Memory

Question 1

What are the types of memory

Answer 1

MEMORY
^
LONG TERM SHORT-TERM/WORKING
^
FACTS EVENTS
(semantic)

(long term=medial temporal lobe)

Question 2

Implicit Memory

Answer 2

• form of long-term memory; nondeclarative
  types:

1. priming
2. procedural (skills and habits)
3. associative learning (classical & operant conditions)
4. nonassociative learning (habituation & sensitization)
5. PRIMING: past experiences influence or increase the response to a given sensory stimulus — images can be recognized with less detail after increased exposure — NEOCORTEX
6. PROCEDURAL: skills/habits — striatum (facilitating voluntary movement)
7. ASSOCIATIVE LEARNING:
   (a) classical conditioning (learn to associate previously neutral stimulus with potent stimulus such that now respond to previously neutral stimulus as you would to potent stimulus —> ex: Pavlov’s dog experiment — bell and salivary glands — salivation is the conditioned response, occurred in response to stimulus alone)
   (b) operant conditioning (learn to associate a behavior with a particular response that either makes that behavior more likely to happen again or less likely —> Skinner’s rat experiment — animals learned to associate their own behavior (pressing lever) with rewarding or aversive outcomes (food or shock) — rat goes through maze: goes one way for cheese, another way for shock —> increased/decreased likelihood for same behavior)
   AMYGDALA
8. NONASSOCIATIVE LEARNING: long-term changes to reflex pathways
   (a) habituation: overtime adapting to water temperature of a hot shower
   (b) sensitization: increased sensitivity to heat after being exposed to scalding hot water
   CEREBELLUM
9. priming —> NEOCORTEX
10. procedural —> STRIATUM
11. associative learning —> AMYGDALA
12. nonassociative learning —> CEREBELLUM

Question 3

Describe some basic facts about working memory

Answer 3

lasts for duration of task at hand—a few seconds to a minute or two

relies on a network of prefrontal and parietal areas

hold about seven items at a time

7 ±2

Question 4

Describe some ways we might show evidence of priming

Answer 4

Alzheimers patients - impaired priming

prick — priming can occur in amnesia patients

Question 5

Describe different types of procedural memory and some standard tasks that are used

Answer 5

slowly acquired

many patients with brain injury have difficulty remembering experiences of even a few moments earlier can learn to master new skills

Question 6

Describe the difference between operant and classical conditioning

Answer 6

(a) classical conditioning (learn to associate previously neutral stimulus with potent stimulus such that now respond to previously neutral stimulus as you would to potent stimulus —> ex: Pavlov’s dog experiment — bell and salivary glands — salivation is the conditioned response, occurred in response to stimulus alone)
(b) operant conditioning (learn to associate a behavior with a particular response that either makes that behavior more likely to happen again or less likely —> Skinner’s rat experiment — animals learned to associate their own behavior (pressing lever) with rewarding or aversive outcomes (food or shock) — rat goes through maze: goes one way for cheese, another way for shock —> increased/decreased likelihood for same behavior)

AMYGDALA

Question 7

Describe how the n-back task works

Answer 7

measures working memory capacity

sequence of stimuli, and the task consists of indicating when the current stimulus matches the one from n steps earlier in the sequence

requires maintaining and updating information

Question 8

How does Parkinson’s relate to memory impairment?

Answer 8

Given that Parkinson’s disease broadly affects frontostriatal circuitry, it is not surprising that the disorder is associated with a reduction of working memory

Question 9

Area important for working memory

Answer 9

prefrontal and parietal areas

Functional neuroimaging studies consistently implicate a widespread network of human cortical brain areas that together support spatial working memory

Studies of humans with brain damage and monkeys with experimental lesions have confirmed that damage to the prefrontal and parietal areas does indeed cause impairments

Question 10

Area important for long-term memory

Answer 10

medial temporal lobe

LTP====MTL

Question 11

Describe what serial position (primacy and recency) effects are and what patients with amnesia typically show

Answer 11

serial position effects

if you give people a list of items, they’ll be more likely to remember the first items in the list (primacy effect) and the last items in the list (recency effect), and less so those in the middle

primacy = first items in list
recency effect = last items in list

AD patients recalled significantly fewer words than NC participants overall, and exhibited a significantly reduced primacy effect (i.e., recall of the first 2 list items) with a normal recency effect (i.e., recall of the last 2 list items)

AD —> low primacy
normal recency

Question 12

Describe retrograde and anterograde amnesia and describe which one(s) H.M.
experienced

