Memory Short Answers Flashcards
How do Skin Conductance Responses Work for Normal Brains?
Chose good decks without awareness of the situation.
How do Skin Conductance Responses Work for Damaged Frontal Lobe Brains?
Didn’t make good choices even with awareness of situation.
What are 2 Pieces of Evidence that show Blindsight is Mental?
Can discriminate line orientation in ‘blind field’ and striped patterns from grey patches.
What were Chalmer’s 2 Easy Problems of Consciousness?
Non-conscious vs conscious perception/learning.
What were Chalmer’s Hard Problems of Consciousness?
Subjective experience, raw feel of things.
What are the Different Perspectives of Dennet and Chalmer’s in terms of Intuition?
C - appeals to our intuitions
D - our intuitions may be unreliable.
What Happens during Stage 1 of Sleep?
5 mins, deep breathing, theta waves.
What Happens during Stage 2 of Sleep?
20 mins, sleep spindles.
What Happens during Stages 3 and 4 of Sleep?
Slow wave, body temp decreases.
What Happens during REM Sleep?
Rapid eye movements, muscles relaxed, hard to awaken, heart beat/breathing irregular.
What is the Aim of Brain-Computer Interfaces?
Communication and therapeutic improvement.
What does Storage Depend on?
Attention, may fade over time.
What Happened during Sperling’s Experiment on Sensory Memory?
Display flashed quickly, usually only 4 letters remembered. If a cue is given, entire row can be remembered.
What is Another Name for Sensory Memory: Visual?
Iconic memory.
What is Another Name for Sensory Memory: Auditory?
Echoic memory.
What is the Cocktail Party Problem?
Switching attention between auditory streams - can still pick up a little bit of ignored streams.
What are the 4 Mental Processes Taking Place in Working Memory?
Mental arithmetic, mental time travel, general conversation, mental rotation.
What are the 3 Components of Working Memory?
Visuospatial sketchpad, central executive, articulatory loop.
What are the 2 Kinds of Rehearsal?
Maintenance, elaborative.
How does Transfer to Long Term Memory Occur?
Physio-chemical process, partly dependent on hippocampus.
How can Primacy Effect be Reduced?
Speeding presentation, allowing less time for rehearsal.
How can Recency Effect be Reduced?
Delay, because STM fades away.
What is Super-Memory Often Associated with?
Deficits in other areas.
Why does Emotion Enhance Memory?
Hippocampus is next to the amygdala, which is the emotional centre.
What is Mental Time Travel?
Replaying the past, pre-playing the future - using the hippocampus.
How is the Brain Activated when Remembering vs. Predicting?
The same way, but hippocampus can tell past from future.
How do Alcohol and Alzheimer’s Affect the Hippocampus?
They cause Atrophy.
What is the ‘Memory Gene’?
Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).
How does the ‘Memory Gene’ Work?
Two alleles - Met and Val - those with Met may have better episodic memory.
How do Rhymes Assist Memory?
Provides redundancy, adds predictability.
What was Pavlov’s Example of Classical Conditioning?
Linking food with sound of a metronome, so that the metronome induced salivation even when no food was present.
What are the 3 Differences between Controlled Processing and Automatic Processing?
C - attention required, one at a time, easily disrupted, becomes automatic with practice
A - no attention, parallel processing, less easily interrupted
What is Semantic Memory?
“Knowing”, like a dictionary, learned at school, large robust storage.
What is Episodic Memory?
“Remembering”, like a diary, based on personal experience, can be replayed, fragile storage, can be inaccurate.
What Happens if the Hippocampus is Destroyed?
You lose your memories.
How does the Episodic Memory Circuit Work?
Puts together the information needed to reconstruct past memories from other parts of the brain.
What Happened to Clive Wearing when his Hippocampus was Destroyed?
Could still play piano - working, semantic, implicit memories still intact.
What Happened to Henry Molaison when his Hippocampus was Removed?
Loss of autobiographical memory, other forms of memory still intact, skill learning still intact.
