Chapter 8: Memory Flashcards

Question

Explicit vs. Implicit Memory: Tests DIRECT VS INDIRECT?

Answer 1

DIRECT: • EXPLICIT memory tasks: involves conscious or intentional memory retrieval, as when you consciously recognize or recall something - Recall: spontaneous memory retrieval-‐ you must retrieve the target stimuli or information on your own - Recognition: requires us to decide whether a stimulus is familiar INDIRECT: • IMPLICIT memory tasks: occurs when memory influences our behaviour without conscious awareness. - Perceptual identification - Fragment completion

Answer 2

1. CONDITIONING | 2. PRIMING

Answer 3

* Operant Conditioning: i.e. effects of consequences (rewards, punishment) on behaviour * Classical Conditioning: i.e. stimulus-‐response learning based on association of an arbitrary stimulus with a stimulus that reliably elicits a certain response (cf. Pavlov’s dog)

Answer 4

* Word stems have activated, or primed your stored mental representations of the original complete words. * Repetition (episodic) priming * Semantic priming

Answer 5

* Fill in this fragment: _O_E; likely to say bone is you have previously read dog * Explanation: spreading activation from DOG to BONE means that BONE is still more strongly activated than usual (cf. semantic network theory) * Aids reading, by pre-‐activating concepts that are likely to follow * Can help “guide’ behaviour

Answer 6

1. Fast presentation of words-‐ asked to recall • Performance benefits from prior exposure: quicker to decide prenouncibility on 2nd presentation * Not a semantic effect because it also works with nonwords and nonsense shapes * If the same process what done with pictures: quicker to decide line crossing on 2nd presentation 2. Repetition priming in Word Fragment Completion: • Prior exposure boosts or speeds up performance EXAMPLE: Implicit memory guide choices: • Consumers choose product more often when they have seen an advert • ...Even when they cannot remember the advert

Answer 7

* Retrieval cues: is a stimulus, whether internal or external, that activates information stored in long term memory * Retrieval is more likely when we have multiple, self-‐generated and distinctive cues.

Answer 8

* E.g. ‘banana’ activates thoughts of ‘peel, fruit and ice-‐cream’ (the cues) * When the associations (e.g. retrieval cues) were self-‐generated, students shown one cue recall 61% of the words and those who shown three cues recalled 91% -‐ much higher than shown cues generated by others. * Generating your own associations involves deeper processing than does being presented with associations generated by someone else-‐ self generated have personal meaning. * Generating multiple cues requires deeper processing than generating only one-‐ if one cue fails another may activate the memory.

Answer 9

• Distinctive events stand a greater chance of etching long-‐term memories that seem more vivid and clear.

Answer 10

* In experiments people shown arousing (e.g. violent images, happy fearful faces) and neutral stimuli, typically remember the arousing stimuli best, even when tested several weeks later * Emotional arousal enhances AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORIES: recollections of personally experienced events that make up the stories of our lives. * Even though pleasant and unpleasant events may be equally arousing when they happen, the intensity of memories for pleasant events seems to fade a little less rapidly over time.

Answer 11

* Memory recollection is effected by environmental, physiological and psychological factors * The encoding specificity principle states that memory is enhanced when cues present during retrieval match the cues present during encoding. * These cues may involve: * *** The same environment (context-‐dependent memory) or * *** Same internal state (state-‐dependent memory) present during original encoding. • Mood states, however, provide an exception. Overall, we tend to recall stimuli that are congruent with our current mood.

Answer 12

1. Encoding Failure 2. Decay Theory 3. Proactive interferences 4. Retroactive interference 5. Repression 6. Prospective Memory

Answer 13

• Encoding failure: We often cannot recall information because we never encoded it into long-‐term memory in the first place

Answer 14

• Decay theory proposes that with time and disuse, the long-‐term physical memory trace in the nervous system fades away. - Predicts longer time interval of disuse between learning and recall means less should be recalled.

Answer 15

• Proactive interference occurs when material learned in the past impairs recall of newer material (e.g. memory of an old phone number interferes with the ability to remember a new one)

Answer 16

• Retroactive interference occurs when newly acquired material impairs the ability to recall information learned at an earlier time (e.g. unable to remember an old phone number two months after having a new phone number. - Interference occurs as it takes time for the brain to convert short-‐term memories into long-‐term memories and thus when new information is entered into the system it can disrupt the conversion. - Other believe the once long term memories are formed, retroactive and proactive interference are caused by competition about retrieval cues - Retrieval failure can occur because we have too few retrieval cues or the cues are weak.

