task 6

Question 1

Jelicic - Case report
the case

Answer 1

Two groups of men were fist fighting when one of them suddenly grabbed a gun from another and shot a man of the other group in the head

. Frontal lobe damage + coma

. no memory of the crime

friends visited the victim and victim claimed to regain memory of the crome

it is likely that the victim managed to fill the gap in his memory -> this fits well with the notion of source-monitoring errors in people with frontal lobe injury

Question 2

What does that mean: Memory is reconstructive

Answer 2

events are encoded in an incomplete and fragmentized way

Question 3

Ribot’s law

Answer 3

some people with amnesia due to traumatic brain injury gradually and spontaneously regain parts of their memory for pre-injury events over time

this does not apply to frontal lobe injury but is restricted to medial temporal lobe injury

Question 4

Is it possible in people with frontal lobe damage to regain memory?

Answer 4

although some memories for pre-injury events may return in people with frontal lobe injury, it is unlikely that experiences that took place in the moments before the shooting can be recovered

(has to do with the interrupted consolidation process of info from the STM to the LTM)

Question 5

Is a eyewitness testimonies of victims with frontal lobe damage authentic?

Answer 5

eyewitness memories of victims with brain damage should be treated with caution

recollections of such people may not be authentic

In order to determine the authenticity of their memories, it seems necessary to find out if recollections of victims with frontal lobe injury might have been contaminated by external information

Question 6

Pseudo-memory

Answer 6

events that are completely fabricated

Question 7

What is source monitoring?

Answer 7

mechanism that serves as a screening and controlling device for memory at retrieval. It refers to cognitive processes involved in determining the source of memory information (localized in a network comprising the PFC)

Question 8

How can pseudomemories envolve?

Answer 8

Source monitoring error:When someone mistakes e.g., the narrative of a friend for ones own memory it is a source monitoring error that leads to pseudo memories

Suboptimal inhibition

suboptimal WM function

Question 9

People with which injury are prone to have pseudomeories

Answer 9

frontal lobe injuries

Question 10

Which disorder also is likelty to have source monitoring difficulties?

Answer 10

Schizophrenia

Question 12

Common techniques in pseudo-memory research:

Answer 12

Imagination-inflation paradigm

Post-hoc misinformation paradigm

Semantic relatedness paradigm

Question 13

Common techniques in pseudo-memory research

Imagination-inflation paradigm

Answer 13

people are asked to fantasize about events that never happened thereby increasing the subjects confidence that the event did take place

Example: A young man is asked to imagine how he, at age 5, was a passenger in a hot air balloon. According to the man’s parents, such an event never took place. After several weeks, he is asked to assign a confidence rating to the following item: “At age 5, I flew as a passenger in a hot air balloon”. It is likely that he will overestimate the probability of the balloon trip compared to items that were not imagined

Question 14

Common techniques in pseudo-memory research

Post-hoc misinformation paradigm

Answer 14

exposure to (post-hoc) misinformation/subtle suggestions can change the accurate recollection of a specific event (e.g. suggestive interviewing)

Example: a car accident occurs because a car did not stop at a stop sign, the eye witness is asked what happened when the car did not stop at the sign -> high probability that the person will recall the car did not stop at the yield sign

Question 15

Common techniques in pseudo-memory research

Semantic relatedness paradigm

Answer 15

people are exposed to cues referring to a critical item that is never presented

Example: people are asked to remember related words, such as bed, nap, pillow, and snooze, all of which are associated to a common word sleep which never presented à people will falsely recognize 65-80% of non-presented words à DRM task

Question 16

What do all these paradigms produce?

Answer 16

source-monitoring problems: participants find it difficult to differentiate between details that they really perceived and details that they only fantasized about

Question 17

Which brain regionas are activated when attention is paid to a certain stimulus

Answer 17

primary sensory and association cortex

· (e.g. a visual stimulus activates the visual cortex)

Question 18

What is the role of the medial temporal lobe?

Answer 18

· The medial temporal lobe works as a switchboard linking different brain regions that are active during the encoding of a specific event -> when we want to retrieve this event the medial temporal lobe mobilizes different regions in the sensory and association cortex

Question 19

What is the role of the PFC?

Answer 19

involved in search strategies and the evaluation of their results -> at retrieval it monitors relevant and inhibits irrelevant information

Question 20

Role of Left PFC

Answer 20

organizes the encoded information in the most efficient way for later remembering

Question 21

Role of Right PFC

Answer 21

guides retrieval (possibly especially for autobiographical memories)

Question 22

What happens to memories when the PFC is demaged?

