Week 15

Question 1

Conversion to LTM

Answer 1

• suggestions that STM components are converted into their corresponding LTM components (e.g. phonological STM –> phonological LTM)

Question 2

Phonological LTM

Answer 2

• supports out ability to identify spoken words
• when we are born we have no associations between words, the sounding of the words need to be stored
• phonological STM patients have difficulty learning new words in LTM –> have a poor vocabulary
• difference between acquired cases (that still have a wide vocab but cannot add new words to LTM) and developmental cases
• double dissociation proves there are subsets of this LTM (pure word deafness vs auditory agnosia –> separates out words from environmental/non=language sounds)

Question 3

Visual LTM

Answer 3

• supports our ability to identify visual information, including written words, objects, faces etc.
• poor visual STM found to lead to poor route knowledge in LTM
• double dissociation proves there are two types of visual LTM (one for words and one for faces)

Question 4

Semantic LTM

Answer 4

• our knowledge of meaning and function of words and objects, plus semantic memory supports inferences
• semantic STM deficits lead to difficulty in learning new concepts and problems in understanding and producing complex meaningful sentences

Question 5

Procedural memory

Answer 5

• learning skills over many trials to acquire new skills (e.g. riding a bike)
• amnesic patients are often quite skilled in procedural memory despite deficits in episodic memory (e.g. patient HM)
• double dissociation as PD patients selectively have their procedural learning affected but their episodic memory is fine

Question 6

Episodic memory

Answer 6

• links memories from various LTM systems to restore a record of a personal event
• involves visual, phonological + semantic STM and LTM systems which are integrated to form a single long term memory of a particular event

Question 7

Single dissociation

Answer 7

• an experimental manipulation or neurological impairment that affects performance on task 1 more than task 2
• suggesting different areas of the brain are active in different tasks
• but this does not necessarily prove the link as there may be other explanations

Question 8

Double dissociation

Answer 8

• an additional experimental manipulation or neurological impairment that affects performance on task 2 but not on task 1
• rules out any other secondary arguments and can therefore prove links that systems work independently on different activities

Question 9

Dissociations between episodic LTM and phonological STM

Answer 9

• anterograde amnesic patients have poor episodic memory. but good functioning phonological STM
• whereas phonological STM patients have poor phonological STM but good episodic memory
• double dissociation suggests that STM and episodic memory are different systems
• patients with deficits in their phonological STM may have deficits in their phonological LTM but their episodic memory can be supported by other subsystems

Question 10

Encoding episodic memory

Answer 10

• more important to have full attention at the encoding stage rather than at the retrieval stage
• proven experimentally, that it is more important to pay more attention at the encoding stage than at the recall stage

Question 11

Maintenance rehearsal

Answer 11

• keeping information active in the STM by relying on the phonological loop
• thought that the longer you store something in STM the more likely it is to pass into LTM –> found to not be true, just maintaining something in STM does not necessarily encode it in LTM
• not enough to store it if it hasn’t been given a meaningful explanation within the brain

Question 12

Elaborative rehearsal

Answer 12

• encoding the meaning of information generally leads to better episodic memory storage of it
• level-of-processing framework: the idea that the more deeply you encode a memory (and the more meaning you give it) the longer the memory will be retained
• shown that digit span can improve when using elaborative encoding technique (by giving each digit meaning)
• how we encode things is affected by our background knowledge and existing memories so people may remember different things from the same experience
• utilises the frontal lobe (link to existing semantic knowledge and relationships between things) plus visual cortex of occipital lobe (converting information into mental pictures)

Question 13

Picture superiority effect

Answer 13

we encode pictorial information much better than verbal information

Question 14

Concreteness effect

Answer 14

words with a “concrete” meaning (e.g. car, house) are much better remembered than abstract words (e.g. truth, betrayal) –> links to pictorial effect as concrete words can be imagined in picture format

Question 15

Dual code theory

Answer 15

• information is better recalled when stored in at least two forms (verbal/linguistic code and a mental image code)
• methods include mnemonics and method of loci

Question 16

Consolidation

Answer 16

• the process of converting memories into a format resistant to forgetting
• encoding cannot be the full store of memory as amnesic patients can encode to deep levels but are still unable to remember

Question 17

Short-term consolidation

Answer 17

• occurs over seconds and minutes
• involves the hippocampus linking and integrating information from all various LTM systems to form an episodic memory
• short-term retrograde amnesia shows that brain trauma erases memories encoded a few minutes before the injury (i.e. despite the memories being encoded, there was a lack of short-term consolidation to form the full memory so it is not remembered)

Question 18

Long-term consolidation

Answer 18

• occurs over months and years
• belief that long-term consolidation leads to encoding directly in the cortex for storage (so damage to hippocampus will not erase old episodic memories as they have moved to cortex)
• observed through temporally graded retrograde amnesia (explains why this extends several years back to memories that have not had the chance to be fully consolidated yet; but memories from long-term past are still present)

