulty than young people in retrieving new information rather than encoding it. Although the ability to recall information declines with age, the ability to recognise the same information does not.

Question 8

Amnesia resulting from brain trauma and neurodegenerative diseases including dementia and Alzheimer’s disease:

Answer 8

Amnesia: The inability to remember.

Retrograde Amnesia: Difficulty retrieving declarative memories that were formed prior to a brain injury. Therefore, it is difficulty in recalling previously stored memories. Usually, retrograde amnesia involves the loss of memories from a period before the time when the person’s brain was damaged. When this amnesia is caused by head injury, such as trauma or stroke, some memories might eventually return, with the older memories generally returning first.

Anterograde Amnesia: Inability to transfer declarative memories from STM to LTM as a result od damage to the hippocampus. Therefore, the inability to encode and store new memories. Typically, people can retrieve memories they had prior to the trauma but cannot learn anything new. This amnesia is commonly associated with Alzheimer’s disease.

Dementia: Disorder affecting higher mental functions. Dementia can be caused by a variety of factors but the brain is not shrinking.

Brain trauma: Damage to the brain refers to ‘organic’ or physiologically based amnesia.

Neurodegenerative disease: Disorder characterised by a progressive decline in structure, activity and function of brain tissue. Neurons within brain tissue gradually become damaged and lose function.

Question 9

Alzheimer’s Disease:

Answer 9

Description and Symptoms

This neurodegenerative disease, which is most common in old age, involves gradual, severe memory loss, confusion, impaired attention, disordered thinking and depression

Retrograde and/or anterograde amnesia?

It involves both anterograde and retrograde amnesia, but generally anterograde.

First type of memory affected

Memories in the hippocampus.

Area of the brain first affected by the disease

The disease affects both the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex.

Amyloid plaques (description)

Amyloid plaques (proteins that form among axon terminals and interfere with communication between neurons) typify Alzheimer’s disease.

Neurofibrillary tangles (description)

In addition, patients’ brains have neurofibrillary tangles (an abnormal build-up of protein inside neurons) and these are associated with the death of brain cells.

Low production of which neurotransmitter?

Alzheimer’s patients also have lower levels of important memory neurotransmitters, especially acetylcholine.

Question 10

Atkinson-Shiffrin’s multi-store model of memory

Processes of memory:

Answer 10

ENCODING: Encoding refers to the process of putting information into a form that will allow it to fit in with your personal storage system. Memory may be improved by improving the quality and depth of encoding.

STORAGE: Storage is keeping information in the brain so that we can use it later on. We store the information in an organised way to make it easier for us to recover memories when we need them. One type of system of organisation is called a ‘semantic network’.

RETRIEVAL: Retrieval is the process of getting information back from memory so that we can use it. Retrieval relies on using the right cues so that we can get to the correct location in our semantic networks.

Question 11

sensory memory

Answer 11

Sensory memory: The store for incoming, fleeting information to enter new info into memory from the external environment.

Iconic Memory: Sensory register for the fleeting storage of visual information. It explains why we can see a moving picture from a series of still photos.

Duration, 0.3 seconds - Capacity, Unlimited - Forgetting, Fades rapidly

Question 12

STM

Answer 12

Short-term/working memory: A store that receives information from the long-term and sensory stores and it holds info we are consciously aware of at any point in time.

Function: Holds information in awareness for a short period of time – long enough to use for mental tasks.

Duration: 12-30 Seconds

Capacity: 7 plus/minus 2 items

Forgetting: Displacement and interference possibility of decay.

Encoding: Mostly acoustic. Attention and rehearsal will help store information in LTM.

Maintenance Rehearsal - A strategy for keeping information in short-term memory or for moving it into long-term memory by simply repeating information over and over. This is a process for getting around limited duration. It can be verbal or non-verbal.

Chunking - The grouping together of items that can be remembered in order as larger units.

E.g. 0448488900 –> 0448 488 900

Rather than remembering 10 individual bits, group them into larger items therefore there are 3 chunks of information to learn rather than 10 individual numbers therefore this enables to get around capacity.

Example: Remembering an address long enough to look it up in an online street map service

Question 13

LTM

Answer 13

Long-term memory: The information is encoded and stored, and as long as you know enough about the information then it can be retrieved.

Function: Holds information in semantic networks making it available for retrieval at a later time

Duration: Virtually unlimited

Capacity: Virtually unlimited

Forgetting: Displacement and interference. Possibility of decay

Encoding: Elaborative Rehearsal - the process by which we give meaning to information and link it to other information already in memory. We tend to process the information on a deeper level.

E.g. FPOT

Salience or personal relevance can help encode information. This requires mentally involving ourselves in an example connected with the material being learnt.

E.g. Remembering an experience when you were in a nervous situation to remember the sympathetic nervous system physiological responses.

Example: Remembering the names of your friends; remembering your 18th birthday party; remembering how to ride a bike

Procedural Memory: How to’ memories. Occurs after practice

Examples: riding a bicycle, once the skill has been learnt or using cutlery to eat.