Answer 22

memory distortions -> decreased usage of strategic retrieval and control (e.g., monitoring, evaluation, inhibition) leading to an endorsement of irrelevant memory representations during retrieval of a specific event

Question 23

How is AGE related to recognition errors?

Answer 23

Neurologically intact elderly make more false recognition errors than younger adults

Older adults are less successful in reproducing studied items and more often falsely recall the non-presented words

: only older adults with poor frontal lobe functioning show heightened levels of false recollections

Older people are more susceptible to misinformation

Question 24

Are Alzheimner patients susceptible to pseudo memroies?

Answer 24

yes: they are especially susceptible to pseudo-memories explained by an inefficient functioning of cognitive inhibitory control

Question 25

What has inhibitiory control to do with creating pseudomeories?

Answer 25

inhibitory control is needed to prevent activity from spreading throughout the semantic network -> if inhibition is diminished then activation will increasingly spread leading to increased probability that one falsely remembers a non-presented critical lure word

Question 26

Which functional brain areas are involved in accurate memories and pseudo-memories?

Answer 26

Increased activation in left temporal region during accurate recall of presented words Increased right prefrontal activity during false recognition of lure words

Question 27

Individual differences in eliciting pseudo-memories

Answer 27

Personality traits like dissociation, suggestibility, and imagery vividness have been studied to examine whether they predict performance on tasks that elicit pseudo-memories

Question 28

In healthy individuaks, what does lead to differences in suspetibility?

Answer 28

differences in the efficacy of executive functions are related to false recollections

Question 29

WM and pseudomemories

Answer 29

reduced working memory capacity was associated with higher rates of false recollections Intact working memory is needed for binding stimulus parts together in episodic memory inefficient working memory will lead to binding failures and therefore an increase in pseudo-memories WM capacity declines with age

Question 30

Overall conclusion of this article (age, WM, etc.)

Answer 30

lack of cognitive inhibition and/or reduced working memory capacity will lead to a weakened suppression of irrelevant information -> source monitoring error occur ultimately producing pseudo-memories

Question 31

Constructive memory framework

Answer 31

memories may not be accurate reproductions of events but can be altered by new information related to beliefs, attitudes, and perceptions to fill in gaps in the memory New experiences are organized in patterns of features that represent different aspects of the experience (e.g. The things I did on my birthday, the things I eat on that day, and the various presents I got ) o These features are encoded across different regions of the brain o The retrieval of information requires an act of pattern completion, whereby the features belonging to a past experience are activated and the activation spreads along other features (spreading activation).

Question 32

Constructive memory framework: To reconstruct accurate memories of past events two problems have to be solved

Answer 32

1.During encoding features must be connected together to from a coherent representation (feature binding process) 2.Bound representations need to be kept separate from each other (pattern separation) ->inadequate binding between features can lead to source memory errors`(fragments can be recalled but not the accurate context of encoding) During retrieval the system must also solve binding and separation problems to reconstruct accurate memories Source monitoring problem: retrieval involves criterion setting ->certain criteria need to be employed and sufficient retrieval cues need to be present to ensure the memory is that of an actual event and not something imagined

Question 32

Neural substrates of the Constructive memory framework

Answer 32

Medial temporal lobes sustain encoding and retrieval of recent experiences Prefrontal cortex sustains control and the retrieval of past experiences The CMF emphasizes that the prefrontal cortex sustains both retrieval focus and criterion-setting -->Authors believe that the CMF and especially the role of the prefrontal areas in the origins of pseudo-memories

Question 33

Study by stark 4 phases

Answer 33

1. shown 11 unique vignettes, composed of 50 color images 2.Misinformation: A day later: participants heard a recorded narrative that they were led to believe was an accurate description of the events seen the day before. The majority of the sentences had descriptions that were entirely consistent with the corresponding slide. For the 12 critical slides in each vignette, however, the auditory descriptions were inaccurate 3. Later in MRI scanner: brief sentence was presented visually that described a scene -> participants were asked: “Did you see this happening in the original event?” Yes/no responses were recorded with a response box 4. Surprise source memory test administered outside the scanner to give us a robust assessment of true and false memories. Participants were shown the recognition memory question again, along with their answer, and asked what the source was for their prior recognition memory response

Question 34

Results Stark

Answer 34

Recognition memory performance demonstrates a clear misinformation effect - True recollections based on visual information reactivated the early visual cortical regions, whereas false recollections based on auditory information reactivated the auditory cortex. True recognition recruited more regions compared with false recognition ->for visual regions, it is only the early regions (BA 17/ 18) that distinguish true from false memories

Question 35

Take away according to Marco

Answer 35

fMRI cannot be used in court!!