Week 1 Flashcards
What does your memory store?
- your personal experiences.
- emotions.
- preferences/dislikes.
- motor skills.
- world knowledge.
- language
Fundamentally, you as a person are derived from…
experiences that have been stored in your nervous system
Fundamentally, you as a person are derived from
experiences that have been stored in your nervous system.
How is this possible?
your brain has developed the capacity to store information
How are memories stored in the brain?
- There is a specific location where all memories are
stored - Memories are stored across a network of connections
- Each memory is a unique neuron (e.g., a grandmother
cell) - Memories are not associated with anything biological
- Other
- Memories are stored across a network of connections
Learning and memory are unobservable but instead they are…
theoretical concepts
true or false: learning and memory are theoretical concepts
True
- They are theoretical concepts that are proposed to explain the fact that
our behavior is influenced by our past experiences.
What is the process of learning and memory?
experience observable –> learning - memory inferred –> behaviour observable
True or false: Learning and memory process cannot observed but instead inferred to exist
Ture
Learning
is the process of acquiring representations of new
information
Memory
refers to the persistence of that
information in a state that can be revealed at a later time
other definition of learning and memory
one might also say that learning is a set of processes initiated by
experience and memory is a product of those processes.
Psychologists only study memory at a
- single level of analysis
- they study only the relationship between experience and behaviour
What does it mean that psychologists only study the relationship between experience and behaviour?
This means they do not directly manipulate or measure brain processes
How do neurobiologists study memory?
they are motivated by the
belief that memory traces have a
physical basis in the brain
For neurobiologists to understand the physical basis of memory
they use a multiple level approach
neurobiologists and studying memory methods
- manipulates brain
- responses in the brain to experience
- drugs are measured
neurobiologists study
brain systems
synapses
molecules
and behaviour
Neurobiologists want to understand how the brain
acquires, stores, and maintains representations
of experience in a persistent state that permits the information contained in the representation to be retrieved and influence behaviour
The last decade of the 19th Century is referred to as the
“golden age of memory” because during that era many of the basic phenomena and ideas emerged
What did Hermann Ebbinhaus develop?
developed the first
scientific methods for assessing the acquisition and retention of a controlled experience.
to study “pure memory” requires
methodology that could separate what the subject already has learned from what the
subject was now being asked to remember.
What did Ebbinghaus invent?
The nonsense syllable
Ebbinghaus and the first forgetting curve
- documented the first
- it declines
- shape of the curve: most of the occurs during the first hour
- highest percent recalled happens during the first minute
- people gradually forget overtime
Single trace theory
explains the forgetting curve by assuming that the strength of a single memory trace declines monotonically as a function of time between learning
and the retention test.
Dual-trace theory
explains the forgetting curve as the product of a rapidly acquired short term trace that has a fast decay rate and slowly established long-term trace that decays slowly.
short term component - around the 1st minute of retention interval
long term component - around the 24 hrs retention interval
Theodule Robot proposed?
that during diseases of the brain, memories disappear in an orderly fashion
Dissolution of memory (most to least vulnerable)
- recent memories
- personal memories
- habits, skills
- emotional memories
Theodule Ribot proposed pt 2.?
also proposed that old memories are more resistant to disruptive influences on the brain = Ribot’s Law
Serge Korsakoff
described the syndrome
produced by alcohol now called
Korsakoff’s Syndrome.
Korsakoff’s syndrome
characterized by what
we would now call anterograde
amnesia—the inability to acquire new memories
Late stages of Korsakoff’s syndrome
there is also retrograde amnesia—the loss of memories acquired before the onset of
the disease.
Example: Following a severe head injury, a person might lose memories from the months or years preceding the accident—such as details about personal history or past events—while still being able to form new memories after recovery.
Korsakoff also proposed…
that amnesia could be due to either storage failure or retrieval failure
William James proposed…
that memories emerge in stages
William James memory emergence stages
An after image is
supported by a very
short-lasting trace, then
replaced by the primary
trace that also decays
after image –> primary memory –> secondary memory
Secondary memory
viewed as the reservoir of enduring memory traces that with an appropriate retrieval cue can be recalled
Ivan Pavlov
developed the
fundamental methodology for
studying associative learning in animals
Pavlovian conditioning method
- two events called the CS
(conditioned stimulus e.g., tone) and US (unconditioned
stimulus e.g., shock) are presented together. - Subsequently, the CS evokes the response called the CR
(conditioned response e.g., freezing). - Psychologists assume that the CS evokes the CR because the
CS gets associated with the US. - Psychologists and neurobiologists continue to use this method
to study associative learning in animals.
Edward Throndike
developed instrumental conditioning
Instrumental conditioning
-how we learn about the consequences of our actions
- correct behavior is learned because the consequences of successful outcome (a satisfying
state) strengthen connections between the stimulus (S) and correct response (R), and the consequence of unsuccessful responses weaken the competing and wrong S–R connections.
Santiago Ramon y Cajal’s two big ideas
- the neuron doctrine
- the synaptic plasticity hypothesis
Neuron Doctrine
The idea that the
brain is made up of discrete cells called nerve cells, each delimited by an external membrane.
The synaptic plasticity hypothesis
The idea that the strength of a synaptic connection can be modified by experience.
according to Golgi, prior to accepting the neuron doctrine
the nervous system
represented an exception to cell theory, being formed not by independent cells but rather by a gigantic net.
Golgi believed…
that the protoplasmic
processes we now call dendrites were in contact with blood vessels and functioned to provide nutrients to the cell.
business end of the nerve cells is
carried out by what we now called axons which were continuous with each other
and formed the reticulum or network.
Cajal’s Major Contributions
- identified the neuron as an independent unit
- argued about axon endings
Cajal identified the neuron as an independent unit
- refuted (refused) the idea that nerve cells were linked into continuous network
What did Cajal’s identification that the neuron works as an independent unit lead to?
accepted view that neurons are truly independent genetically derived units that are composed of the
- cell body (soma)
- dendrites
- a single axon
Canal argued that axon endings were
were contiguous with dendrites but not continuous (fused) with them.
This axon-dendritic junction is now known as the the synapse.
The neuron doctrine - the basis of modern neuroscience
- The neuron is an anatomical unit—the fundamental
structural and functional unit of the nervous system. - The neuron is composed of three parts: cell body, dendrites
and axons - Neurons are discrete cells which are not continuous with
other cells. - The points of connection between neurons are called
synapses. - The neuron is a physiological unit. Electrical activity flows
through the neuron in one direction (from dendrites to the
axon, via the cell body) This is called this the Law of
Dynamic Polarization
Cajal is also credited with what is now called the synaptic plasticity hypothesis
the strength of a synaptic connection can be modified by experience
Multiple Memory Systems Theory
- Different kinds of information are processed and stored in different parts of the
brain
What is the evidence for the MMS Theory?
brain damage in humans has different effects
depending on the location of the damage
ex. HM could not form declarative memories but could learn procedural tasks
- could not remember learning things
- was learning, but just could not remember learning
- no memory of learning
Theories that parsimoniously explain data from single tasks will never generalize to memory as a whole because their core assumptions are too limited…
instead, memory theory should be based on a broad variety of evidence