Implicit memory: Involves unintentional remembering. It is unconscious, as it does not require intentional, deliberate recall.

Declarative Memory: Memories of personal experiences (events) and facts.

Episodic: Personalised memories of events. May be related to knowledge of facts if the memory is also of how and where you learnt them.

Examples: your first day at school or a first romantic kiss

Semantic: Memories of facts (or knowledge)

Examples: knowing that Canberra is the capital city of Australia or knowing the times tables.

Explicit memory: involves intentional remembering (declarative memory) and is shown to be the responsibility of the brain structure known as the hippocampus.

Question 14

Other forms of Long Term Memory:

Question 15

Summary of Criticism OF ATKINSON AND SHIFRON

Question 16

Sperling’s Iconic Memory Study

Answer 16

In his experiment on memory, Sperling was able to demonstrate the existence of iconic memory by using a tachistoscope.

Sperling asked participants to remember as many symbols as they could from a grid of 12 that he displayed for ½0 of a second with the tachistoscope.
He found that participants could remember about four of the symbols before the remaining items had faded from their sensory memory.
Sperling concluded that iconic memory has a duration of approximately one-twentieth of a second.

However, participants said that they saw more symbols than they could report before they faded. Therefore, Sperling also tested the capacity of the iconic memory.

He presented the twelve-item grid for ½0 of a second, followed by a high-, medium- or low-sounding tone which signalled to the participants which of the three rows of four symbols to attend to and report (partial report condition).
He found that the mean number of symbols reported was three out of four symbols from the specified row.

Sperling further tested the duration of the iconic memory by allowing a delay between the sounding of the tone and the presentation of the grid in the tachistoscope.

He found that the longer the delay, the more symbols were forgotten, with only 50 per cent of symbols recalled after a 0.3 second delay and 33 per cent after a 1 second delay.

Question 17

Semantic Network Theory

Answer 17

Proposes that the nodes of information are stored in a hierarchy according to particular concepts. This suggests that elaborative rehearsal is likely to assist learning of new information that we want to be able to retrieve later on. In reality there are thousands of interconnected nodes which together.

Nodes: The named units of information.

Links: The lines showing the relationships between nodes. The shorter the links the closer the relationship.

Hierarchical Structure: Organising information into a conceptual hierarchy will assist recall of information.

Question 18

Semantic network theory

Answer 18

Draw in an example

Question 19

Serial Position Effect

Answer 19

Primacy Effect

Superior recall for items at the beginning of a list.

Items have probably been rehearsed and transferred into LTM before the capacity of the STM was full. If list lasts longer than approximately 30 seconds (duration of STM), it is likely that items from the start of the list will be forgotten unless they have been stored in LTM. The primacy effect will still occur if there is a delay of more than 12–30 seconds between learning and reporting items.

Recency Effect

Superior recall for items at the end of a list.

Items from the end of the list are recalled first. The recency effect will still occur even if the list of items is increased. Maintenance rehearsal has probably been used. The recency effect will not occur where there is a delay of more than 12–30 seconds between earning and reporting the items.

Words in the Middle

On a graph, this shows inferior recall for items in the middle of a list.

As STM reaches capacity, items are displaced before they can be adequately rehearsed and stored in LTM.

Question 20

Baddeley and Hitch’s model of working memory:

Question 21

Levels of processing as informed by Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart:

Answer 21

Structural/shallow

Words are learnt by remembering their physical features - visual encoding. / Participants were asked to remember whether the word contained upper case letters. / Eg. pOTato / 20%

Phonemic / Moderate

Words are learnt by their sounds. / Participants were asked to think of a rhyme (bull/full) for the word, or perhaps rhyme and rhythm (What a song/I love the phrasing/and the tune/is just amazing!) / 50%

Semantic / Deep

Words are encoded by their meaning, which allows them to be placed directly in our semantic networks./ Participants were asked to put the words into a sentence where the meaning of the word would be important to the meaning of the sentence, such as ‘She opened the gate and entered the garden’. / 80%

Question 22

Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve

what did it involve

Answer 22

Forgetting: is the inability to remember and access information. This includes the inability to retrieve, recall or recognise information that was previously stored as memory.

What did Ebbinghaus’ experiments involve?

He did not want previous knowledge to interfere with his results. He learnt lists of nonsense, pronounceable, three-letter combinations such as bup, tov, ruj and lev. Having tested himself until he had perfect scores for remembering the ‘words’ on each list, he waited for various periods of time – ranging from 20 minutes to 31 days – and then tested himself again to see what percentage of the learnt material he had retained.

Question 23

Outline four features that were observed in both Ebbinghaus’ research and subsequent studies:

Question 24

Retrieval Failure Theory

Question 25

Interference Theory

Answer 25

What does the theory propose?

Interference theory is an explanation of why a memory trace that is available has become temporarily inaccessible.

When is interference most likely to occur?

