Lecture 17- Learning And Memory Part 2

Question 1

Name the two types of memory

Answer 1

Implicit and explicit

Question 2

What is implicit memory?

Answer 2

-It’s unconscious memory, no declarative memory.
-It’s a memory that influence behaviour in an automatic, involuntary manner
-Automatic adjustments to perceptual, cognitive and motor systems that occur beneath the level of conscious awareness.

-> procedural memories (how to ride a bike)
-> perceptual memories (how to tell identical twins apart, unconsciously)
-> stimulus-response memories (salivating in response to a tone)

Question 3

What is explicit memory?

Answer 3

• Memories of events, facts that we can think and talk about consciously.

—> episodic memory
• personal experiences associated with a time and a place. Autobiographical memory that involves contextual information that is learned all at once

—> sematic memory
• Encyclopaedic memory of facts and general information, often acquired gradually over time. Knowledge need not be associated with time and place where we learned the information

Question 4

What is the episodic memory?

Answer 4

Personal experiences associated with a time and place. It is naturally learned as you go through life.

Question 5

What is the semantic memory?

Answer 5

It is the memory of facts and general information.
They are not attached necessarily to a time and place.
It’s like a big bank of info about the world.
how you know these things might not be evident.

Question 6

Describe perceptual learning.

Answer 6

Part of the implicit memory —> unconscious
- It’s the basis of recognition and categorization.
- It’s detecting the regularities of the stimuli that we perceive.
Dependent on neocortex —> sensory association areas

Question 7

What is perceptual learning dependent on?

Answer 7

The neocortex —> sensory association areas

Question 8

Describe motor learning.

Answer 8

Involves many different part of the brain.
At the basis of motor skills.
Implicit and unconscious. (Like riding a bike)

Question 9

Describe rational learning (stimulus-stimulus learning).

Answer 9

It is explicit, so conscious and deliberate.
It’s a the basis of the episodic and semantic memories.
Dependent on hippocampus and neocortex

Question 10

What is relational learning dependent on?

Answer 10

The hippocampus and the neocortex

Question 11

Describe the stimulus-response learning.

Answer 11

It uses implicit and explicit memory. Therefore it is both conscious and unconscious.
It is at the basis of the classical and instrumental conditioning.
Involves different parts of the brain depending on stimulus and response

Question 12

What are the three durations of memory?

Answer 12

-Sensory memory
- Short-term memory
- Long-term memory

Question 13

What is the sensory memory?

Answer 13

It is a perceptual memory of the stimuli of the world.
Occurs with each of the senses.
It lasts only a couple of seconds or less.
Kind of an extension of what we saw or heard (memory of what we saw or heard).

Question 14

What is the short-term memory?

Answer 14

It lasts for a few seconds or a few minutes.
The sensory info we focus on will enter the short-term memory.
It is limited to a few items, like the digits of a phone of how to spell a name.

Question 15

What is the long-term memory?

Answer 15

Things that come from the short-term memory can enter the long-term memory after a while of repetition or learning.
It contains info that can be retrieved throughout a lifetime, years, months, a very long time.

Question 16

Name the concept:
- It enables us to recognize and identify objects or situations. It is a pattern recognition system. It makes us recognize changes and variations in stimuli.

Answer 16

Perceptual learning

Question 17

What is the difference between the ventral stream and the dorsal stream in perceptual learning?

Answer 17

Dorsal stream
-from the primary visual cortex
- How are things moving, how do we interact with it.

Ventral stream
- From the primary visual cortex
- What is it that we see? Categories, stereotypes, recognition

Question 18

Name the agnostia
; Damage to the regions of the brain involved in visual perception not only impair ability to recognize visual stimuli but also disrupt people’s memory of visual properties of familiar stimuli.

Answer 18

Visual agnosia

Question 19

What are the effects of visual agnosia?

Answer 19

• They can perceive visual stimuli but their brain does not makes sense of it and cannot recognize it as a whole. They can copy a drawing since they can see the individual lines, but when asked to draw from memory, they cannot reproduce the image.

Question 20

What feedback does motor learning use to improve and optimize movements?

Answer 20

Feedback from our movements from our joints, vestibular system, eyes, ears, etc.

Question 21

What parts of the brain are involved in motor learning?

Answer 21

Cerebellum
Thalamus
Basal ganglia
Moto cortex

Question 22

What is the between-session learning as seen in motor learning?

Answer 22

Compared to the rapid learning, this learning is a slower process where movements in motor behaviour are seen following a period of the memory consolidation (in part during sleep).

Question 23

What is classical conditioning (Pavlovian learning)?

Answer 23

1) An unconditioned stimulus —> produces an unconditioned response
- A stimulus that has inherent value, like food or a painful shock produces a behavioural response that is innate, hard-wire, unlearned.

