Memory Pt.3 Flashcards
Explicit Memory
-Semantic memory
-Episodic memory
Implicit Memory
-Procedural memory
-Classical conditioning
-Priming
Procedural Memory
Automatic behviour/actions related to motor movements and organization of sequences
-Basal Ganglia-motor sequence
-Prefrontal Cortex-organization
These are more immune to forgetting compared to other types of memory
-Not thinking of what you’re doing
Habits
When deliberate actions become routine
-Initially relies on explicit memory -> with training and/or exposure, relies on implicit memory
Habit Formation
-Rats trained on a T-shaped maze with tones to signal reward (chocolate milk; sugar water) at left or right end
-Required the striatum (can’t form habits without this)
Breaking Habits
-Removing a reward, or making one reward gross (non-rewarding) did not break the habit
-To break habit, you must inhibit prefrontal cortex to reduce association (between the habit and the reward)
Priming
-Prior exposure facilitates information processing without awareness
-Example: word-fragment completion test
-participants are likely to use prior words to complete the fragments without knowing it
Deja Vu
-The feeling that you’ve experienced something before that you have not
-When you feel like a place is familiar because you are implicitly reminded of another place
Implicit Emotional Responses
Conditioned emotional responses
-Automatic responses to things you find scary
-Fear responses to snakes, the dark and other scary stimuli (adaptive)
-Amygdala also supports explicit emotional memory
Eat a bowl of apples as a relaxation activity.
-Reward
-Breaks association
Clarke can’t stop eating popcorn! Most nights they find themselves looking forward to a big bowl of popcorn to relax. Their dentist told them they must stop this habit! What would be the most successful way for Clarke to stop their popcorn habit?
Semantic Memory
Aquired knowledge that includes facts about the world and the self, concepts, general ideas, meaning
-Formed from regularities and repeated occurrences in our experiences (formed from episodic memories)
-Requires time and repetitions for general facts (concepts) to be formed
Semantic Network
How do we store semantic knowledge?
Spreading Activation in the Semantic Network
-Spreading activation
-How a related concept pops up when thinking of another concept (priming)
-Helps explains trains of thought that might seem nonsensical or strange
Spreading Activation
-Automatic activity spread from an activated concept to interconnected concepts
-Thinking about a canary will trigger activation in related bird concepts
-Speading activation to features
The case of HM. Amnesia due to brain injury
-Bilateral removal of the medial temporal lobe, inlcuding the hippocampus
-Intact short-term memory
-Intact procedural memory
-Intact semantic memory
-Profound episodic memory loss
-He couldn’t learn new information and recalled his past in sparse detail
HM was stuck in the present
-He could not remember details of his past
-He could not encode new events
-He could not imagine the future
Anterograde Amnesia
Inability to form new episodic memories
Retrograde Amnesia
Inability to access memories from before amnesia
-Remote memories are less affected than recent memories
Korsakoff’s Syndrome
-Chronic alcoholism -> thiamine deficiency -> damaged mammillary bodies of the hypothalamus, connected to the hippocampus
-Anterograde + retrograde amnesia
-Personality + other behavioural changes
-Confabulation
Confabulation
Narrative story of an event that has not been experienced
-Deficits in monitoring processes supported by the prefrontal cortex
-False memories that they believe
-Mushing memories together
-Organization problem
-E.g. I might be telling you something that never actually happened…But I actually believe it did
Dissociative Amnesia
-A very rare psychiatric disorder
-Usually, a response to psychological or physical trauma
-Retrograde amnesia
-Shifts in lifestyle
-Assuming a new identity
Retrograde Amnesia
Someone who developed a tumor now can’t remember a wedding they attended years ago. This would be an example of what?
Alzheimer’s Disease
-The most common form of dementia
-Build up of amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles that cause cell death = brain shrinkage
-Medial temporal lobe (MTL) regions are the first to be affected, then spreads
-Earliest symptom is a deficit in episodic memory
Healthy Aging
-Implicit memory is intact
-Semantic memory is intact
-Episodic memory (and working memory) is impaired