Answer 17

• Psychodynamic theorists propose that we may forget anxiety-‐arousing material through repression, an unconscious process of motivated forgetting.

Answer 18

• Prospective memory: concerns remembering to perform an activity in the future (e.g. remember to take you medication to 4pm

Answer 19

* Partial or total loss of memory | * Usually refers to episodic memory

Answer 20

How to acquire Amnesia: * Korsakoff’s Syndrome: no food or vitamins, only alcohol * Head injuries * Surgical trauma or disease (e.g. stroke, viral encephalitis)

Answer 21

1. Retrograde 2. Anterograde 3. Dementia 4. Alzheimer's Disease 5. Infantile Amnesia

Answer 22

• Retrograde amnesia is memory loss for events that occurred before the onset of amnesia (E.g. HM).

Answer 23

• Anterograde amnesia refers to memory loss for events that occur after the initial onset of amnesia (e.g. the removal of HM’s hippocampus)

Answer 24

• Dementia: refers to impaired memory and other cognitive defects that accompany brain degeneration and interfere with normal functioning

Answer 25

• Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is a progressive brain disorder that is the most common cause of dementia among adults over the age of 65 - Spreads across the temporal lobes and to the frontal lobes and other cortical regions. - Working memory and long-‐term memory worsen as AD progresses. - Neurons in the brain become damaged and die brain tissue shrinks and communication between neurons is impaired as AD disrupts the several neurotransmitter systems-‐ especially the acetylcholine system. • Alzheimer’s disease produces both types of amnesia

Answer 26

• Infantile amnesia is our inability to remember experiences from the first few years of our lives - The brain regions that encode long term episodic memories are still immature in the first years after birth - We do not encode our earliest experiences deeply and fail to form rich retrieval cues for them. - Infants lack clear self-‐concept and thus do not have a personal frame of reference around which to organize rich memories.

Answer 27

Medial temporal lobe damage: • Surgery to control intractable epilepsy, aged 27 • Hippocampus removed bilaterally, plus surrounding area (limbic system) • Retrograde memory deficits for 2-‐3 years before surgery • Plus anterograde amnesia (i.e. unable to remember ongoing events) ``` HM’s Amnesia: • Severe global anterograde amnesia • Shown a word or face, no later recall • Read newspaper/magazines repeatedly • Did not remember his physician • Evident in formal tests and in daily life • Evident both visually and verbally ****Word lists, faces and objects, recall or recognition ```

Answer 28

* H.M. had intact memories only from childhood and early adulthood= he could remember words who growing up but not their meaning * He couldn’t remember new personal experiences or general facts * After a tone was repeatedly paired with a puff of air blown towards HM’s eye, he began to blink involuntarily-‐ he repeated this action when exposed to the tone again (blinked) thus he formed a procedural memory. * HM was able to form a procedural memory from performing the mirror-‐tracing task, although having no conscious awareness of having learned it. His memory for the task (procedural memory) was implicit * But H.M had intact digit span: - Once remembered the number 584 for 15 minutes - After brief distraction, H.M could remember neither the number nor the rehearsal technique

Answer 29

* Amnesics recall very little * Implicit memory preserved in amnesia * Intact Implicit Memory: Patients with amnesia (more often) spell homophones according to earlier context-‐ like “normal” people do-‐ event though they “remember” nothing (explicitly

Answer 30

* Our schemas (i.e. our generalized ideas about how events happen) may cause us to misremember events in ways that fit with out pre-‐existing concepts and may lead us to recall events that never occurred * Boundary Extension: remembering the scene as wider-‐angled than it really was. • The Misinformation effect: occur when memory is distorted by misleading post event information. - This may occur because of source confusion: the tendency to recognize something as familiar but to forget where we encountered it. (e.g. seeing a mug shot of a criminal earlier in a newspaper and then wrongly identifying that criminal as the one who stole your bag in a lineup-‐ as you cant remember the source you recognize them from) * Vulnerability to misinformation effects is greater among younger than older children and when suggestive questions are asked repeatedly. * Experts cannot reliably tell when children are reporting accurate memories versus sincerely believed false memories * Psychologists debate whether recovered memories of child abuse are accurate and whether the abuse, if it occurred, was forgotten about through repression or other psychological processes. * Concern about the possibility of false memory leads many experts to urge caution in unconditionally accepting the validity of recovered memories.

