Why does memory fail Flashcards
What can cause Amnesia?
brain damage, disease, or psychological trauma
What is retrograde Amnesia?
Cannot retrieve memories, but no problem forming new ones.
What part of the brain creates retrograde amnesia?
cerebral cortex
What is the mass action principle?
The more extensive the damage, the more previous memories the patients tend to lose.
What is Ribot’s Law?
More likely to lose recently stored information than those they had for a long time (such as language).
What is anterograde amnesia?
Cannot form long-term memories, but can still access past LTM and create new STM.
What part of the brain causes anterograde amnesia when damaged? Describe what is does.
Hippocampus. Explicit long-term memory - those we are consciously aware of.
What is semantic memory?
Explicit long-term memory of facts and concepts.
What is episodic memory?
memory of specific event that happened to you. Autobiographical.
Clive Wearing, what was his condition?
He has retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Do not remember the past, and cannot form new long-term memory.
What is implicit long-term memory? What is procedural memory?
memories that we are not consciously aware of and it does not take conscious effort to retrieve them.
memory on how to do something.
Which kind of long-term memory can people with amnesia recover? Why?
implicit long-term memories.
Another part of the brain is involved in implicit memories, the cerebellum (coordinating movements).
What is absent-mindedness? Why does it occur?
Two techniques to avoid it?
fail to encode important info in the LTM because weren’t paying attention.
More mindful, routines.
What is blocking?
Memories are conceptualized as being stored in a ____ with each piece of info being _____ to others. Blocking happens when…
involves a failure in retrieval that keeps us from accessing store information. Tip-of-the tongue kind of thing.
web/ connected
cannot locate a piece of info within the web.
How is blocking cured?
retrieval cues (finding pathways in the web) to allow us to find the info.
What is context-dependent retrieval?
if you learn something in a context (land, underwater) more likely to retrieve the info in the same context. Context is a retrieval cue.
What is state-dependent retrieval?
if you encode something in a state, you are more likely to remember it in the same state.
What is storage decay? Whose concept?
Forgetting often occurs due to the passage of time. Ebbinghaus
How did Ebbinghaus study storage decay? How did he conceptualize his findings?
Made people memorize nonsense words. Checked for how long they can remember it.
Forgetting curve.
What is the serial positioning effect?
Name the two concepts.
order in which learn stuff affects how we remember.
1- Primacy effect: initial info
2- Recency: later info
What is suggestibility?
include misleading information from external sources into our memories.
Explain Loftus’ study on suggestibility?
Ask questions about a car accident and use different words to describe incident. Ask how fast were people going. When the word was like “smashed” people said that the cars were going faster.
What does it mean when we say that we reconstruct our memories when we need them?
piece memories together from a few highlights and then we fill-in the rest. So as we reconstruct, we can be influenced by external sources.
