Sem2 Week 8
No description yet. This curated deck is ready for daily study.
Card preview (24)
What are the five key properties of human memory?
Storage and retrieval of information; includes facts, abilities, skills, and experiences; lifelong learning and forgetting; imperfect but robust; comes in different qualities
How does computer memory differ from cognitive memory in terms of access?
Computers use address-based access; the brain uses content-addressable access
How does computer memory differ from cognitive memory in terms of processing?
In computers, memory and processing are separated; in the brain, memory is inseparable from processing (‘the software is the hardware’)
What is the capacity of short-term / working memory?
About 4 items (not Miller’s Magical Number 7±2)
How long is information retained in short-term memory experiments?
Around 900 ms
What is the neural basis of working memory?
Reverberating neural activity, particularly in the prefrontal cortex (PFC)
What did Daneman & Carpenter (1980) show about working memory?
WM capacity is correlated with reading comprehension — it is more than just a temporary store
What are the two main branches of long-term memory?
Declarative (explicit) memory and non-declarative (implicit) memory
What are the two subtypes of declarative memory?
Episodic memory (personal events) and semantic memory (factual world knowledge)
What are the four subtypes of non-declarative (implicit) memory?
Procedural memory, perceptual representation system, classical conditioning, non-associative learning
What is episodic memory?
Memory for specific personal experiences from a particular time and place; involves the medial temporal lobe including the hippocampus; selective and forgetful
What is semantic memory?
Factual knowledge about the world (e.g. world knowledge, object knowledge, language knowledge); involves multiple cortical regions; retained for long times
What is implicit memory?
Memory that does not require active recollection; typically unconscious; includes procedural skills, conditioning, and habituation
Give three examples of implicit/procedural memory
Tying shoelaces, riding a bike, driving a car
Why is it hard to explain how to tie your shoelaces even though you can do it?
Because it is implicit/procedural memory — it is encoded non-declaratively and is difficult to verbalise as explicit knowledge
What is the neural basis of long-term memory (vs. short-term)?
Synaptic changes in the hippocampus and slower cortical changes (vs. reverberating neural activity for STM)
How does information move from STM to LTM?
Through encoding; attention selects information into STM, and rehearsal can lead to encoding into LTM
What happens to episodic memories over time?
They are often consolidated into semantic memories
Who was Patient HM and what happened to him?
Henry Gustav Molaison (1926–2008); underwent bilateral hippocampal removal in 1953 to treat epilepsy
What memory deficit did Patient HM show?
Anterograde amnesia — he could not form new declarative memories of events after the surgery
What memory abilities did Patient HM retain?
He could still learn new procedures (implicit/procedural memory) and retained some short-term memory
What did Patient HM’s case demonstrate about memory?
That declarative and non-declarative memory have different neural mechanisms/sites, and that STM and LTM are dissociable systems
What brain structure is critical for forming new episodic memories?
The hippocampus (part of the medial temporal lobe)
What is the change detection paradigm?
An experimental task where participants view a memory array, then after a retention period, identify whether a test array has changed — used to study STM capacity