Answer 12

retrograde: loss of access to memories of events that occurred/information learned previously; usually graded, with very recent memories most affected
anterograde: loss of ability to create new memories (more common)

—> surgical removal of bilateral medial temporal lobe (MTL)
—>led to severe anterograde amnesia (inability to form new declarative memories)
—>lesion evidence suggesting that the hippocampus and surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) areas are important for the formation of new declarative memories

Question 13

Describe how implicit memory is hard to articulate/verbalize and how performance can improve without the person being able to describe how it improved and even without conscious awareness

Answer 13

does not lend itself to conscious recall or expression

Question 14

Explain how the Weather Prediction Task works (i.e., be able to describe specifics of how it works and that learning is based on feedback that is probabilistic) and what type of memory this typically taps into; explain how this differs from the Paired Associates
task that looks quite similar

Answer 14

weather prediction task:

—participants are given a set of cards with shapes and then asked to predict the outcome

—feedback-based, probabilistic learning

—involves the basal ganglia

—->Participants must learn to predict “rain or sun” based on patterned cards. Trial-and-error cognitive skill improved with practice. fMRI images showed basal ganglia activation and hippocampal deactivation

Trial and error

Pressed a switch for “rain.” Correct answer flashed after each trial

Question 15

Describe the importance of the striatum (and roughly where it is/what broader structure it’s a part of)

Answer 15

(facilitating voluntary movement) —> important in procedural movement and forming “habits”

part of basal ganglia (basal ganglia involved in and control of movement)

Question 16

Describe what happens when patients with amnesia and patients with Parkinson’s Disease perform both the Weather Prediction task and a declarative memory task and what this tells us about the brain regions that are important for each

Answer 16

tested patients with Parkinson’s disease (basal ganglia dysfunction) and patients with amnesia (MTL dysfunction) and controls

AD patients did better on WPT (working memory)
PT patients did better on declarative memory task

Question 17

Parkinsons disfunction

Answer 17

damage to basal ganglia/striatum —> bad working memory

Question 18

amnesia disfunction

Answer 18

damage to medial temporal lobe —> bad long-term memory

Question 19

Paired Associate test

Answer 19

test of short-term memory

The paired-associate learning is required whenever you link up two items in memory—such as the type of object and its location. That can be useful when trying to find something you stuffed in a box in the basement, but it is also linked with different types of pairing. For example, when you learn new words, you have to pair the word itself with its meaning

you may see something like this….
4-VNR 7-CSL 8-RKJ 2-KPD

After you inspected the list, the experimenter would present a stimulus item (like 7) and you would try to supply the response item (CSL). Then the experimenter might present the stimulus 4 and you would answer VNR. You must learn the association between each stimulus and its corresponding response. The pairs could occur in any order.

Question 20

Describe what informed consent is and some key components of a standard consent
form for a psychological experiment

Answer 20

description, time involvement, risks and benefits, payments, participant’s rights, contact information

when people cannot consent to research participation, a legally appointed guardian, who has the patients’ best interests at heart, can provide consent (assent)

Question 21

Describe the case of Clive Wearing

Answer 21

viral encephalitis attacked medial temporal lobe

the man with no short-term memory, lives only in the present

chronic anterograde and retrograde amnesia

Question 22

Describe what explicit memory is and what episodic and semantic memory are and how they differ

Answer 22

explicit/declarative memory : encodes information that can be consciously recalled/expressed

semANTic (anterior temporal lobe)
episodic (medial temporal lobe)

semantic memory (loss = damage to anterior temporal lobe) —> facts, concepts, skills and general knowledge of the world

episodic memory (loss = damage to medial temporal lobe) —> memory for personally experienced events that occurred in a particular place at a specific time, includes specific and general facts, personal facts, etc., can get confused with autobiographical facts

Question 23

Describe what semantic dementia is

Answer 23

typically involving damage to the anterior temporal lobe

episodic memories are preserved, but semantic knowledge impaired

loss of the meaning, or semantics, of words

early in the illness a patient might lose the word for a falcon, later-on forget the word for a chicken, then call all winged creatures “bird” and eventually call all animals “things”

Not only do they lose the ability to recall the word, but the concept of these words is also lost. “What is a bird?” might be a typical response for a patient with advanced SD

