The remembering brain Flashcards
Short-term memory
Memory for information currently held ‘‘in mind’’; it has limited capacity.
Long-term memory
Memory for information that is stored but need not be consciously accesible: it has an essentially umlimited capacity.
Working memory
A system for the temporary storage and manipulation of information.
Articulatory suppression
Silently mouthing words while performing some other task (typically a memory task).
Declarative memory
Memories that can be consciously accessed and, hence, can typically be declared.
Non-declarative memory
Memories that cannot be consciously accessed (e.g. procedural memory).
Explicit memory
See declarative memory.
Implicit memory
See non-declarative memory.
Procedural memory
Memory for skills such as riding a bike.
Semantic memory
Conceptually based knowledge about the world, including knowledge of people, places, the meaning of objects and words.
Episodic memory
Memory of specific events in one’s own life.
Anterograde memory
Memory for events that have occurred after brain damage.
Retrograde memory
Memory for events that occurred before brain damage.
Consolidation
The process by which moment-to-moment changes in brain activity are translated into permanent structural changes in the brain.
Long-term potentiation (LTP)
An increase in the long-term responsiveness of a postsynaptic neuron in response to stimulation of a presynaptic neuron.
Ribot’s law
The observation that memories from early in life tend to be preserved in amnesia.
Place cells
Neurons that respond when an animal is in a particular location in allocentric space (normally found in the hippocampus)
Grid cells
Neurons that respond when an animal is in particular locations in an environment such that the responsive locations form a repeating grid-like pattern.
Recognition memory
A memory test in which participants must decide whether a stimulus was shown on a particular occasion.
Recall
Participants must produce previously seen stimuli without a full prompt being given (compare recognition memory).
Familiarity
Context-free memory in which the recognized item just feels familiar.
Recollection
Context-dependent memory that involves remembering specific information from the study episode.
Levels-of-processing account
Information that is processed semantically is more likely to be remembered than information that is processed perceptually.
Encoding specificity hypothesis
Events are easier to remember when the context at retrieval is similar to the context at encoding.
Retrieval-induced forgetting
Retrieval of a memory causes active inhibition of similar competing memories.
Directed forgetting
Forgetting arising because of a deliberate intention to forget
Constructive memory
The act of remembering construed in terms of making inferences about the past, based on what is currently known and accessible.
False memory
A memory that is either partly or wholly inaccurate but is accepted as a real memory by the person doing the remembering.
Source monitoring
The process by which retrieved memories are attributed to their original context.
Confabulation
A memory that is false and sometimes self-contradictory without an intention to lie.
