Week 6-Long Term Memory

Question 1

Is Long term memory active or passive?

Answer 1

Passive(Not disturbed by interruption)

Question 2

What is the duration and capacity of long term memory?

Answer 2

Unlimited duration and unlimited capacity

Question 3

What is the method of forgetting for long term memory?

Answer 3

Cue dependent

Question 4

What are the brain regions used in long term memory?

Answer 4

Hippocampus and Cerebral Cortex

Question 5

What are the 2 different types of memory?

Answer 5

Declarative Memory

• Facts e.g. map; geographical locations
• Events e.g. personal events that happened to us across our lifetime even recalling what we had for breakfast this morning

Non-Declarative memory
-Procedures e.g. Skills; habits; riding a bike
-Classical Conditioning -e.g. pairing 2 unrelated stimuli
or emotional response

Question 6

What is Declarative (explicit) memory?

Answer 6

• CONSCIOUSLY RECALLED AND VERBALISED
• SEMANTIC Memory(Facts)-Independent of personal experience
• EPISODIC Memory(Events)-Allow for mental time travel

Question 7

What is Non-Declarative (implicit) memory?

Answer 7

-Procedures-Skills; habits; riding a bike
-Classical Conditioning-pairing of stimuli or emotional response.
Operate Automatically-e.g. writing with the dominant hand.
Writing with a non-dominant hand requires conscious effort required to overcome automatic responses. e.g. Stroop task reading colour rather than the word

Question 8

What are Schemas?

Answer 8

An organised set of information stored in our long term memory(things that you expect to be there) related chunks are integrated.

Schemas build on our previous knowledge and experience.

• CORE-constant information e.g. rooms have floors and ceilings
• SLOTS-variable information e.g. different number of doors and windows

Question 9

What are Scripts?

Answer 9

Scripts are a type of schema.
Relates to a series of events-e.g. Restaurant script- we go to a restaurant, wait to be seated, order a drink, read the menu, choose something, order food, eat a meal, pay for food, leave.

Sequencing of events/structure.
Schemas and Scripts allow us to make assumptions or generalizations but not always correct.

Question 10

What was Barlett’s War of Ghost study of schemas?

Answer 10

Recall information after a period of time-hours, days, weeks or years.
Longer Intervals—->Less accurate
But also memories changed, emitted information or transformed them completely. Memories made to fit their schemas.

(Common items that fitted schema of an office were recalled. Brewer and Tryens-Concluded information from schemas can influence our episodic memory and expectations-reducing the amount of information to be processed can make us inflexible)

Schemas are scaffolding for new information. Facilitating retrieval

Question 11

False Memories

Answer 11

Roediger et al-List of words associated with the overall concept of sleep but not the actual word “sleep” presented.
Critical lure- semantic system interferes with episodic memories
Non-meaningful we just don’t take it in. Meaning is critical

Question 12

How knowledge is stored? (Semantics and semantic network) What is Semantic Memory?
Colin and Quillian Theory

Answer 12

ASSOCIATIONS
Colins and Quillian-Hierarchy of Semantics. Minimises storage space needed. Specific information stored individually.
E.g. wings, beak, flying- associate to birds
Nodes are basic components of memory and allow us to attach memories to objects.
Retrieval time depends on distance between the nodes.

Question 13

What are the problems with Colin and Quillian’s Theory?

Answer 13

The Familiarity Effect- familiar terms verified faster than unfamiliar terms regardless of position in the hierarchy.
E.g. A bear is an animal. A bear is a mammal. We a much quicker to associate a bear as an animal than a mammal due to the more familiarity in the word ‘animal’.

The Typicality effect- Both a robin and ostrich are birds but we are much quicker to associate a robin as a bird than an ostrich. Some items are more typical.

Direct-concept property associations-properties are all associated with all categories in the hierarchy, not just the highest category.

Question 14

What was Colin and Loftus updated model of memory?

Answer 14

• Hierarchy removed
• Activation of one concept does not require activation of another
• No constraints on how they are organised

Question 15

What is episodic memory?

Answer 15

Experiences and events that can be reconstructed
PERSONALLY experienced events that have a specific time and place. Where we were; who was with; what we were doing.
Binding and grouping of information
Certain stimuli can trigger other parts of the memory
Visiting an old place, a smell can take you back to an experience or event.
Can change our perception of events due to personal experiences.

Question 16

Patients with Amnesia(forgetting)

Answer 16

Episodic memory damaged within patients
Clive Wearing-can’t remember the name of children. Just woken up from a coma. Less than 30sec memory.
Herpes virus damaged his hippocampus and can’t move information from STM to LTM. Can’t link food with taste.
The self damaged within patients.

H.M- severe epilepsy, parts of his brain removed, He had severe Anterograde amnesia- impaired of forming LTM and new memories. Distinction before and after surgery (childhood memories; the death of uncle he could remember but not remember recent events) Did not affect IQ still formed sentences but impacted quality of conversation. Could learn new procedural task (doesn’t involve hippocampus)- mirror trace drawing over time he got better. Double dissociation between episodic and procedural memory.

Question 17

What is Autobiographical memory?

Answer 17

The link between semantic and episodic memory.
About ourselves(episodic) but a factual element to it-where you live; how old you are; what our parents do

Includes flashbulb memory- significant; emotional arousing events e.g. Brexit, Trump being elected, COVID
Long-lasting detailed events, that aren’t easy to forget

Question 18

Studies on how fragile our memories are

Answer 18

Loftus-memories can be altered or invented.
Memories are incredibly fragile
Car crash-how fast cars going? Smashed (40mph)or hit(30mph)-changing wording in a sentence.

