Neuropsychology of memory Flashcards
Amnesia
Intelligence is intact
Attentional span is intact
Personality is unaffected
Ability to take in new information is severely and usually permanently affected
HM’s surgery
Bilateral removal of medial temporal lobes
Includes ‘hipocampus’
Causes of amnesia
Usually caused by damage to the medial temporal lobe or anatomically connected regions
Can occur in head injuries, Alzheimer’s disease, epilepsy, stroke
Anterograde amnesia
After brain injury
Memories are severely affected
Procedural memory
Amnesics can learn new skills
Learning of motor skills is distinct from explicit long term memory
Dedicated brain systems for procedural memory
- basal ganglia
- impaired in Huntingdon’s disease
When a skill becomes automatic it can operate in the absence of awareness
Episodic memory
Memory for events and occurrences that are specific in time and place
What, where, when
Semantic memory
Knowledge of facts, concepts, word meanings, etc
Can be retrieved without knowledge about where and when the information was acquired
Declarative memory theory
All declarative memories depend on medial temporal lobes for their acquisition and short term retention
New semantic memories
All had perinatal anoxia
Damage to hippocampus
Grossly impaired episodic memory
Completed normal schooling, have good vocabularies about the world
Retrograde amnesia
Means before brain injury
Some degree of retrograde amnesia is almost always present
Extent of retrograde amnesia for episodic memories is highly contested
Over time, declarative memories become consolidated to other brain regions
Semantic dementia
Poor knowledge of meaning of words or concepts
Naming difficulties
Not confined to one modaility
Semantic knowledge
Associated with lateral temporal cortex
Confabulation
Spontaneously generate erroneous memories they believe to be true
Linked to own lives- true memories misplaced in context
Usually result of damage to frontal lobes
Not due to damage to memory storage
Breakdown in control processes