Question 24

Describe what developmental amnesia is

Answer 24

problems in remembering day-to-day events but not in acquiring facts

episodic memory impaired, but perception, comprehension, and working memory preserved — seriously impaired in their ability to recall visual or verbal stimuli but are relatively unimpaired in recognizing them

brain damage was previously reported to be largely limited to the hippocampus

selective hippocampal damage associated with specific deficits in episodic—but not semantic—memory

episodic memory impaired, but perception, comprehension, and working memory preserved

Question 25

Broadly describe the 5 different theories of hippocampal function

Answer 25

declarative theory: hippocampus crucial for all explicit memory (semantic & episodic), but only in the beginning; after a time, memories are consolidated in circuits throughout cortex

multiple-trace theory: hippocampus crucial for explicit memory; always need hippocampus to recall episodic memory, no matter how old; only semantic memory can become independent of hippocampus and stored in cortex

dual-process theory: Hippocampus critical for detailed recollection of the context of an episode; overall sense of familiarity results from different processes relying on other MTL structures

relational theory: hippocampus stores information about the relations among elements of a scene or event, not the elements themselves; enables flexible use of old information in new situations

cognitive map theory: original role of hippocampus in nonhumans was to create and store territory maps; in humans, system was coopted to create and store episodic memories as well

Question 26

Episodic memory ==> what part of the brain?

Answer 26

association between lesions in the medial temporal lobe and impairments in episodic memory confirmed in many patients; precise role of hippocampus is a subject of debate

Question 27

Briefly describe the results of the London taxi driver study and why this was a clever way to explore certain brain function

Answer 27

spatial memory (function of hippocampus) — progressive growth in posterior hippocampus of taxi drivers with increased navigational experience

Question 28

Explain the Method of Loci procedure and how it might take advantage of the ability of
the hippocampus to keep track of maps

Answer 28

“Method of loci” or “memory palace” technique

imagine walking a familiar route and associate items to be remembered with different stops along the route (the more vivid—or even outlandish—the associations the better!)

to use the Method of Loci, you simply need to visualize a location through which you can take an imaginary walk; if you are memorizing a speech, it is helpful for the location to have a beginning, middle, and an end, perhaps similar to a route you have memorized on your way to work

items mentally associated with specific physical locations

Question 29

Explain why we might draw similarities between working memory and a chalkboard or between working memory and random access memory (RAM) on a computer and why “working memory” may be a more apt term than “short-term memory”

Answer 29

The work you are doing is temporarily held in the computer’s memory, known as RAM or Random Access Memory —-> Your progress will remain as you continue to work on it —> But in order to save the letter or report for future use, you must actively save your work to the computer’s hard drive

Question 30

Define what a double dissociation is, describe an example, and explain why it’s useful in
our understanding of how brain areas are related to particular functions

Answer 30

Double Dissociation is when two related mental processes are shown to function independently of each other.

A classic example of Double Dissociation is speech and language comprehension. Although both processes pertain to use of language, the brain structures that control them work independently. When a part of the brain called the Broca’s area is damaged, patients may still understand language but be unable to speak fluently. They know what they want to say, but are unable to express themselves. On the other hand, when a part of the brain called Wernicke’s area is damaged, patients may still speak fluently, but be unable to comprehend language. This results in properly constructed but nonsensical sentences.

By establishing Double Dissociation, scientists are able to determine which mental processes are specialized to certain areas of the brain.

Question 31

Explain what converging evidence is and why it’s important and give an example

Answer 31

evidence from independent, unrelated sources can “converge” to strong conclusions

ex: lesion data + neuroimaging data provide converging evidence:

medial temporal lobe (MTL) important for declarative (explicit) memory

basal ganglia (BG) important for procedural (implicit) memory

Question 32

Explain some of the controversies surrounding Dr. Corkin and H.M. described in the articles you read: informed consent, the additional lesion in the orbitofrontal gyrus, etc.

Answer 32

questioned the ethics of Dr. Corkin in her dealings with Henry Molaison

(1) suggested that Dr. Corkin attempted to suppress research findings that H.M. had a preexisting frontal lobe lesion—orbitofrontal gyrus
—>(could affect the interpretation of earlier studies of H.M.’s memory loss)

(2) did not locate the genetically closest living relative to H.M. from whom to obtain consent (legal proceedings instead appointed a distant relative as conservator)

(3) and sought to shred her original source material and unpublished data because it could potentially lead to a reexamination of her conclusions during her decades of research on H.M.
—->(destruction of primary data would be considered an enormous loss and possibly a violation of research ethics)

Question 33

episodic vs. semantic — where in brain

Answer 33

semantic: anterior temporal lobe
episodic: medial temporal lobe