Week 2 - Memory

Question 1

What is the definition of MEMORY

Answer 1

The outcome of learning
The ability to store and later retrieve information

Question 2

What is the definition of LEARNING

Answer 2

The process of acquiring new information
(not necessarily changes in overt behaviour)

Question 3

what is a MEMORY TRACE

Answer 3

a mental representation of a previous experience

associated to some physical changes in the brain

Question 4

What is ENCODING, STORAGE, and, RETRIEVAL

Answer 4

Encoding: Creating a memory trace
Storage: Maintaining this memory trace over time
Retrieval: Accessing memory traces

Distinction between AVAILABILITY (whether or not info is part of stored content) and ACCESSIBILITY (whether ot not can retrieve the info at a specific moment

Question 5

SHORT TERM MEMORY

What is SENSORY MEMORY

Answer 5

• Temporary storage of sense information (milliseconds to seconds)
• Unattended information is quickly lost
• STM maintains information registered by sensory memory (typically for a few seconds)

e.g. someone dictates a phone number

May be gone less than a minute after, if you did not rehearse the number

Question 6

SHORT TERM MEMORY

What are the two types of sensory memory

Look up model of Atkinson and Shiffrin

Answer 6

Visual sensory memory/iconic memory: temporary storage for information perceieved by your visual system

Auditory sensory memory/echoic memory: auditory info just presented seems to persist in a sort of echo

Auditory: e.g. when you have difficulties understanding what someone just said, you may try to ‘‘replay’’ the last words in a sort of echo - and accessing information from your echoic memory store

Question 7

SHORT TERM MEMORY

What limits STM?

Answer 7

ATTENTION: if distracted, will likely forget information
CAPACITY: can only hold a few items

• There is no magical number 7 (Miller, 1956)
• Capacity vary between indivudals and task/modality, and is typically smaller than 7 (Cowan, 2010)
• Capacity can be increased by chunking (grouping); for example letters in a word; converting 4 digits into a date: 1066

Question 8

LONG TERM MEMORY

What are the two types of LTM?

Answer 8

Declarative: things you know that you can tell others
Nondeclarative (procedural): things you know that you can show by doing

Question 9

LONG TERM MEMORY

What are the sub types of Declarative memory

Answer 9

EPISODIC: remembering your first day of school

SEMANTIC: knowing the captial of France

Question 10

LONG TERM MEMORY

What are the subtypes of Nondeclarative memory

Answer 10

Skill learning: knowing how to ride a bicycle

Priming: being more likely to use a word you heard recently

Conditioning: Salivating when you see a favourite food

Question 11

LONG TERM MEMORY

What is SEMANTIC MEMORY

Answer 11

• General world knowledge (such as knowledge of facts, events, concepts, objects, and people), retrieved independetly from its original spatial or temporal contect.
• Semantic processing refers to processing the meaning of stimuli.

E.G: Definition of a bday party; knowledge of events at a party

Semantic memory is impaired in centrain neurlogical conditions: e.g. semantic dementia.
As a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by a selective loss of semantic memory (Lambon Ralph et al., 2016)

Question 12

LONG TERM MEMORY

What are the tasks used to study semantic memory

Answer 12

• Sentence verification (a duck is a bird; a horse is a bird)
• Naming of category exemplars
• Production of semantic associates or opposites
• Feature-dimension decision (such as jdugements on a real word size or indoors/outdoors classification)
• Features/Attributes listing (e.g., is an animal, has 4 legs, fur, makes a ‘‘woof’’ sound)

Question 13

LONG TERM MEMORY

What is EPISODIC MEMORY

Answer 13

• Memory of unique events (unique based on their context of occurence: a specific time and place)
• AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL: i remember when i met John at the waterfront, and evening of October 2018
• LAB-BASED: One of the words i am sure i saw in the first list studied was ‘‘concert’’

Episodic recollection is impaired in Amnesia (e.g., patients such as HM, KC, Clive Wearing) and in Alzheimer’s disease.

Sometimes, in cases of Amnesia + Alzheimers, recent memories (weeks, months, last year) are less impaired than remote memories (10 years ago, childhood) but these all depend on LTM.

Question 14

LONG TERM MEMORY

Episodic memory is Constructive what does that mean?

Answer 14

Constructive memory: describes the process by which we update our memories in light of new experiences, situations, and challenges, the formulation of new memories
Some authors state episodic memories are:
* ‘‘summarized and generic’’ rather than ‘‘a literal record’’ of experiences (Conway, 2009)
* Would typically reflect ‘‘only the gist of an episode’’ (Cheng, et al., 2016)
* Rely on the same neurocognitive processes as imagination (Addis, 2018; Irish, 2019)

Question 15

LONG TERM MEMORY

What is RECONSOLIDATION

In episodic memory

Answer 15

Reconsolidation: Upon recall, memories re-enter a stage of transient instability (plasticity) and can be updated
* when you retrieve, you re-encode
* memories are not static, but dynamic

Question 16

LONG TERM MEMORY

What do episodic memory systems typically require?

Answer 16

THE SEMANTIC MEMORY SYSTEM (Tulving, 2002)

• Semantic knowledge influences what we remember

'’War of the ghosts’’: Bartlett (1932) asked participants to read and then remember a story based on Canadian Indian Folkore

• When elements of the story were incompatible with the schemas of the participants, they would omit these details and/or replace them with more familiar details

Question 17

Differentiating STM from LTM

Answer 17

Performane task is assumed to depend on LTM if:
* Material learned exceeds STM capacity
* material is difficult to rehearse
* if attention is diverted

THEREFORE: if retention interval is brief (time between study and retrival phase), as long as participants are distracted or material exceeds STM capacity, you should test to measure LTM.