Systems & Taxonomy
According to Larry Squire’s long-term memory taxonomy, this major division handles conscious, deliberate recollection of facts and events.
What is declarative (or explicit) memory?
Ablation of this large segment of cortical and subcortical regions in both hemispheres in Patient H.M. was famously shown to cause profound anterograde amnesia.
What is the medial temporal lobe (MTL)?
Coined by Donald Hebb, this famous phrase summarizes the cellular basis of learning: "Neurons that fire together, ___".
What is "wire together"?
In classical conditioning, this term refers to the unlearned, natural reaction triggered by the unconditioned stimulus.
What is the unconditioned response (UR)?
This type of amnesia, which affected Patient H.M. severely, involves an inability to form new long-term memories following brain injury.
What is anterograde amnesia?
This sub-branch of declarative memory refers specifically to general knowledge and facts about the world, independent of context.
What is semantic memory?
This classic hippocampal circuit pathway starts at the entorhinal cortex, synapses on the dentate gyrus, moves to CA3, and ends at CA1.
What is the trisynaptic pathway?
This cellular phenomenon involves the persistent strengthening of synapses based on recent patterns of activity, serving as a primary cellular model for memory storage.
What is Long-Term Potentiation (LTP)?
Using this task (often impaired in Parkinson's Disease), researchers demonstrated that participants can exhibit implicit motor sequence learning without explicit awareness.
What is the Serial Reaction Time Task?
This "law" of retrograde amnesia states that older, remote memories are more resistant to disruption than newer memories.
What is Ribot's Law?
In Yonelinas' Dual-Process Model, this component of recognition is quantitative, automatic, and based on global item strength without contextual details.
What is familiarity?
In the dual-stream model of medial temporal lobe organization, this specific cortex anchors the anterior temporal network and processes item information.
What is the perirhinal cortex (PRC)?
Karl Lashley proposed this "law" stating that the proportion of brain damage is directly related to the degree of memory impairment, supporting distributed engrams.
What is the Law of Mass Action?
Electrophysiological studies by Schultz et al. showed that midbrain dopamine neurons encode this signal, representing the difference between expected and actual rewards.
What is a Reward Prediction Error (RPE)?
Also known as the standard model of systems memory consolidation, this model proposes that memories eventually become independent of the hippocampus.
What is the Systems Consolidation Model?
In Signal Detection Theory applied to memory, this parameter d' attempts to index a participant's underlying ability or this metric.
What is accuracy (or discriminability)?
Anchored in the parahippocampal cortex, this memory network connects to the posterior hippocampus and is specialized for processing "context" and relational information.
What is the Posterior Medial (PM) network?
Discovered in the entorhinal cortex, these cells fire when an animal is in locations that form a repeating, periodic hexagonal grid.
What are grid cells?
This form of classical conditioning pairs a neutral stimulus with an aversive outcome, relying heavily on the integrity of the amygdala.
What is Pavlovian fear conditioning?
Unlike the standard model, Nadel and Moscovitch's Multiple Trace Theory argues that the hippocampus creates a new trace every time a memory undergoes this process.
What is retrieval?
When plotting a Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curve for recognition memory, the y-intercept specifically provides an estimate of this qualitative process.
What is recollection?
Woollett & Maguire (2011) demonstrated that learning "The Knowledge" leads to increased structural volume in this specific brain region for taxi drivers who pass.
What is the posterior hippocampus?
Functioning like place cells but tracking time instead of space, these hippocampal cells provide information on temporal associations during an experience.
What are time cells?
Patient SM showed that the amygdala is critical for exteroceptive fear, but spared when fear or panic is triggered by this internal, bodily route (such as CO2 inhalation).
What is interoceptive?
A final theory of learning and memory and the MTL complex suggests that forgetting happens not because traces fail to transfer from hippocampus to cortex, but because this spatiotemporal factor naturally drifts over time.
What is context?