W10/11 Flashcards
What are the two types of memory?
Declarative: Things that can be consciously recalled/ described with words. Daily events, words and their meaning.
Nondeclarative: motor skills, associations, priming cues, puzzle solving.
What are the different time forms of memory?
Immediate- available for a very short time
Working- can be recalled a little longer
Long-term - things which are repeated often are moved here. Consolidation. Important information is regularly recalled and so maintained.
What is learning?
Learning is the process in which the nervous system acquires new information.
Depending on the type of learning, it may lead to a change in behaviour.
What is memory?
Memory is the saving and re-accessing of information which has been acquired through learning.
What is “imprinting” (prägung)
This is something that is learnt in the critical period and lasts a life-time.
What is instinct?
A behavioural response to a stimulus which doesn’t have to be learnt by every individual, but is acquired at a species level.
What improves learning?
Learning is dependent on protein synthesis, and therefore consolidation takes time.
Things that are put in categories are more easily learnt. Although we can also generate false memories.
Things that conform to learnt patterns, e.g. Chess game vs. random pieces.
What are some aspects of forgetting?
The older a memory is, the more likely it will be forgotten.
The more often something is recalled, the more likely it is that the memory will change and things will be forgotten.
Where are memories stored?
Throughout the cortex.
Describe an animal experiment which showed that the hippocampus in important for forming memories.
A mouse is put into a pool with an invisible platform. The mouse learns where the platform is and after 10 attempts, can find it directly.
Mice with the hippocampus removed cannot do this.
What did the case of the patient H.M. teach us.
It showed that the hippocampus was important for building new memories. H.M. could remember things from his past, but couldn’t build new memories. However, he could build new nondeclarative memories, i.e. motor learning.
Acquisition and storage of declarative information.
Sort-term storage: hippocampus and related structures.
Long-term storage: cortical sites, i.e. Wernicke’s area for the meanings of words, temporal cortex for objects, faces.
Acquisition and storage of nondeclarative information.
Short-term: unknown, presumably widespread.
Long-term: cerebellum, basal ganglia, premotor cortex, other motor areas.
Types of memory disorder.
antrograde (cannot remember new things)
retrograde (cannot remember things from the past)
Most famous, Alzheimer’s Disease.
What characteristics are observable in an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain?
Neurofibrilary tangles, and Amyloid plaque. Both of these cause loss of cell functioning.
