The remembering brain

Question 1

Short-term memory

Answer 1

Memory for information currently held ‘‘in mind’’; it has limited capacity.

Question 2

Long-term memory

Answer 2

Memory for information that is stored but need not be consciously accesible: it has an essentially umlimited capacity.

Question 3

Working memory

Answer 3

A system for the temporary storage and manipulation of information.

Question 4

Articulatory suppression

Answer 4

Silently mouthing words while performing some other task (typically a memory task).

Question 5

Declarative memory

Answer 5

Memories that can be consciously accessed and, hence, can typically be declared.

Question 6

Non-declarative memory

Answer 6

Memories that cannot be consciously accessed (e.g. procedural memory).

Question 7

Explicit memory

Answer 7

See declarative memory.

Question 8

Implicit memory

Answer 8

See non-declarative memory.

Question 9

Procedural memory

Answer 9

Memory for skills such as riding a bike.

Question 10

Semantic memory

Answer 10

Conceptually based knowledge about the world, including knowledge of people, places, the meaning of objects and words.

Question 11

Episodic memory

Answer 11

Memory of specific events in one’s own life.

Question 12

Anterograde memory

Answer 12

Memory for events that have occurred after brain damage.

Question 13

Retrograde memory

Answer 13

Memory for events that occurred before brain damage.

Question 14

Consolidation

Answer 14

The process by which moment-to-moment changes in brain activity are translated into permanent structural changes in the brain.

Question 15

Long-term potentiation (LTP)

Answer 15

An increase in the long-term responsiveness of a postsynaptic neuron in response to stimulation of a presynaptic neuron.

Question 16

Ribot’s law

Answer 16

The observation that memories from early in life tend to be preserved in amnesia.

Question 17

Place cells

Answer 17

Neurons that respond when an animal is in a particular location in allocentric space (normally found in the hippocampus)

Question 18

Grid cells

Answer 18

Neurons that respond when an animal is in particular locations in an environment such that the responsive locations form a repeating grid-like pattern.

Question 19

Recognition memory

Answer 19

A memory test in which participants must decide whether a stimulus was shown on a particular occasion.

Question 20

Recall

Answer 20

Participants must produce previously seen stimuli without a full prompt being given (compare recognition memory).

Question 21

Familiarity

Answer 21

Context-free memory in which the recognized item just feels familiar.

Question 22

Recollection

Answer 22

Context-dependent memory that involves remembering specific information from the study episode.

Question 23

Levels-of-processing account

Answer 23

Information that is processed semantically is more likely to be remembered than information that is processed perceptually.

Question 24

Encoding specificity hypothesis

Answer 24

Events are easier to remember when the context at retrieval is similar to the context at encoding.

Question 25

Retrieval-induced forgetting

Answer 25

Retrieval of a memory causes active inhibition of similar competing memories.

Question 26

Directed forgetting

Answer 26

Forgetting arising because of a deliberate intention to forget

Question 27

Constructive memory

Answer 27

The act of remembering construed in terms of making inferences about the past, based on what is currently known and accessible.

Question 28

False memory

Answer 28

A memory that is either partly or wholly inaccurate but is accepted as a real memory by the person doing the remembering.

Question 29

Source monitoring

Answer 29

The process by which retrieved memories are attributed to their original context.

Question 30

Confabulation

Answer 30

A memory that is false and sometimes self-contradictory without an intention to lie.