Memory Test 1

A portion of the prefrontal cortex located along the midline of the brain (i.e., in the middle), lower in the prefrontal cortex

Plays an instrumental role in the integration of recent episodic experiences with well-consolidated background knowledge and schemas

Plays a role in hastening the consolidation of schematically related episodic memories

Same set-up, but used words instead of visual scenes.

Found same pattern of neural correlations for words that were remembered.

But activated the left frontal lobe instead of the right. Remember the link between language and the left hemisphere!

48 photographs of visual scenes used

Subjects required to judge whether they were indoor or outdoors

Surprise recognition test for the scenes

Could respond either “not seen”, “familiar” (know you saw it), “remembered” (have recollection of seeing it)

Scenes that were judged as familiar or were forgotten did not activate areas of the hippocampus and the right frontal lobe during encoding. Only the case for those scenes judged to be remembered.

Jon suffered anoxia at birth, leading to an atypical amnesia.

Jon has damage limited to hippocampus and therefore displays severe episodic memory deficits.

But he has excellent semantic memory

This seems to challenge the assumption that episodic memory is necessary for the formation of semantic memories.

More research is needed.

This seems to challenge the assumption that episodic memory is necessary for the formation of semantic memories.

More research is needed.

A process where the hippocampus, either during sleep, or in periods of quiet rest, periodically reinstates recent memories and knowledge in cortex, putatively by a process of hippocampal replay that drives neocortical activation of the elements of an event

assumed to be incidental and not goal directed

The process wherein a newly formed episodic memory gradually becomes integrated into the fabric of long-term memory, becoming more stable and durable in the process

Thought to reflect the gradual elimination of the role of the hippocampus and the progressive increase in importance of cortical representations in storing and retrieving an event

sometimes characterized as the transfer of memories to neocortex

The reactivation of sensory memory traces stored by neurons within individual cortical modulates, by virtue of back projections from the hippocampus that activate the constituent parts of a memory, reinstating the original experience

A representation that draws together inputs from many different sensory modalities, such as vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell

Can also include conceptual and emotional feature

The particular place and time of an event, with spatial information about an environment contributing to specifying where something happened, and temporal information contributing to encoding when it happened

Neurons in the hippocampus that code for particular moments in time in a temporal sequence, independent of any particular external stimuli, the activity of which may contribute to representing time in episodic memories

“neurons that fire selectively in response to a particular position in an animal’s spatial environment“

Neurons in the hippocampus that respond whenever an animal or person is in a particular location in a particular environment

The collective activity of which is believed to be a critical ingredient in representing particular spatial environment either perceived or remembered

The ability to represent the temporal sequence of occurrences with a larger event

Clayton and Dickerson (1999) use a behavioral definition – memory for where, what, and when.

Scrub Jays allowed to hide two different foods in ice trays filled with sand: meal worms, which they strongly prefer, but decay quickly or peanuts which are more durable.

Therefore they have memory for what (type of food), where (location buried in ice tray) and when (seem to know the specific time at which the foods were buried)

Can be considered episodic-like

We may never truly know how similar their memory is to ours.

According to Tulving, having the ability to re-experience the past is key (mental time travel). But we don’t know to what extent animals remember in this way.

A strategy whereby a learner attempts to organize unstructured material so as to enhance learning

The process of linking new information to pre-existing knowledge structures, such as prior schemas, concepts, and events

Process whereby items are not simply kept in mind but are processed either more deeply or elaborately

A process of rehearsal whereby items are “kept in mind” but not processed more deeply

Learning when the learner knows that there will be a test of retention

• 4 groups given pack of cards with words on each

  • One group just told to remember words

  • A second told to sort cards into categories

  • A third told to sort into categories and remember them for a test

  • A fourth told to put words into columns

• Group told to organize into categories without being told of later

  memory test did as well as group instructed to learn. They also did as

  well as group instructed to categorize and learn

• Desire to remember doesn’t matter; the way material is processed is

  key

• Link material to what you already know, think deeply about its

  meaning and consider its broader implications

A technique using vivid mental images to enhance memory recall

It helps associate information with memorable visuals to improve retention and retrieval

Gave subjects words to study either in logically structured hierarchy or in scrambled order

Subjects presented with info in hierarchical condition recalled 65% of the material, while those in scrambled condition recalled 19%

Further evidence of benefit of organization

Had people repeatedly learn lists of unrelated words, whose order was randomly arranged on every trial.

Gradually, subjects started to chunk the words and would recall in same order every time.

