forgetting Flashcards
What is an example of a single dissociation in relation to brain damage?
damage to brain area 1 results in function A being disrupted but a related function b is intact. This indicates that function A and B are at least partially different but it could be function A was more affected by the damage
What is an example of a double dissociation in relation to brain damage?
need to find patients who show opposite pattern- damage to area 2 which leaves function a intact but dirsupts b. Indicates a and b functions are independent from eachother
How can we observe double dissociation between episodic and semantic memory?
amnesic patients tend to have anterograde amnesia for both new and personal episodes and new knowledge but there are some amnesic patients e.g. Clive Wearing who cannot recollect any personally experienced events from birth but had procedural and semantic memories pre accident
What is the difference between retrograde and anterograde amnesia?
Retrograde- forgetting past events
Anterograde- forgetting future events
What did Bahrick find out about long term memory?
no forgetting of school classmates over 30 years but forgetting of former students by teachers does increase with interval
How can we test inference vs. decay theories?
If forgetting is due to interference, then recall should decrease with more exposure to similar stuff with time held constant.
What did Baddeley and Hitch investigate into LTM?
Rugby players- number of games played during hte interval is a significant predictor of forgetting. Evidence that retrieval failure is increased by interference from similar material.
What do incidental memory experiments show about effective learning strategies?
processing the meaning of and actively organising the material rather than rehearsal is more effective as an acquisition strategy, so we need to think about the meaning rather than having arbitary groups
How do mnemonics work in sequence learning and memory?
Remembering certain parts of the route associated with different parts of a place. They bind ideas to a pre established framework which organises them. Forming associations between representations that already exist in the mind including representations of elements in the new experience
What is the first stage of consolidation?
After TBI or ECT, there is often retrograde memory loss spanning many minutes or hours. Disruption of process of consolidation of memory trace in hippocampal/medial temporal cortex system.
What is the second phase of consolidation?
Over a longer timescale, recent LTM traces are more vulnerable to hippocampal damage than older traces. Amnesic patients with damage to hippocampas/medial temporal cortex typically show gradient of retrograde amnesia over years. Older memories are better preserved and more robust. Over time, reactivation of traces makes them more robust so they are stored elsewhere in the cortex, no longer dependent on hippocampus.
What is the fan effect?
Retrieval as an example of associative interference (Lewis and Andersron, 1976). Learned 0-4 facts about each set of famous people which were true or false- later they were measured on how many remembered.
What are false memories and what can cause these?
‘Recognition’, recollection and recall of events that did not happen due to: source amnesia (retrieval of info coupled with inability to remember its source). Recall is reconstructive so fragments of actual experience removed from memory get combined with other info in memory whose source is lost
What study looked at the implantation of false memories on emotional events?
Loftus and Palmer- asked speed of cars using different verbs- mis information implied by integorration. Differences in false recall of broken glass- application to EWT.
What is the context content paradox?
argues the way emotions affect false memories depends on: whether the emotion is part of the to be remembered event (e.g. negative) or whether a negrative mood is the context in which something is remembered
