psych 414 exam 2

incidental memory test

a memory test in which the participant in not expressly told that their memory will be tested later

• wanting to remember something doesn’t help your memory—all that matters is whether you process deeply or shallowly

What helps encoding?

Depth of processing, emotion, elaborating on an experience as you are having it, or thinking about its relevance to your survival

what is memory?

associating two previously unlinked pieces of information

pavlov

noticed that dogs in his lab would often begin salivating at the sight of the lab technician who was responsible for feeding them, even when this person was not carrying food

• formal experimentation established that the animals could be taught to associated an arbitrary selected stimulus (e.g., the ticking of a metronome (CS) with the delivery of food (UCS)

• one can speculate that hearing the metronome makes the dog think of being fed

Hebb’s postulate

fundamental for understanding synaptic plasticity in biological systems, as well as being the basis for learning in virtually all computational neural network models

• a situation in which an axon carrying information about the sound of the metronome, one with a synaptic connection with neuron in the salivary system, “was made to excite the salivary neurons and repeatedly or persistently take part in firing them”

• the simultaneity of the two neuron’s activity turns out to be enough to strengthen the synapse

NMDA receptor

• its more is larger than an AMPA receptor and it is occupied by magnesium ions at rest

• binding with glutamate, which untwists its pore, is not sufficient for the NMDA receptor to allow the influx of positively charged ions because the Mg2+ ions remain in place and block the pore

• to activate the NMDA receptor the two following things must happen at once: presynaptically released glutamate binds to its binding site & the postsynaptic terminal has the effect of repelling the positively charged Mg2+ ion, forcing it out of the pore, which then allows for that passage of calcium ion

• ACTS AS A COINCIDENCE DETECTOR

  • 1. release of glutamate by the presynaptic terminal of the synapse that is to be strengthened

  • 2. the prior state of depolarization of the postsynaptic terminal

Hebbian plasticity

• can work in two directions

• LTP or LTD as a result of activities in neurons changing

Cue

information in the environment that is used as a starting point for retrieval

• a strong memory needs few, while a weaker memory needs more to be successfully retrieved; however, differing views on this

free recall test

a test that provides very few cues—the experimenter says little more than “write down as many words as you remember from the list an hour ago” or “tell me what you remember about the event you just experienced”

• “hardest” memory test; harder to successfully retrieve the material you encoded

• must generate the target material from the context information

cued recall test

the experimenter adds some hints, or cues, about the material you are supposed to remember (e.g., “some of the words were fruits”)

• context is provided and hints are added about the material

recognition test

the experimenter provides targets along with distractors, and the participant must pick out the targets from among the distractors

• multiple choice tests are based on recognition

• “easiest” memory test

• provides a cue about the context but now also provides the target material along with some other material that was not presented at encoding—the participant has to determine which stimuli go with the encoding context

context

the information about the time and place at which a memory was encoded

• in free recall, you don’t have complete information about this