Non associative and associative learning and memory (27/11) Flashcards
What is ‘learning’?
Acquisition of new knowledge or an altered behavioural response to an environmental stimulus
What is ‘memory’?
Process through which learned information is stored and retained
What is ‘recall’?
Conscious or unconscious retrieval process by which this knowledge or altered behaviour is shown
What is ‘declarative memory’?
Memory relating to facts and events
What is ‘non-declarative memory’?
Working memory
What is short term memory also known as?
Working memory
Outline the model for working memory.
What is the ‘central executive’ dependent on?
Attention ‘regulator’
What is the ‘visuospatial sketchpad’?
It stores and processes information ina visual and spatial form
What is the phonological loop?
A part of working memory that deals with spoken and written material
A. What is the episodic buffer?
B. How can we use this information and information from the other two buffers in terms of memory?
A. It is a buffer that integrates information from other components and used to maintain a sense of time
B. For comparison of long term memory
What are the key findings from Goldam and Rakic short term memory task in monkey’s?
(Task was: fixation, cue, delay, saccade. Signal comes on, animals look at where stimulus is on screen)
- Pre-frontal cortex - see firing of neuron at cues
- Neuron fire at different points in task - preferentially during saccade
- Sometime fire more preferentially in delay period - holds onto information that goes to intermediate of LTM stores
- Co-ordinated activity in sparse network of neurons
Above implies sparse reverberation and network of activation for short period of time
What do prefrontal neurons having opponent fields show in Goldam and Rakic experiment?
Shows rate of firing in delay period is enhanced, for one target location, and inhibited during delay on trials with target stimuli of opponent polarity
What is the Wisconsin sorting card task?
Where you have to sort cards by colour, shape and number
How can you measure brain activity of Wisconsins card sorting task in humans?
fMRI
Where and when do you see peak activity in the human brain in the Wisconsin card sorting task?
Why is that?
Dorsal lateral pre-frontal cortex - occurs when subject gets feeback
Happens as teh current information is being related to earlier events
In terms of STM what is ‘iconic’ and ‘echoic’?
Iconic refers to visual sensory memory and echoic refers to auditory sensory memory
What are some of the features of STM and working memory?
(3 marks)
- Temporary (~10 secs)
- Limted capacity
- Requires attention adn rehearsal and is vulnerable to disruption (change in attention)
What is the process of STM changing into LTM?
- Diagram below meant to show that senory infromation geos into a sustained neural circuit activity. This will either give ‘output’ as STM and be forgotten, or recevie input from STM to be consolidated and form LTM.
Arrow that is above STM and that means infromation is forgotten
STM (arrows that go between this and sustained)
Sensory information –> Sustained neural circuitry –> Consolidation –> LTM
What are the types of declartive memory and are they explicit or implicit?
Semantic e.g. countires, and Episodic e.g. ‘what, where and when’
Both these forms are explicit declarative
What are forms of non-declarative memory and are they implicit or explicit?
- Learnt emotional responses
- Habits and procedural memory
- Classical conditioning
- Skeletal musculature
These are all IMPLICIT nad require repition and practise to learn
What is an engram?
- Cognitive unit within the brain that is theorized to be the mean in which memory is stored as biophysical and biochemical changes in the brain
What is the phrase used when all cortical areas are shown to contribute to memory storage?
MASS ACTION
What was Hebb’s postulate for an engram? (4 marks)
- If an external stimulus was presented, you would get an activation of anumber of neurons in the brain leading to reverberatory loop of activation
- Reverberating activity will lead to ‘growth process’
- After stimulus has gone away the connections of the cells will be strengthened
- After learning, partial activation of assembly leads to activation of entire representation of stimulus
What does reveraberation mean?
That cells are reciprocally interconnected - continuous loop of connectivity
What is meant by ‘cell assembly’?
Simultaneously active neruons. Consolidation by ‘growth processes’. ‘fire together wire together’
What sort of role is the meidal temporal lobe hypothesised to play in declarative memory?
Involved in dreams, hallucinations, memories
What strucutres in the brain are essential for memory retrieval?
Amygdala and hippocampus
What are the 3 main memory systems, the brain structures that support them, and the type of memory they ‘store’?
