What memory types does the term declarative memory include?
Semantic and episodic memory
- consciously accessible and usually knowledge that is easy to verbalize
What is episodic memory?
– Memory for a specific autobiographical event. It is personal and fully tied to personal history. It includes information about spatial and temporal context -> Information we ‘remember’.
What is semantic memory?
Memory for facts or general knowledge about the world. It is not tagged in time and space -> Information we ‘know’.
What are the three distinct life stages of episodic and semantic memories?
- Acquisition - Information must be encoded or put into memory;
- Retention - Memory must be retained or kept in memory;
- Recall - Memory must be retrieved when needed.
What factors can include the life stages of declarative memory?
- it is easier to remember information we can interpret in context of things we already know
- deeper processing at encoding improves recognition later
- we are more likely to remember things that happened recently than things that happened long ago
- recall is a bit better if retrieval context is similar to encoding context
- the more cues, the better the recall
In which three ways can declarative memory malfunction?
- interference
- source amnesia
- false memory
How are our semantic networks organized?
- by object properties (e.g. visual, functional etc.)
What brain areas are involved in memory encoding?
- medial temporal lobes including hippocampus, amygdala and nearby cortical areas
Who is patient H.M.? What happened to him?
- patient with epileptic seizures, whose medial temporal lobe was bilaterally removed including hippo campus, amygdala and surrounding cortex.
- seizures declined in frequency, but he developed anterograde amnesia -> inability to form new episodic and semantic memories
What behavior did rats with hippocampal lesions show in the radial arm maze?
X Rats with hippocampal lesions made more errors than control -> They had trouble remembering which arms they’ve already visited on trial.
What is the function of the hippocampus in a healthy brain?
- critical for forming new memories
- region is needed to encode information, retain or consolidate it, to retrieve it when needed
What did the ‘subsequent forgetting paradigm’ experiment show?
- More activity during initial learning of words in left medial temporal lobe, are more subsequently remembered