2) The conditioned stimulus —> now produces a conditioned response
- A stimulus that was initially perceived as neutral is now perceived as predictive of an unconditioned response. It gives way to a behavioural response that occurs in response to a conditioned stimulus.

Question 24

What is instrumental conditioning?

Answer 24

It’s learning that is characterized by learning from the consequences of your actions, from the receipt of reinforcement or punishment.
Mostly unconscious learning

Question 25

What is the key difference between classical and instrumental conditioning?

Answer 25

Classical conditioning is dependent on the fact that the animal cannot move and cause actions that would change anything. It does not have the power to change the situation.

Instrumental conditioning requires that the animal move and make decisions that influence their environment.

Question 26

What is a reinforcing stimulus?

Answer 26

Appetitive stimulus.
- When it follows a behaviour, it increases the chances of that behaviour being repeated

Question 27

What is a punishing stimulus?

Answer 27

Aversive stimulus.
When it follows a behaviour, it decreases the likelihood of the behaviour being repeated.

Question 28

What are the two major pathways between sensory association cortex and motor association cortex involved in instrumental conditioning?

Answer 28

Direct transcortical connections
- involved in acquiring complex motor sequences that involve deliberation or instruction.

Basal ganglia
- Integrates sensory and motor information throughout the brain. Makes habits. When the basal ganglia takes care of the reinforcement, it becomes an unconscious action.

Question 29

What are the three areas that start the basal ganglia?

Answer 29

• Caudate
• putamen
• Nucleus accumbens

Question 30

What is made up of the caudate, putamen and nucleus accumbens?

Answer 30

The striatum

Question 31

What parts make up the midbrain?

Answer 31

Substantial nigra and ventral regimental area

Question 32

What neurons seem to signal reinforcement and punishment?

Answer 32

Dopamine neurons

Question 33

What does the amount of dopamine in the striatum seem to correspond to?

Answer 33

• It seems to correspond to motivation and the value of moving in and engaging with the environment.

Question 34

When do dopamine neurons fire?

Answer 34

When “good” things are happening. It stops firing when “bad things” happen. It seems to be a thumbs up or thumbs down on situations we go through.

Question 35

What is the role of the basal ganglia?

Answer 35

As action sequences and thought patterns are repeated again and again, they become more and more habitual. More ingrained and automatic.

Question 36

What happens if we lesion the basal ganglia ?

Answer 36

It disrupts reinforcement learning and habit learning.
- It does not strongly affect perceptual learning or stimulus-stimulus learning

Question 37

What is needed in relational learning?

Answer 37

THe hippocampus

Question 38

What happens to relational learning if we lesion the hippocampus?

Answer 38

Animals lose the ability to form long-term accessible memories.
They can remember previously learned semantic information, but they generally live in the moment.

Question 39

What is Korsakoff’s syndrome?

Answer 39

Permanent anterograde amnesia caused by brain damage.
Usually results from chronic alcoholism.
- Patients are unable to form new memories, but can still remember old ones before the brain damage occurred.

Tend to confabulate a lot —> reporting of memories of events that did not take place without the intention to deceive.

Question 40

Is the hippocampus the location of short-term and long-term memories?

Answer 40

NO
- it seems to be involved in converting short-term memories into explicit long-term memories, process known as memory consolidation

Question 41

What is the role of the hippocampus in forming long-term memories?

Answer 41

It seems to be involved in converting short-term memories into explicit long-term memories —> process called memory consolidation

Question 42

What is the simplest model of the memory process?

Answer 42

Sensory information enters the short-term memory.
Rehearsal keeps it there, and eventually, the information makes its way into long-term memory, where it is permanently stored.

Question 43

What is memory consolidation?

Answer 43

It is the conversion of short-term memories into long-term memories

Question 44

What are the theories about the hippocampus and memory encoding? (2)

Answer 44

1) when a memory is formed, all the information about that memory will be recorded into this node or bookmark by the hippocampus. This makes it so that when a cue is reminding us of that memory, the hippocampus will pull out the bookmark and make us relive and remember the event in its entirety.

2) Memory gradually becomes less and less dependent on the hippocampus over the years. The theory is that hippocampal activity (during recall events and sleep), is “training” the cortex, which causes a reorganization of the synaptic weights in the cortex so that intro-cortical connections can support memory recall on their own.

Question 45

What is the semantic-transformation theory?

Answer 45

All memory starts off as episodic memory, which is always dependent on hippocampal nodes interacting with the cortex. Over time, as facts emerge from repeated episodic experiences, these semantic memories are permanently stored in the cortex in a hippocampal-independent manner

Question 46

What is anterograde amnesia?

Answer 46

The inability to learn new information or retain new information after brain injury. Memory of events that occurred before the injury remain largely intact.

Question 47

What is retrograde amnesia?

Answer 47

Inability to remember events that occurred before the brain injury