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