Question 19

Multiple-memory trace (MMT) hypothesis

Answer 19

• this theory believes that episodic memories are always encoded in the hippocampus and do not move to the cortex
• belief that very old memories have been recounted more often and therefore re-stored in the hippocampus
• according to this theory, severity and extent of retrograde amnesia depends on the extent of the hippocampal lesion
• fMRI showed that hippocampus is involved in both old and recent memories and that there is no evidence that information has been moved to the cortex
• N.B. possibility that memories are copied over into the cortex but also still remain in hippocampus

Question 20

Retrieval

Answer 20

retrieval is less affected by divided attention than the encoding stage (suggesting an automatic component)

Question 21

Korsakoff amnesia

Answer 21

• associated with frontal lesions
• free recall is more affected than recognition memory
• also suffer from confabulation (false memories but in the form of honest lying)

Question 22

Automatic retrieval

Answer 22

• hippocampus can retrieve information relatively automatically with strong retrieval cues (automatic retrieval with clear cues)
• memory associations within the hippocampus “pop out” in memory (sometimes correct but sometimes not - confabulations)
• hippocampus cannot correct itself so we need another system to correct false memories

Question 23

Effortful/strategic retrieval

Answer 23

• initiated in the frontal cortex and is required for free recall (i.e. if you are not given any strong retrieval cues so the hippocampus struggles)
• helps prevent false/confabulated memories as it can monitor errors made by the hippocampus
• frontal system is the “boss” of the memory system as it controls the information presented to the hippocampus at encoding and guides retrieval and monitors information retrieved from the hippocampus
• analogous to central executive in working memory

Question 24

Encoding specificity

Answer 24

• the effectiveness of a retrieval cue depends on how well it relates to the initial encoding strategy
• explains both state and mood dependent memory (why retrieval success depends on environment)
• may also explain childhood amnesia (why you do not remember the first years of your life as that was such a different encoding environment to anything we can imagine as an adult; but smell is a good retrieval cue as this does not change much!)
• also related to the testing effect (practising retrieval, e.g. practise exam questions, improves memory) –> supports the fact that you are practising retrieving information so practising in the test environment
• also explains amnesia between different personalities in multiple personality disorder

Question 25

Why are some memories forgotten?

Answer 25

• poor encoding in the first place
• presence of a poor retrieval cue
• poor consolidation (e.g. in amnesia)
• loss of storage (acquisition of new memories can interfere with and potentially erase previously stored memories + false memories can take up space)

Question 26

Memory distortion in encoding

Answer 26

• various studies have shown that episodic memory for faces is better for own-race, own-gender etc. (relevant for eye-witness testimony)
• may be partially explained by being an expert at the categories that are the same as yourself –> leading to better encoding
• not innate but just based on learned visual experience (e.g. adoptives of one race that have moved country will recognise people of their “new” country better)

Question 27

Memory distortions at retrieval

Answer 27

• different wording to retrieval cues can make a significant difference to the answers people give and the memories people retrieve
• even when encoding stage was identical
• note: unclear whether false memories occur at encoding or retrieval stage (e.g. critical lures)
• also that semantic encoding of knowledge may lead to both useful encoding of true memories but also contribute to errors in memory
• eyewitness memory itself may not be unreliable as long as the recall conditions are suitable (e.g. not asking suggestive questions, open vs closed ended questions)

Question 28

Retrieval induced forgetting paradigm

Answer 28

• highlights possible mechanism for repression of memories, e.g. in traumatic events
• initial test that memory is worse for words from a non-practised category compared to others (e.g. possible to focus and rehearse certain aspects of one side of a memory and forget another)
• over time, induced forgetting goes away so all items are remembered to the same level
• however it is also proven that inducing false memories is a high possibility so it is not necessarily that the memory has been repressed but may also be false

Question 29

Explicit memory

Answer 29

the conscious retrieval of content from past experiences

Question 30

Implicit memory

Answer 30

refers to the unconscious influences of past experiences on later behaviour and performance

Question 31

Priming

Answer 31

enhanced ability to think of a stimulus as a result of recent exposure to the stimulus

Question 32

Blocking

Answer 32

occurs when stored information is temporarily inaccessible (i.e. we know we have the memory but are unable to retrieve it)

Question 33

Absentmindedness

Answer 33

results from failures of attention, shallow encoding and influence of automatic behaviours

Question 34

Memory’s mindbugs (Schacter’s seven sins)

Answer 34

• transience, blocking, absentmindedness, misattribution, suggestibility, bias and persistence
• thought of as the cost we pay for the benefits that allow memory to work as well as it does most of the time