Amnesia
What is retrograde amnesia?
The inability to remember long-term memories from before an accident or illness.
Who was H.M. and what part of his brain did he have removed?
A man with seizures who has his hippocampi and some surrounding brain structures removed.
How can we know if long-term memory is truly independent from short-term memory?
Double dissociation
What are semantic memories? Give an example.
Memory for facts, general knowledge
Ex: important dates, historical figures, geography, general facts
What is explicit memory and its subdivisions verses implicit memories and its subdivisions?
Explicit: memories which are consciously and intentionally remembered (semantic and episodic)
Implicit: memories which do not require conscious effort to recall (procedural memory, priming, and conditioning)
What is anterograde amnesia?
The inability to form new long-term memories after an accident or illness.
What were the positive and negative results of H.m.'s surgery?
Good: no more seizures, could hold a normal conversation, and had an average digit span and IQ
Bad: couldn't form new long-term memories, couldn't improve digit span, would repeat meals, and his language was "stuck" in the 50s.
What key ways does long-term memory differ from short-term memory?
In duration (seconds vs minutes to years), capacity, and neural systems
What are episodic memories and what do they allow you to do?
Give an example.
Memory for past events from your life
Mental Time Travel: the feeling as though you are “reliving” the event
What is procedural memory and what brain region is it associated with?
"Muscle memory" which is associated with the cerebellum.
What does it mean for retrograde amnesia to be temporally graded?
More recent memories are lost before older, more remote ones are impacted.
Patients H.M and E.P had damage to their long-term memory, but their short-term memory stayed intact. Patient K.F had a functional long-term memory, but their short-term memory was damaged.
What would K.F.'s memory loss entail?
Severely reduced digit span and in-the-moment "forgetfulness" while still being able to recall long-term memories and create new long-term memories.
What are the two major memory divisions within long-term memory? Are they distinct or do they interact?
Explicit vs Implicit
They normally interact
Who is the researcher credited with discovering the difference between episodic and semantic memories?
Ednel Tulving
Can patients with amnesia form new procedural memories? What do these findings indicate?
Yes, which shows that implicit and explicit memory are distinct from each other.
What part of the brain is crucial for the storage and formation of long-term memories?
The hippocampus
Who was patient K.C. and what form(s) of amnesia did he have? What distinct function of his memory did he lose?
Both anterograde and retrograde amnesia. He lost his episodic memories
On the serial position curve, the first thing you hear is more likely to be remembered because of the ______ effect as a function of ______-term memory.
primacy;long-term memory
What are autobiographical memories and what components of long-term memory do they include?
Autobiographical memory - memory for specific experiences from our life.
Contains both episodic and semantic components
What is priming?
x2 Bonus: what is the propaganda effect?
The presentation of one stimulus (the priming stimulus) changes the way a person responds to another stimulus (the test stimulus).
Propaganda Effect: people are more likely to rate statements they have read or heard before as being true, just because of prior exposure to the statements
What form of amnesia did H.M. have?
Anterograde amnesia
What part of his brain did patient K.C. injure?
His hippocampus, medial temporal lobe (MTL), and frontal lobe structures.
On the serial position curve, the last thing you hear is more likely to be remembered because of the ______ effect as a function of ______-term memory.
x2 Bonus: what eleminates this effect
recency; short-term memory
The recency effect can be eliminated by an interruption that delays recall.
Semantic memories are more associated with activity in the ______ temporal region, while episodic memories are more associated with activity in the ______ temporal region.
2x Bonus: what neural imaging technique allows us to know this?
Semantic: lateral temporal region
Episodic: medial temporal region
Recorded via fMRI
How can we be sure that explicit memory is not driving the priming results?
Repetition Priming: when the test stimulus is the same as or resembles the priming stimulus
Ex: rating a list of words then being asked to recall them (explicit) or fill in blanks with the first word that comes to mind (implicit)