Tulving termed this “subjective organization”, the structuring of unstructured material

Binding the words into chunks is one method of doing this

Learning situation in which the learner is unaware that a test will occur

Proposal that retention is best when the mode of encoding and mode of retrieval are the same

When given sentence frame at test, recall better for the word linked to the more complex, semantically rich sentence.

According to Craik and Tulving (1975), because it results in a richer code

Passages in which every 5th word has been deleted.

• The more redundancy in ____ passage the easier it ______ be recalled.

The proposal by Craik and Lockhart that the more deeply an event is processed, the better later episodic memory will be

Found that lists that contained woods with strong interword combinations were easier to recall

High imageable words are easy to learn because they can be encoded both visually and verbally

Allen Paivo developed that words that are more imageable can be coded both verbally and visually, thus aiding recal

__ by the 60s

“Gerald Martin strove to undermine the existing government to satisfy his political ambitions... He became a ruthless, uncontrollable dictator. The ultimate effect of his rule was the downfall of his country”

“Adolf Hitler strove to undermine the existing government to satisfy his political ambitions... He became a ruthless, uncontrollable dictator. The ultimate effect of his rule was the downfall of his country”

Subjects more likely to misremember seeing the passage “he hated the jews particularly and persecuted them” in the second case.

This only happened at the 1 week interval, but not 5 minutes afterwards.

A structured representation of knowledge used to make sense of new information

Made subjects read “The War of the Ghost”

Bartlett found what he called effort after meaning.

People sought to more concisely make sense of the story

The focus was more on gist

Focused on social cultural influences: Since his subjects were Europeans, they tended not to mention supernatural elements, which didn’t fit their schema. Less mentions of ghosts upon subsequent retellings of the story

Meaning plays a prominent role in how we encode such experiences and how we learn overall

• Asked students in a psychology course about their memory for material

• After several months, this information became independent of the recollection-became semantic

Memories located at a specific point in time and place

Endel Tulving calls “mental time travel”

The idea that memories grow to be more firmly represented in the brain over time

A process whereby the memory becomes more firmly established. It is commonly now divided into two processes: synaptic consolidation, a process that is assumed to involve the hippocampus and operate over a 24-hour timescale, and systems consolidation. This is assumed to operate over a much longer period, and to involve the transfer of information from the hippocampus to other parts of the neocortex

occur when two or more nerve cells are excited at the same time

“neurons that fire together wire together”

A concept proposed by Hebb to account for the physiological basis of long-term learning, which is assumed to involve the establishment of links between the cells forming the assembly.

When a skill is practiced to the extent that it no longer requires significant attentional monitoring to be performed and is less effortful

Gradually learning a tendency to perform certain actions, given a particular stimulus or context, based on a history of reward

Instrumental conditioning is a form

A practiced induced change on a task that allows a person to perform it better faster and or accurately than before

Both cognitive and motor skills

A technique whereby memory for a word is tested by deleting alternate letters and asking participants to produce the word

A task whereby retention of a word is tested by presenting the first few letters

Those type of cognitive or motor skills that don’t require conscious involvement to perform

E.g: Mirror Drawing

Learning a language by placing oneself in an environment in which only that language is spoken

Obviously, this is the way we learn our first language,

It’s not clear that it’s the best way to learn a second one.

People appear to be able to learn the grammars of their native language without formal instruction of the rules.

Researchers have developed artificial grammars to examine how intricate grammatical rules may be learned.

Subjects able to learn which sequences were legal and which were illegal (not perfectly, but above chance performance)

Were not able to explicitly state the rules.

Is procedural learning more resistant to impairments of performance under stress?

Task: to knock a golf ball in a hole.

Half of the participants performed this task while concurrently forming an attentionally demanding task (random letter generation).

Explicit knowledge of the task might interfere with performance under stress

Masters speculates that inward focus on the explicit rules under stress can lead to an overriding of automatic motor skills, thus leading to poorer overall performance

Reduced activity in a brain area responsible for processing a stimulus when that stimulus is repeated, compared to when it is encountered for the first time

reflects the fact that the brain is more efficient at processing things it has already encountered. These effects are ubiquitously observed in every type of sensory cortex and are widely taken to reflect the formation of perceptual memory traces

When presenting a stimulus enhances its subsequent perception or processing without your awareness

Enhanced processing of a stimulus arising from recent encounters with that stimulus, a form of implicit memory

Multiple prior presentations of NS before association with US will interfere with conditioning

So presenting NS alone either before or after will tend to reduce the association