Interference is likely to be most pronounced when the two sets of material are very similar. It was found that the amount of original information forgotten increased as the level of similarity between the original information and the interval information also increased.

Proactive Interference

Proactive interference is when previously learnt material inhibits our ability to retrieve new material.

Retroactive Interference

Retroactive interference is when newly learnt material inhibits our ability to retrieve previously learnt material.

Strengths of the theory

• Supported, empirical evidence.
• Useful explanation of forgetting regarding interference.

Criticisms of the theory

• They also point out that in real life interference might not occur so readily.
• Doesn’t account when forget due to use of incorrect retrieval cues
• Most studies have used more sensitive measures of recognition/ relearning

Question 26

Motivated Forgetting – Freud

Question 27

Decay Theory

Question 28

Measures of retention:

retriveal

recall - cued, free and serial

recognition

relearning

Answer 28

Retrieval: process of accessing the stored information.

Recall: Requires the person to retrieve stored information using a minimal amount of cues to assist retrieval.

Free recall: Is involved in a task in which the participants are required to retrieve as much information as they can in any order. EG - a list of items to purchase from the supermarket.

Serial recall: Involves recalling information in the order in which it was presented. EG -The steps of making a cake.

Cued recall: Uses various prompts (cues) to assist the retrieval process. EG - “The surname is short and begins with a D”

Recognition: Refers to identification of the correct information among a list of incorrect pieces of information. Recognition is generally more accurate than recall because recognition provides more cues to assist retrieval. EG - Being able to pick the correct answer to a multiple-choice question from a list of four alternatives.

Relearning: Refers to learning again something that has previously been committed to memory, is easier than learning something for the first time. If the time taken to learn the material originally can be measured and compared with the time taken to relearn the same material, then a savings score can be calculated. EG - Learn how to play hockey when you are 4 - then you do it again when you are 14 and you can relearn it quicker than before.

Question 29

Continuum below according to their relative sensitivity:

Question 30

Encoding specificity: context- and state-dependent cues Tulving & Thomson 1973

Answer 30

Encoding specificity principle: States that the associations formed at the time of encoding new memories will be the most effective retrieval cues. This means that if we are trying to retrieve information under conditions that are similar to those under which it was learnt, we will retrieve it more easily than under different conditions.

Context-dependent cues: Context-dependent cues refer to the learner’s external environment the context) in which the memory was formed. Environmental cues include sounds, smells, temperature, sights and other environmental stimuli that were linked to the material being learnt at the time. Eg: Taken to the scene where you witnessed a crime.

State-dependent cues: State-dependent cues refer to the ‘internal environment’, the physiological or psychological state that the person was in at the time of learning. Eg: Getting an A in English, feeling happy then getting another A in psychology feeling like how you felt in English.

Question 31

Improving memory: mnemonics

Answer 31

Mnemonics: The tricks and strategies that we use to help improve our ability both to encode material into memory and to retrieve it when needed include mnemonics.

Acronyms: A word or pronounceable syllable makeup of the first letters of the items you were trying to remember or the words in the phrase we are trying to remember. Eg – ANZAC, Australia and New Zealand Army Corps

Acrostics: Phrases, rhymes or poems in order which the first letter of each word serves as a cue to help you retrieve a word or an idea that begins with the same letter. Eg – Never Eat Soggy Wheatbix, to remember the order of the notes on the lines of the treble clef.

Narrative chaining: A series of items or terms to be remembered to be incorporated in a story. These items need to be in order. Eg - milk, dog food, bananas, flour, dental floss, apple, tomato sauce, napkins and peas.

Question 32

Eyewitness testimony

Why does eyewitness testimony fail?

Misleading questions and the misinformation effect

Answer 32

Why does eyewitness testimony fail?

The reconstructive nature of such memories. Usually the eyewitness sees the perpetrator for only a few seconds so when asked to describe the scene and the perpetrator, the witness will build on their own expectations, created by similar experiences from the past, from stories in books, films and on television, or even their own feelings at the time.

Misleading questions and the misinformation effect

During questioning in court or, during the police investigation, it is possible for misinformation to be implanted in the witness’s memory. This can gradually take on greater significance for the witness until they begin to believe that the implanted information was a genuine memory.

Question 33

Loftus and Palmer (1974)

Answer 33

Experimental Method

They showed participants a video of a motor accident, after which they interrogated them as if they were being cross-examined in court. Some participants were asked ‘How fast were the cars going when they collided with each other?’, while others had other words such as bumped into, hit, contacted, smashed into substituted for ‘collided with’. One week later, they were asked ‘Did you see any broken glass in the accident?’

Question 34

Loftus and Zanni (1975)

Answer 34

Experimental Method

Showed 100 participants a film in which a car turned quickly into traffic and caused a five-car nose-to-tail collision. Afterwards, participants were asked about certain details of the accident, including whether certain items were present or not. The only difference in questioning was that 50 per cent of the questions were phrased as ‘Did you see the (broken headlight)?’ and half as ‘Did you see a (broken headlight)?’