Task 2

Question 1

What memory types does the term declarative memory include?

Answer 1

Semantic and episodic memory

- consciously accessible and usually knowledge that is easy to verbalize

Question 2

What is episodic memory?

Answer 2

– Memory for a specific autobiographical event. It is personal and fully tied to personal history. It includes information about spatial and temporal context -> Information we ‘remember’.

Question 3

What is semantic memory?

Answer 3

Memory for facts or general knowledge about the world. It is not tagged in time and space -> Information we ‘know’.

Question 4

What are the three distinct life stages of episodic and semantic memories?

Answer 4

1. Acquisition - Information must be encoded or put into memory;
2. Retention - Memory must be retained or kept in memory;
3. Recall - Memory must be retrieved when needed.

Question 5

What factors can include the life stages of declarative memory?

Answer 5

• it is easier to remember information we can interpret in context of things we already know
• deeper processing at encoding improves recognition later
• we are more likely to remember things that happened recently than things that happened long ago
• recall is a bit better if retrieval context is similar to encoding context
• the more cues, the better the recall

Question 6

In which three ways can declarative memory malfunction?

Answer 6

• interference
• source amnesia
• false memory

Question 7

How are our semantic networks organized?

Answer 7

• by object properties (e.g. visual, functional etc.)

Question 8

What brain areas are involved in memory encoding?

Answer 8

• medial temporal lobes including hippocampus, amygdala and nearby cortical areas

Question 9

Who is patient H.M.? What happened to him?

Answer 9

• patient with epileptic seizures, whose medial temporal lobe was bilaterally removed including hippo campus, amygdala and surrounding cortex.
• seizures declined in frequency, but he developed anterograde amnesia -> inability to form new episodic and semantic memories

Question 10

What behavior did rats with hippocampal lesions show in the radial arm maze?

Answer 10

X Rats with hippocampal lesions made more errors than control -> They had trouble remembering which arms they’ve already visited on trial.

Question 11

What is the function of the hippocampus in a healthy brain?

Answer 11

• critical for forming new memories

- region is needed to encode information, retain or consolidate it, to retrieve it when needed

Question 12

What did the ‘subsequent forgetting paradigm’ experiment show?

Answer 12

• More activity during initial learning of words in left medial temporal lobe, are more subsequently remembered