Classical conditioning phenomenon whereby multiple prior presentations of a neutral stimulus will interfere with its involvement in subsequent conditioning

Repeatedly presenting CS in isolation (without US)

CS will eventually not produce the CR

NS – neutral stimulus,

CS – conditioned stimulus

CR – conditioned response

US – unconditioned stimulus

UR – unconditioned response

Study: 25 Ads were shown to 2 groups of subjects (one told to remember, the others not)

Recognition test (with 25 new ads) and Evaluation

Difference in recognition performance between groups

Results: But ads previously seen liked more no matter group

Repeatedly presenting pleasant slides (e.g. of the sun shining) after slide of a neutral product (Brand L Toothpaste) lead to changes in how much subjects say they were likely to to buy the products.

Conditioned attitude to a novel brand of toothpaste as a function of the number of conditioning trials.

Participants rated the likelihood that they would choose the positively conditioned brand over the randomly associated control brand. C, conditioning; RC, random control.

Experimenters also repeatedly exposed presentations of toothpaste in isolation before conditioning lead to latent inhibition

The tendency to one’s liking of a stimulus to be influenced by how frequently it is followed by pleasant or unpleasant stimuli unrelated to it, with positive stimuli enhancing liking, and negative stimulus decreasing liking

Brain structure in the medial temporal lobe that is important for long-term memory formation

3 different patients

1. Bilateral damage to amygdala

2. Bilateral damage to hippocampus

3. Bilateral damage to both regions

• Also control participants

• Conditioned different color slides to averse stimulus (horn)

An area of the brain close to the hippocampus that is involved in emotional processing

Important for fear conditioning

The observation that during sleep material learned prior to sleep is often reactivated or “replayed” in the hippocampus, which is thought to facilitate the consolidation of that content into long-term memory

The finding that sleep improves memory for content learned before sleep in a selective way, favoring salient material (due to emotion or perceived importance) and facilitating the forgetting of less important material

development and growth of synaptic connections

Long-term potentiation (LTP)

repeated electrical stimulation of axonal pathway led to increase in size of response in post-synaptic neuron, termed long-term potentiation (LTP)

• LTP prominent in hippocampus

• The NMDA receptor plays a role in LTP

Place rats in tank filled with milky water.

Must find platform. Over a number of trials, normal rats find platform easily.

What about those with hippocampal lesions?

• Hippocampus place role in memory formation, particularly spatial

• Did not remember where platform was

AP5 blocks induction of LTP in hippocampus. How?

• It’s an NMDA antagonist

What happens when rats are given AP5 during their orientation to the Morris water maze?

• Perform similarly to rats with hippocampal lesion.

When newly acquired information interferes with the ability to recall previously learned information. It occurs when past memories are disrupted by new memories.

Rats oriented to a novel maze had place cells monitored.

Same place cells activated during deep sleep.

Appears that patterns of brain cell activation that occurs during learning recapitulated during sleep.

Sleep on learning

Time to recognize spoken words depends on its near neighbors, e.g. catalyst and catalogue

Learning the novel word cathedruke, doesn’t slow down the recognition of cathedral on the first day.

But 24 hours later, after sleep, it does. The word was “lexicalized” overnight.

Trained people on two different sequential finger tasks.

One group told, before 12 hours of sleep, that one of the tasks would be monetarily rewarded.

Then before task in next session, told that average performance on both tasks would be rewarded.

This group performed better only on the task that they were informed would be awarded before sleep. Second group didn’t show performance advantage for one over the other

Process by which a memory was hardened or made more robust over time for an association just learned

The time-dependent process by which a new trace is gradually woven into the fabric of memory and by which its components and their interconnections are cemented together

Proposed by two German psychologists, Müller and Pilzecker (1900)

The failure to detect that a visual object has moved, changed, or been replaced by another object

Used “saturation advertising” to get the message out that the BBC radio frequency would change

Repeated radio announcements had were fairly effective for simple information, like the date of the change, but not for more complex info, like the actual radio frequency.

Recall test

• 5 dollar for each blue word you remember

• 10 cents for each green word you remember.

• You will most likely remember more of the blue words but at a lost of green words.

Motivation likely is important

Effects are indirect, however

Motivation to learn

3 groups of subjects, one told of reward for correct recall after studying items, one told of reward before study, and another group not offered any award at all

All three groups performed similarly.

The tendency for offering rewards for successful memory to improve long-term retention of studied material

examined learning of Swahili-English word pairs

• 4 groups

1. Repeatedly presented and tested the pairs

2. Learned pairs continued to be tested, but not presented

3. Ceased testing learned pairs, but continued presenting them

4. Dropped learned pairs entirely

Though rate or learning initially the same, retention of items was markedly different.

