W4) 9) Disorders of Memory Flashcards
Frued had patients that were told were fine by other doctors. What did that help prove?
- Freud 1915 – suggested threatening
information is often blocked from conscious awareness - Most evidence based on adult patients that often spontaneously retrieve memories of being abused as children that they report no previous memory of.
What was the Clancy et al 2000 experiment?
- Butter, food, eat, sandwich, rye, jam, milk,
flour, jelly, dough, crust, slice, wine, loaf, toast - Nurse, sick, lawyer, medicine, health, hospital, dentist, physician, ill, patient, office,
stethoscope, surgeon, clinic, cure
Bread? Doctor?
* Clancy et al 2000 compared women with
recovered memories of childhood sexual
abuse, with women who believed they were
abused but could not recall it and women who had always remembered abuse and controls.
What do you think happened?
- Also issue of prompting – subsequent studies have shown that adult patients that admit to reporting false recovered memories had clinicians that categorically suggested they had been abused as children
- This finding relates to the literature of eyewitness testimony and its unreliability.
What is the dissociation function involving patient HM?
– Had surgery to cure severe epilepsy
– After operation had near normal memory for events prior to surgery, and STM normal (approx 15 s)
– But severe deficit for new memory of facts or of events occurring after surgery (encoding from STM to LTM).
– Since operation he forgets the events of his life as they occur
– Able to learn motor skills but could not remember which skills he had learned (Short term declarative)
– Hand buzzer example - doctor, electric shock.
This is anterograde amnesia.
What is the procedural and declarative dissociating function?
Temporal Lobe Amnesia (e.g. Korsakoffs)
Patients are able to learn skills
Procedural
Patients are unable to learn new facts
Declarative
E.g. a patient may show improved performance on a simple task over time, but each time they will show no recognition or memory of ever havin performed the task before (despite obvious improvements)
What is the Tulving, 1989 memory?
– Damage to specific brain regions, (left frontal-parietal and right parieto-occipital lobes) following a traffic accident
– Can no longer retrieve any personal memory of his past (autobiographical memory) but general knowledge
remains good
– Plays chess well but does not remember where he learned to play
– Can learn semantic knowledge when care is taken but cannot acquire episodic knowledge
- E.g. will claim never to have met people met recently, but will be more friendly towards them than people he really hasn’t met
What is amnesia?
Amnesia can be brought about by:
– Damage
* Head injury, stroke
– Chronic alcohol abuse
* e.g. Korsakoff’s syndrome, affecting storage and retrieval processes
– Disease
* e.g. Alzheimer’s: extensive damage to cortex, progressive deterioration from some impaired memory skills (esp. episodic
memory) more general cognitive impairment
– Reversible brain disease
* Tumours, hydrocephalus, subdural haematoma, deficiencies in B1, B6, B12, endocrine disease, syphilis
– Psychogenic Memory Loss
* Abuse, war
What is anteriorgrade and retrograde amnesia?
Anterograde amnesia (as in patient HM)
Inability to store new information
Inability to transfer information from STM to LTM
Retrograde amnesia (rarer)
Inability to recall information prior to trauma
Often following closed head injury, can be relatively short duration
What happened when the hippocampi were removed in patient HM?
HM had both hoppocampi surgically removed yet retained information from the past.
Therefore suggests this is not the actual repository
Memories are stored in various regions of the cortex
Hippocampus = orientation. Internal repretation of the world to be able to navigate. The actual memories themselves are stored in the cortex.
What is the biology of storage?
Memories are stored in a distributed fashion throughout the cortex
Therefore something has to integrate these into coherent memories
That something is probably the hippocampal region (Schacter, 1996)
Where does temporary amnesia happen?
Can result from head injuries, psychological states or drugs
Concussion often associated with memory loss
Cinema experience
Usually retrograde amnesia for events immediately preceding the cause
Fugue states (Schacter et al. 1982)
Occur with extreme psychological trauma often loss of previous experience and identity
Drugs
Date rape drugs such as rohypnol can cause amnesic effects for events occurring while under the influence
How does ageing impact memory?
Memory across the lifespan is unequally distributed as we have seen (Rubin, Wetzler & Nebes, 1986).
If we ask an older adult to recall their lives the following general pattern would emerge
Infantile amnesia – failure to recall anything from first 3 years often first 5 years
Reminiscence Bump – better memory for period 10 to 30 but strongest for positive information
Alternative theory
Conway & Pleydell Pearce (2000)
Knowledge base
Lifetime periods – vast swathes of time defined in terms of ongoing situations
General Events – often repeated but related to each other
Specific knowledge of events
Working self
Concerned with goal attainment frames knowledge in terms of progress or lack of progress towards important goals
What does amnesia research show?
Brain damage studies are broadly supportive of the 3 types of autobiographical knowledge
Generally event specific knowledge is more compromised than general events or lifetime periods
Confabulation on basis of plausibility is common
What happens as you get older?
At advanced age memory starts to decline
Speed of processing slows with age (Perfect, 1994)
Generally normative age related decline should not interfere with daily functioning
Where it does its more likely to indicate a pathological process
Working memory declines more
