Procedural memory/skill memory

Question 1

procedural memory

Answer 1

-improved performance (accuracy/speed) on perceptual motor or cognitive tasks with practice

Question 2

perceptual-motor skills

Answer 2

• motor patterns
• guided by sensory input
• maps sensory world to response, the sensory world is dynamic

Question 3

cognitive skills

Answer 3

-ability to problem solve and apply strategies

Question 4

types of perceptual motor

Answer 4

• closed loop skills

- open loop skills

Question 5

closed loop skills

Answer 5

• performing pre-defined sequence of actions
• express the same motor executions
• e.g. gymnastics, dance, synchro

Question 6

open loop skills

Answer 6

• requires dynamic adjustment based on changes in the environment
• e.g., basketball, improvising jazz

Question 7

are most skills closed or open?

Answer 7

-most skills like on a spectrum from closed to open

Question 8

How is procedural memory different from declarative memory?

Answer 8

• procedural memory is :
  
  • acquired without conscious awareness: implicit learning
  • we are not aware when we draw on procedural learning
  • typically difficult to verbalize
  • requires repeated learning trials (extensive practice)

Question 9

Implicit learning

Answer 9

• acquisition of implicit memories without conscious awareness
• measured with serial reaction time task

Question 10

serial reaction time task

Answer 10

• press different buttons that correspond to different visual cues
• cues mostly appear in random order, but some are repeated
• with training, reaction time to the repeated sequence is faster than the random sequence
• participants are not usually aware that the sequence was repeated

Question 11

How is procedural memory different from priming?

Answer 11

• priming is facilitated performance regarding a particular STIMULUS
• skill learning is facilitated performance on a particular TASK with MULTIPLE STIMULI

Question 12

power law of learning

Answer 12

-gains in learning are very rapid at first, but the rate of learning decreases with practice

Question 13

stages of skill learning

Fitt’s three stage model (1964)

Answer 13

• Cognitive stage: initial period, typically verbal, in which effort is required to perform the skill
• associative stage: less reliance on verbal rules, more stereotyped behavior
• autonomous stage: requires little attention, can do other things concurrently, automatic, requires little attention (habitual)

Question 14

factors for effective practice

Answer 14

• feedback: knowledge of performance during practice
• spacing: massed or spaced
• variability: constant or variable

Question 15

spacing

Answer 15

• massed: concentrated practice

- spaced: spread out

Question 16

variability

Answer 16

• constant: practice focused on a single skill

- variable: practice that alternates between a set of skills, is more effective

Question 17

Ericcson

Answer 17

-proposed that you need about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert

Question 18

expertise

Answer 18

• it isn’t just time that matters, it’s how you practice
• e.g., spacing is important, it is best to practice for 2-3 hours per day for many years
• people often hit plateaus (law of learning)
• deliberate practice matters in order to get past these plateaus
• focus on feedback, overcome motor habits that might not be optimal

Question 19

Deliberate practice

Answer 19

• requires focused attention
• requires feedback
• requires regularly changing context and conditions and variability

Question 20

importance of failure

Answer 20

• practice should be challenging
• to get past plateau, there must be a risk of failure (desirable difficulty)
• lacking awareness or not addressing failure is often the reason we don’t improve with practice
• practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect

Question 21

transfer

Answer 21

• generalization of skill learning from one context to another
• generally most skills don’t transfer

Question 22

transfer specificity

Answer 22

-restricted applicability of some learned skills to a specific situation

Question 23

when are skills likely to transfer:

Thorndike’s identical elements

Answer 23

• similarity of the training context to the new context

- more shared (identical) elements = better transfer of skill learning

Question 24

amnesic patients and skill learning

Answer 24

-can still acquire new skills
-hippocampal/MTL not necessary for simple motor skills
-mirror tracing:
-requires new perceptual motor mapping
cortical representations of visual perceptions need to be associated with cortical representations of motor programs (basal ganglia)

Question 25

brain substrates involved in skill learning

Answer 25

• basal ganglia
• cortex (especially motor)
• cerebellum

Question 26

basal ganglia

Answer 26

• input: many cortical regions
• output: thalamus
• learns mappings between sensory information and optimal outcome
• key role in regulating the direction, speed, and strength of movement

Question 27

different radial arm tests

Answer 27

Radial arm task

• declarative: each arm has food, has to remember which arms were visited
• procedural: half the arms are baited and signaled wiht light, performance requires entering illuminated arms only (stimulus response)

Question 28

MTL vs basal ganglia damage

Answer 28

• hippocampal lesion = errors on declarative radial arm task

- basal ganglia lesion = errors on procedural radial arm task

Question 29

parkinson’s disease

Answer 29

• neurodegenerative, affects about 1 million
• movement disorder
• cognitive affects: impairments in procedural learning, gradual death of neurons in substantia nigra (source of dopamine) that projects into the basal ganglia
• the release of dopaminergic signals during learning usually help the basal ganglia to learn the new appropriate output

Question 30

weather prediction task

Answer 30

• test of probabilistic classification
• slowly learn relation between card and probability
• controls and amnesics get better
• PD patients don’t improve but they have declarative memory of the task

Question 31

amnesics and list learning

Answer 31

• impaired on explicit task (name the words)
• implicit testing: tell me the first thing that comes to mind (stem completion)
• no recall, impaired recognition
• able to generate as many words as control

Question 32

priming

Answer 32

change in performance (accuracy/speed) with a stimulus (e.g., word or picture) due to prior processing of that stimulus or a related stimulus

Question 33

are priming and declarative memory dissociated in healthy individuals?

Answer 33

yes

Question 34

perceptual overlap and generalization: explicit and implicit dissociations (study)

Answer 34

• study with no context, semantic context or gernative context
• given explicit (recognition of the word) or implict probe (word flashed for 34 milliseconds, identify the word)
• priming is relative: compare performance on old words to performance on new words
• explicit: best for generative
• priming: best for no context
• shows a dissociation between episodic memory and semantic processing and priming and sensory stimulus