Testing very important.

Repeated presentation not enough (don’t just read a textbook over and over again). Try to generate info yourself.

Combines the benefits of distributed/spaced practice and the generation effect.

Items tested (generated by subject) after short delay, but the delay gradually increases with correct responses before they are tested again.

The tendency for a period of study to promote much greater learning when that study follows a retrieval test of the studied material

improvement in later memory for material that is tested

The finding the long-term memory is enhanced when much of the learning period is devoted to retrieving the to-be-remembered information

Knowledge about one’s own memory and an ability to regulate its functioning

Postmen learned to type (massed vs distributed practice)

4 separate groups

• 1 session of 1 hour a day (1x1)

• 2 sessions of 1 hour a day (2x1)

• 1 session of 2 hours a day (1x2)

• 2 sessions of 2 hours a day (2x2)

1x1 group learned more efficiently.

• Learned faster than 2x2 group with less hours spent practicing overall.

• Retained information better than 2x2 group after being tested several months later.

• Interestingly, not as contented as 2x2 group. Felt they were learning more slowly.

Spreading out learning episodes over a period of time, better than cramming in one long episode.

When it comes to learning, “little and often” is a good principle.

Improved learning that arises from separating repeated study attempts compared to massing repetitions is known as the spacing effect

Breaking practice up into a number of shorter sessions: in contrast to massed practice, which comprises fewer, long, learning sessions

The ability of the brain to undergo structural changes in response to altered environmental demands.

The engagement (with full concentration) in a training activity that is designed to improve a particular aspect of performance, including immediate feedback, opportunities for graduate refinement over repetitions, and problem solving

Wei, Zhang, Jiang & Luo (2011) observed increases in cortical thickness the more divers practiced.

Hu et al. (2011) observed increase myelination, the development of white matter, in children as the developed skills in music and mathematical calculation

The proposal that amount learned is a simple function of the amount of time spent on the learning task

Discovered by Ebbinghaus

Pronounceable but meaningless consonant-vowel-consonant items designed to study learning without the complicating factor of meaning

The type of practice matters. Simple repetitive practice does not appear to suffice.

• Simple repetitive practice probably not the whole story to becoming

  an expert.

• Other ways to get more bang for your buck in terms of learning.

These studies are correlational

• More practice associated with greater skill, but what’s really driving this relationship?

• Writing skill increases with number of writing courses (Johnstone, Ashbaugh, & Warfield, 2002)

• Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Romer (1993) report:

  • Very best violinists = 10,000 hours

  • Lesser Experts = 7500 hours

  • Least accomplished experts = 5000 hours

  • Committed Amateur = 1500 hours

  • Uncommitted, talentless psychology grad student = 0 hours

Learned nonwords.

Used nonwords so as to reduce the influence of prior knowledge.

Varied number of repetitions of a list of nonwords on first day. Observed how many trials took to relearn in 24 hours.

Amount of information learned depends on the total amount of time spent learning.

So if you double your learning time, you double the information learned.

Converging evidence suggest location in frontal lobes

Anterior cingulate in particular associated with effortful attention

Hubel and Weisel, pioneers of the single cell recording.

Funashashi, Bruce, and Goldman-Rakic (1989) detected cells in frontal lobes active during retention interval.

If held, usually correct eye movement made. Goldman

Metanalysis on WM training

Short term gains

Modest sustained improvement in visual STM, but none in verbal

No evidence for generalization to nonlab tasks

WM training in the form of a computer game

Improvements were seen on several WM tasks.

Generalization observed to other tests such as Raven’s Progressive Matrices

Cowan’s embedded process model

Engel’s inhibitory control

Time based resource sharing model

Additional component added to Baddeley’s original model as recently as 2000

Thought to integrate different elements of perception in STM and information from LTM. (multidimensional code)

Helps to account for influence of LTM on working memory operations, e.g. expanded memory span

Importance of SAS – in its absence we rely on habit – e.g. utilization behavior

Also important for monitoring inappropriate behavior

When central executive is disrupted this can impair performance on tasks requiring sustained attention

Chess study: when central executive was disrupted (concurrent random number generation) the ability to remember chess positions and to choose the best move were impaired

Two components

• automatic system

• Supervisory attentional system (SAS)

Brain region involved – frontal lobes

Concurrent spatial tapping disrupts sketchpad

Interference of imagery