Why does memory fail

Question 1

What can cause Amnesia?

Answer 1

brain damage, disease, or psychological trauma

Question 2

What is retrograde Amnesia?

Answer 2

Cannot retrieve memories, but no problem forming new ones.

Question 3

What part of the brain creates retrograde amnesia?

Answer 3

cerebral cortex

Question 4

What is the mass action principle?

Answer 4

The more extensive the damage, the more previous memories the patients tend to lose.

Question 5

What is Ribot’s Law?

Answer 5

More likely to lose recently stored information than those they had for a long time (such as language).

Question 6

What is anterograde amnesia?

Answer 6

Cannot form long-term memories, but can still access past LTM and create new STM.

Question 7

What part of the brain causes anterograde amnesia when damaged? Describe what is does.

Answer 7

Hippocampus. Explicit long-term memory - those we are consciously aware of.

Question 8

What is semantic memory?

Answer 8

Explicit long-term memory of facts and concepts.

Question 9

What is episodic memory?

Answer 9

memory of specific event that happened to you. Autobiographical.

Question 10

Clive Wearing, what was his condition?

Answer 10

He has retrograde and anterograde amnesia. Do not remember the past, and cannot form new long-term memory.

Question 11

What is implicit long-term memory? What is procedural memory?

Answer 11

memories that we are not consciously aware of and it does not take conscious effort to retrieve them.
memory on how to do something.

Question 12

Which kind of long-term memory can people with amnesia recover? Why?

Answer 12

implicit long-term memories.

Another part of the brain is involved in implicit memories, the cerebellum (coordinating movements).

Question 13

What is absent-mindedness? Why does it occur?

Two techniques to avoid it?

Answer 13

fail to encode important info in the LTM because weren’t paying attention.
More mindful, routines.

Question 14

What is blocking?
Memories are conceptualized as being stored in a ____ with each piece of info being _____ to others. Blocking happens when…

Answer 14

involves a failure in retrieval that keeps us from accessing store information. Tip-of-the tongue kind of thing.
web/ connected
cannot locate a piece of info within the web.

Question 15

How is blocking cured?

Answer 15

retrieval cues (finding pathways in the web) to allow us to find the info.

Question 16

What is context-dependent retrieval?

Answer 16

if you learn something in a context (land, underwater) more likely to retrieve the info in the same context. Context is a retrieval cue.

Question 17

What is state-dependent retrieval?

Answer 17

if you encode something in a state, you are more likely to remember it in the same state.

Question 18

What is storage decay? Whose concept?

Answer 18

Forgetting often occurs due to the passage of time. Ebbinghaus

Question 19

How did Ebbinghaus study storage decay? How did he conceptualize his findings?

Answer 19

Made people memorize nonsense words. Checked for how long they can remember it.
Forgetting curve.

Question 20

What is the serial positioning effect?

Name the two concepts.

Answer 20

order in which learn stuff affects how we remember.
1- Primacy effect: initial info
2- Recency: later info

Question 21

What is suggestibility?

Answer 21

include misleading information from external sources into our memories.

Question 22

Explain Loftus’ study on suggestibility?

Answer 22

Ask questions about a car accident and use different words to describe incident. Ask how fast were people going. When the word was like “smashed” people said that the cars were going faster.

Question 23

What does it mean when we say that we reconstruct our memories when we need them?

Answer 23

piece memories together from a few highlights and then we fill-in the rest. So as we reconstruct, we can be influenced by external sources.