Answer 31

• Boundary Extension: remembering the scene as wider-‐angled than it really was.

Answer 32

• The Misinformation effect: occur when memory is distorted by misleading post event information.

Answer 33

the frontal cortex, Thalamus, prefrontal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus and cerebellum. • Memory involves numerous interacting brain regions.

Answer 34

* Sensory memory depends on input from our sensory systems and initial processing by cortical sensory areas * Working memory involves a network of brain regions. The frontal lobes and prefrontal cortex play a key role in performing executive functions of working memory such as allocating attention to the other component of working memory. * Deeper encoding produced better memory for the words and greater activity in the left prefrontal cortex.

Answer 35

* The diverse components of an experience are processed initially in different regions of the cortex and then gradually bound together in the hippocampus (memory consolidation). After a memory for a personal experience is consolidated its various components appear to be stored across wide areas of the cortex, yet we retrieve and reintegrate these components as a unifies memory. * The hippocampus helps consolidate long-‐term declarative memories. * The cerebral cortex stores declarative memories across distributed sites. * The amygdala encodes emotionally arousing aspects of events * The cerebellum helps form procedural memories. Damage to the thalamus can produce severe amnesia

Answer 36

* Formation of procedural memory can be traced to a series of biochemical events that occur between and within various sensory neurons and motor neurons. * During the conditioning procedure various sensory neurons become densely packed with neurotransmitter release points and postsynaptic motor neurons develop more receptor sites. * These structural changes result in greater ease of synaptic transmission that may be the basis for memory consolidation.

Answer 37

* Researches try to mimic a process of long-‐term memory formation by stimulating specific neural pathways with rapid bursts of electricity. * They find that once this rapid stimulation ends, the neural pathway becomes stronger-‐ synaptic connections are activated more easily. * Long-‐term potentiation (LTP): an enduring increase in synaptic strength. * Studies of long-‐term potentiation in several species indicate that as memories form, complex chemical and structural changes that enhance synaptic efficiency occur in neurons.

Answer 38

* Our evolved memory capabilities display a balance between the adaptiveness of remembering and the adaptiveness of forgetting * Sensory memory depends on sensory systems that detect stimuli and output neural codes that are sent to the brain for processing. * The frontal lobes, hippocampus, amygdala, thalamus and cerebellum are among many brain regions that play key roles in working and/or long term memory * Chemical and structural changes in neurons that increase synaptic transmission efficiency underlie long term memory formation. * Brain damage from disease, sudden brain injury, brain surgery or other trauma and produce retrograde and anterograde amnesia.

Answer 39

* Stimulus characteristics (e.g. distinctiveness, organisation) influence encoding and retrieval * The position of an item in a series affects recall * The amount and rate of information affects our ability to recall it. * Memory may be enhanced when encoding and retrieval take place in the same environment. * Cultural upbringing influences our schemas and the age of earliest memories. * Misinformation effects (post event stimuli) can distort memories

Answer 40

* Memory codes are mental representations; and memory is a network of associated mental representations. * Elaborative and maintenance rehearsal facilitate encoding. * Memory confidence doesn’t ensure money accuracy. * Mental Schemas influence encoding and retrieval * Encoding failure and interference effect impair recall * Motivational biases (e.g. to feel food about oneself, to avoid anxiety-‐arousing information) may distort memories

Answer 41

* Use elaborative rehearsal (focus on the meaning of the information) * Link new information to existing memories * Organize information and use imagery * Overlearn the material * Distribute learning over time and test yourself * Minimize interference.

Answer 42

• We often cannot recall information because we never encoded it into long-‐term memory in the first place.

Answer 43

* Sensory memory depends on input from our sensory systems and initial processing by cortical sensory areas * Working memory involves a network of brain regions. The frontal lobes play a key role in performing executive functions of working memory. * The hippocampus helps consolidate long-‐term declarative memories. The cerebral cortex stores declarative memories across distributed sites. The amygdala encodes emotionally arousing aspects of events and the cerebellum helps form procedural memories. Damage to the thalamus can produce severe amnesia. * Studies of long-‐term potentiation in several species indicate that as memories form, complex chemical and structural changes that enhance synaptic efficiency occur in neurons.

Chapter 8: Memory Flashcards

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