Memory and Amnesia Flashcards

Question

what is the serial position curve

Answer 1

demonstrates the recall of items as you progress through a list and demonstrates the recency and primacy effects on a u shape

Answer 2

amnesiacs show no primacy effect and it is pathological, no encoding benefit - HM remember last few words when not interrupted but primacy effect gone. Patient KF intact primacy effect but an impaired recency effect.

Answer 3

Two effects predicted the amnesic patients’ impairments and can predict performance on classical psychological tasks. Can use this to pin down kind of amnesia new patients show.

Answer 4

hippocampal formation is responsible for episodic memory parahippocampal region for semantic memory they are very close in the brain lesions can impair them both because they're close

Answer 5

intact semantic memory but impaired episodic. cant learn anything but can remember facts from before had motorcycle accident with very severe brain lesion therefore semantic and episodic memory are different. MRI displays extensive damage to patient KCs MTL/hippocampus in axial and coronal sagittal views

Answer 6

it's unreliable hence need to define it within imperfect systems in order to diagnose a pathological memory deficit example of unreliable memory = eyewitness testimony. brain reconstructs events and is an organ or re presentation

Answer 7

ancestors see grass move assume tiger and flee, even though they were wrong 99% of the time. brain incorrectly tells people to run, a computer however would always stay as the probability of it being a tiger is so low its not worth running so the computer would die from the tiger one day. fearful and false assumptions kept us alive and false memories were selected for evolution

Answer 8

memory isnt like a tape recorder doesnt faithfully play back our experiences. Instead reconstructs them imaginatively

Answer 9

presented story of ghosts to ppt of indian origin the people reconstructed based on what they believe. Investigated how memory of a story is affected by previous knowledge, does cultural background and unfamiliarity with a text lead to distortion of memory, reconstructed on cultural schemas

Answer 10

when we encode what we expect to encode dont notice a change

Answer 11

ppt asked q by experimenter on the street, during qs a piece of wood goes between and the sight is blocked off, experimenter changes as it passes. ppt doesnt realise because they are wearing similar clothes information is mediated by our beliefs didnt expect the person to change so they didnt notice

Answer 12

loftus and palmer ppt watch video of car accident, asked to remember if glass broken using different words "hit" vs "smashed" each other was there broken glass. people who heard hit reported broken glass 14% of the time but smashed incorrectly reported smashed glass double the amount of times memory is unreliable so eye witness testimony is too, questions change the answer

Answer 13

waited for tourists to leave and asked whether they remember seeing buggs bunny. lots of people said they did but hes not a disney character so its impossible expectation that it could have happened caused them to remember something that didnt happen

Answer 14

In order to plan the future, which is what memory is about, we need a system of representations rather than mere recordings of events. The price we pay is a memory system which is fallacious and prone to errors.

Answer 15

karl popper and wittgenstein discussing if there is a science in morality. Wittgenstein picked up a poker from the fire to play with as the conversation got heated. then asked popper to think of an example of a moral stance and he said not to threaten lecturers with a poker as it had offended The people who were in the room many years later asked to recall the event all 9 said different things

Answer 16

dispel a myth e.g vaccines are bad people agree immediately after return a month later no notion of what is false ortrue they have mixed into the same thing educating people can backfire and lead to people remembering misinformation about things

Answer 17

errors and false memories

Answer 18

Forgetting is defined as the lack of availability, partial or total, temporary or permanent, of memories of lived events or of information previously encountered, processed or learned.

Answer 19

when something is disregarded, erased or transformed during encoding or retrieval. After the learning phase, information may be inaccessible because of inhibition, removal or interference.

Answer 20

the difference between what has been encoded consciously or unconsciously and what is remembered + available for retrieval

Answer 21

omission errors (with or without awareness of not remembering) or commission errors (false memories, intrusions, and substitutions). Different error types reflect different neurobiological and cognitive mechanisms.

Answer 22

yes it reflects normal functioning essential for categorisation, learning and abstract reasoning for maintaining social and affective relationships

Answer 23

disproportionate or abnormally fast forgetting are pathological lack of forgetting is also abnormal

Answer 24

it can be induced voluntarily to preserve feelings and pursue personal goals in everyday life or following specific instructions in experimental settings

Answer 25

trace decay theory - memory trace fades and the memory is no longer availabe Interference theory - the memory trace is no longer accessible as another memory trace interferes with its retrieval

Answer 26

he started the idea of studying forgetting and determined the curve. Memories fade away as function of time. made curve by studying himself. on learning non sensical lists of syllables

Answer 27

fast forgetting at the start then slowed down | plateaus later on, important to know if forgetting is abnormal in a patient

Answer 28

ppt repeat material different amounts of times, 6,4 or 2 times. more repeated the more is remembered in immediate memory. independent of initial learning stage the curves are parallel. more repetition = more remembered but decay rate is the same

Answer 29

psychologists wait at football game until someone had an injury found that these people if asked remembered exactly what happened, followed ambulance and asked again at diff points where they didn’t remember anything. It encoded but faded after 10 mins so failed to consolidate. People with no concussion show same remembering immediately to 20 mins later, people with concussion remember immediately but fades to 0 by 20 mins.

Answer 30

ask ppt to encode material then either perform interference tasks or rest in a dark room (minimal interference) with ppt with normal and with amnesia. test both 30 mins to week later people in interference remember less than people with less interference, if time alone responsible there would not be a difference due to the condition of what happens during this time. Therefore interference plays a role in forgetting. People with dense amnesia with minimal interference remember much better as compared to the usual condition where they remember 5% as opposed to 60%. This interference changes according to how close the interference happens to the remembering event.

Answer 31

longer interference is postponed the better the performance the earlier a lack of consolidation occurs the worse remembering is

Answer 32

Etymologically, the word “to forget” derives from the old English word forgytan, which is composed by for- and gietan (to grasp) and literally means "to lose (one's) grip on" (Hoad, 1996). In Italian: dimenticare, from the Latin demens which means “without mind”. In most languages, forgetting denotes a defective memory.

Answer 33

the loss of access to information through disuse is seen not as a failure of the system, but an adaptive feature that facilitates updating. not retrieved = not reinforced = forgotten not useful to remember every parking space has in your life

Answer 34

– TEA have often malfunctioning hippocampus as demonstrated by MRI scans. They learn something they are normal, then after 30 mins still normal, encoding, storage and first retrieval normal but showed diff forgetting curve compared to Ebbinghaus. Instead they drop dramatically (fast pathological forgetting)

Answer 35

Forgetting should not be conceived as the opposite of remembering, rather as functional to remembering, unless it becomes pathological.