Lecture 20 - Amnesia

Be able to discuss how memory and memory confidence are cognitive events, and why this matters when judging properties of memory.

-confidence in the memory is a cognitive experience/activity

-you can be confident and still be wrong

What is amnesia?

loss of memory or memory abilities

Anterograde

-preserves past memories but prevents new ones,

-forgetting events after the injury

-caused by alcoholism without good diet

-Patient HM

Retrograde

-forgets past, but can form new info

-forgetting events prior to the injury

Know the general scope and duration of retrograde amnesia (for most cases).

-After the first couple of months (5 months), the coma makes the previous 2 years of memories forgotten, leading to fuzzy memories in infancy

-After about 8 months, the coma makes the previous year of memories forgotten, then about 4 years of fuzzy memories and then remember infancy

-After about 16 months, patients still/usually never remember coma, and there is about 2 weeks before the accident that they will never remember, but everything else prior is recovered/remembered.

Understand some of the difficulties in studying retrograde amnesia.

personality, parents, and college memories (hard to verify these memories when they have physical evidence shown to them, they are given memories told by other people) (EX: parents say “you are my kid, I am your mother) (You love swimming, singing, etc.)

-Source Monitoring Problem: hard to determine if real true memory or memory of being told info

-Can’t hit someone on head to give them amnesia, doctor can’t say “don’t tell them anything and let’s see what happens” (unethical)

Ansomia

loss of sense of smell

Odd Aphasia

language deficit.

Declarative (explicit)

-Amnesia affects this more

-Episodic memory (events in personal past, like family breakfast)

-Semantic knowledge (general knowledge, first president of U.S.)

-Names, Parents, Addresses

Nondeclarative (implicit)

-How to walk, talk, solve problems

-Associative learning (classical and operant conditioning)

-Priming

-Procedural (skills/habits), opening door, shooting basketball, tying shoes

-Nonassociative learning, habitualization, sanitization

Be able to describe the difference between declarative (explicit) and nondeclarative (implicit) memory systems in LTM.

Amnesia affects declarative more than nondeclarative

Know the type of amnesia suffered by patient HM. Know the basic limitations of his amnesia

-Had anterograde amnesia (unable to learn anything new) from his epilepsy, had surgery on hippocampus.

-Always thought it was 1953, was shocked by the age of his own face in the mirror, could not understand newspapers, reintroduce himself to the same doctors/nurses.

-Could carry on conversations, but same conversation every day, didn’t recognize anyone unless he knew them before the operation.

understand the studies that show the amnesia patient (and other amnesics like him) could learn some new information

-Could learn some things, like how to get to cafeteria or mirror drawing tasks (implicit memory) (had learned how to do something/go somewhere, but didn’t really know that they knew how to get there)

Be able to discuss the behavior of anterograde amnesiacs on tasks like the memory span experiment or a recall task that produces a serial position curve.

-Normal Short-term memory, impaired long-term memory

-Good recency effect, no primacy (Have no initial knowledge cause they forgot, but after doing it day after day they “unknowingly” have learned how to do the recall task. The patients just think they are a natural at the task cause they always think its there first time doing it

Infantile Amnesia

-Can’t remember before age 4 because infants/toddlers view the world differently than adults.

-Encoding specificity - need to be in similar state at recall as at study, and its impossible (can’t change age)

Repression

Proposed by Freud, this term is a psychological defense mechanism. (childhood is filled with painful events and memory of pain is prevented)

Understand why memory researchers are skeptical of the evidence used by clinicians to support the idea of memory repression.

-Repression is refutable (Holocaust survivors remember their time there in pain/agony/torture)

-Lab evidence would require one to be unable to remember, able to recover through therapy which is accurate

-There is no evidence for dream interpretations, patterns, hypnosis

Be able to describe the CogLab Forgot It All Along experiment

Phase 1 - Given lower case word with upper case word (cup-DESK)

Phase 2 - shown lower case word with upper case word missing middle 2 letters (cup-D__K) (pan-D__K)

Phase 3 - judge memory of what word was paired with what, asked if the word pairs actually were present or not

What were the implications of the Forgot It All Along CogLab?

Possible to forget that you remembered, change of cue would allow you to “recover” a forgotten memory, asks questions about what you remember about remembering

-Parts 1 and 2 are like the encoding specificity experiment, part 3 memory judgement is based on cue type whether it relates to target word or not

-people performed better on cue recalled and memory judgement when the words were of the same context (EX: water-WAVE) as compared to (water-HAIR)