Procedural memory/skill memory Flashcards
procedural memory
-improved performance (accuracy/speed) on perceptual motor or cognitive tasks with practice
perceptual-motor skills
- motor patterns
- guided by sensory input
- maps sensory world to response, the sensory world is dynamic
cognitive skills
-ability to problem solve and apply strategies
types of perceptual motor
- closed loop skills
- open loop skills
closed loop skills
- performing pre-defined sequence of actions
- express the same motor executions
- e.g. gymnastics, dance, synchro
open loop skills
- requires dynamic adjustment based on changes in the environment
- e.g., basketball, improvising jazz
are most skills closed or open?
-most skills like on a spectrum from closed to open
How is procedural memory different from declarative memory?
- 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)
Implicit learning
- acquisition of implicit memories without conscious awareness
- measured with serial reaction time task
serial reaction time task
- 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
How is procedural memory different from priming?
- priming is facilitated performance regarding a particular STIMULUS
- skill learning is facilitated performance on a particular TASK with MULTIPLE STIMULI
power law of learning
-gains in learning are very rapid at first, but the rate of learning decreases with practice
stages of skill learning
Fitt’s three stage model (1964)
- 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)
factors for effective practice
- feedback: knowledge of performance during practice
- spacing: massed or spaced
- variability: constant or variable
spacing
- massed: concentrated practice
- spaced: spread out
variability
- constant: practice focused on a single skill
- variable: practice that alternates between a set of skills, is more effective
Ericcson
-proposed that you need about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert
expertise
- 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
Deliberate practice
- requires focused attention
- requires feedback
- requires regularly changing context and conditions and variability
importance of failure
- 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
transfer
- generalization of skill learning from one context to another
- generally most skills don’t transfer
transfer specificity
-restricted applicability of some learned skills to a specific situation
when are skills likely to transfer:
Thorndike’s identical elements
- similarity of the training context to the new context
- more shared (identical) elements = better transfer of skill learning
amnesic patients and skill learning
-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)
brain substrates involved in skill learning
- basal ganglia
- cortex (especially motor)
- cerebellum
basal ganglia
- 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
different radial arm tests
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)
MTL vs basal ganglia damage
- hippocampal lesion = errors on declarative radial arm task
- basal ganglia lesion = errors on procedural radial arm task
parkinson’s disease
- 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
weather prediction task
- 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
amnesics and list learning
- 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
priming
change in performance (accuracy/speed) with a stimulus (e.g., word or picture) due to prior processing of that stimulus or a related stimulus
are priming and declarative memory dissociated in healthy individuals?
yes
perceptual overlap and generalization: explicit and implicit dissociations (study)
- 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