Wade et al-False memories induced- a faked photograph of a hot air balloon. Created a false memory to fit photograph.

Question 19

Non-Declarative Memory

Answer 19

Non-associative learning:
-Habituation(learn to ignore stimuli) e.g. you can learn to read a book and not be distracted by background noise.
(A progressive extinction of behaviour in response to repetitive harmless stimulation)

• Sensitisation (heightened/magnified response to stimuli)
  e. g. woken by a loud noise at night, you are alert for any other noises.

Question 20

Implicit Memory-Priming

Answer 20

Influenced by something we’ve seen before
One stimulus influences response to a subsequent stimulus
STEM completion task-influence the words you give
e.g. ‘tab…’—->furniture =table
Activates association or representation in memory.
Used in marketing-info can prime response

Question 21

What is Amnesia?

Answer 21

• Forgetting or a deficit in memory
• Can be physiological (brain damage) or psychological (repressing traumatic events)

Impaired EPISODIC MEMORY (esp if damage to the hippocampus) and semantic memory, not procedural memory

Retrograde amnesia-past knowledge lost (forget things happened to them before damage)

Anterograde amnesia-can’t form new memories

Hippocampus critical to solidify memories.

Question 22

Procedural vs Declarative Memory

Experimental differences between control and amnesic patients

Answer 22

Participants in amnesic and control groups conducted 4 different tasks. 2 were declarative.
Patients in amnesic and controls performed similarly in PROCEDURAL tasks but amnesic patients showed a real deficit when told to do declarative tasks.

-Priming tasks (procedural)- control and amnesic patients showed speeding up effects
STEM Completion
Perceptual identification

-Recognition Tasks(declarative)
Amnesic patients impaired at this task

Amnesic patients were impaired for the declarative task but not procedural.-double dissociation

Question 23

Procedural vs Declarative Memory

Patients with Parkinson’s Disease, Control and Amnesic

Answer 23

Patients with Parkinson’s have problems with procedural learning.

Patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD) show attenuated implicit memory formation, But PD patients perform normally in a declarative memory task.

Question 24

Criticisms of Amnesic Research

Answer 24

• Issues with generalisability- single cases, small groups. Damage varies. Brain changes over time- accommodation; neuroplasticity. Damage to different areas loss of heterogeneity
• Damage not confined to a single area-HM has damage extending past the hippocampus and has part of his hippocampus intact
• Patient outcomes are often heterogeneous – there is a mix of anterograde and retrograde amnesia, with both episodic and semantic memory affected.

This makes it difficult to understand if impairments are due to damage to the encoding, storage, or retrieval of information.

Question 25

Autobiographical Memory

Answer 25

Our personal history we remember little from our childhood.
Childhood amnesia- remember later childhood not early childhood- reduced recency effect
Freudian repression -only usually negative experiences
Regions for episodic memory only develop later like the hippocampus- memories not consolidated well so more difficult to retrieve.
Language doesn’t develop for quite a long time.

Question 26

Concept of the Reminiscence Bump

Answer 26

Across cultures
As people age remember more memories 15-30. Specific memories pinpointed in the young adult era. Independence-leaving home-finding a partner-having children-have a career- emotional events.

Reminiscence Bump only occurred for Positive events

Question 27

False Memory

Answer 27

Paradigm inducing false memory- keyword e.g. sleep emitted. Accuracy decreases with age. More false memories the older you are.
Accuracy of remembering exact wording of sentences decreases with age (Brainerd and Mojardin 1998).

Question 28

Implicit vs Explicit Memory

Answer 28

Explicit memory increases with age. Categorical links increase with age. Strategies- maturation of prefrontal cortex and regions from childhood -deep processing.

Implicit- relational associative conceptual priming established quite early on.

Associative and relational tasks.

Question 29

Memory in childhood

Brain Regions Maturation

Answer 29

-Implicit memory abilities develop early
Brain regions involved in implicit memory (e.g. striatum, cerebellum) mature early in life

-Explicit memory abilities develop later
Parts of brain regions involved in explicit memory (e.g. the dentate gyrus in the hippocampus) mature later in life. Processes involved in explicit memory involve more complex cognitive processes that develop later. E.g.,
Working memory
Memory strategies
Building on previous knowledge

Question 30

Assessing Working Memory

Answer 30

Verbal Memory Span-decrease with age- assessed using digit span- keep elongating the list gets increasingly harder (their limit is their digit span)
Mean verbal span 7+/-2
As we age our span reduces slightly

Spatial span-Corsi blocks elongating yellow blocks within the span.
The decrease in working memory as we age of manipulation of info rather than just holding info

Question 31

Memory and Ageing

Answer 31

Episodic memory declines both for recall and recognition-across modalities. Process slower as we age.
Difficult to form associations as we age.
The binding quality of episodic memory - faces with names (age effect)- younger people better at this task.

Dual-Task paradigm - counting back in threes. Splitting attention in two different ways and impairs performance.

Semantic memory vocab, the world knowledge-preserved with age.

• Processing speed peaks at 19
• Working memory peaks at 30
• Vocabulary peaks around 60

Question 32

Processing Speed; Executive function and Ageing

Answer 32

Declarative memory and speed is vulnerable to ageing
Reduce performance because of processing speed

Self-pacing reduces the effect of processing speed and can abolish age-related deficits