PSY 324- Final Exam

Struggling (and Even Failing) to Remember Can _______ Memory

Improve

testing effect

•  the act of taking a test can serve as a powerful enhancer of later memory for the information tested.

• The “testing effect” may be an example of the desirable difficulties phenomenon, in which struggling to recall information can actually promote retention of that information later.

  • Slight challenge leads to better retention overall.

A ______ test—one that forces you to struggle to retrieve the information—may be most helpful of all

• difficult

• Challenge could be remembering a certain quantity of information.

• Using working memory to put things together.

Passive forgetting

•  occurs as a function of time: older information is more likely to be forgotten than more recently acquired information.

• As time goes on, you forget things.

• Forgetting allows you to remember the most relevant things

Directed forgetting

•   occurs when we intentionally try to suppress memory.

  • Involves a lot of cognitive processes

  • You are consciously suppressing memories

  • Ex. You have been walking around with gum on you butt, so you might power through and not talk about that situation again. You aren’t paying attention to it, so you forget it.

Source monitoring errors

• when we remember information but are mistaken about the specific episode that is the source of that memory.

  • Didn’t attend to information enough, so you aren’t completely sure where that memory came from. You forget the context, but remember some of the information.

  • Ex. A student studies from a textbook, and then writes it verbatim on the paper because they forgot they remembered it verbatim.

False memory

•   memory for events that never actually happened

  • More likely to occur when they can’t remember the details around them

• In laboratory research, false memories are particularly likely to occur when people are prompted to imagine missing details; later, they may mistakenly remember those details as the truth.

• One study reviewed 62 cases in which people were convicted of crimes and later exonerated based on DNA evidence. In more than 80% of these cases, the crucial evidence leading to conviction was eyewitness testimony in which witnesses had mistakenly identified people later proven to be innocent .

The Medial Temporal Lobes and Memory Storage

•   The medial temporal lobes in humans contain the hippocampus, the amygdala, and nearby cortical areas, including the entorhinal cortex, the perirhinal cortex, and the parahippocampal cortex

  • Analogy:

    • At the beginning of the day, you have a whole tray full of pastries, and near the end of the day, you would have spots of baked goods.

      •   The pastries were then consolidated together.

    • You have a lot of memories (face, scents, location) and the little memories need to be consolidated together into one memory.

anterograde amnesia and patient H.M.

•   The most profound and noticeable memory impairment in patients such as H.M. is anterograde amnesia, a severe impairment in the ability to form new declarative memories

  • When we remove the hippocampus, we remove the ability to make new declarative memories.

  • Without the consolidation of memory, you may remember specific aspects of a memory, but they all exist on their own.

  •   Struggle to remember and reproduce a complicated shape.

Retrograde Amnesia

• In the late 1800s, Theodore Ribot noticed that individuals with head injury often developed retrograde amnesia, form of memory loss that causes an inability to remember events from the past.

  • Can include the hippocampus and other parts of the brain.

• Patients with bilateral medial temporal lobe damage generally show some retrograde amnesia along with their anterograde amnesia.

Standard consolidation theory

• the hippocampus and related medial temporal lobe structures are required for the initial storage and retrieval of an episodic memory.

• Their contribution diminishes over time until the cortex is capable of retrieving the memory without hippocampal help

  • The hippocampus is the one that can tell that many different parts of a memory (odor, friends, taste, sounds) go together and help encode the original memory.

  • Hippocampus consolidates and encodes memory.

• Different brain regions become connected to each other, so the hippocampus isn’t needed. Memories are in different areas of the brain.

  • This circuit is the engram.

Emotion

•  a cluster of three distinct but interrelated sets of phenomena:

  • physiological responses

  • overt behaviors

    • things that you can show

    •   demonstrating internal state externally

  • and conscious feelings—produced in response to an affecting situation

Paul Ekman and emotion

• suggested that a small set of distinct emotions are hardwired in humans from birth.

  • Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise (universal expressions/ emotions)

  • He was looking at different facial expressions, and saw the same facial expressions were understood crossed culturally.

  • Emotions can intersect each other.

• Not all humans manifest (or interpret) emotional displays the same way.

• Cultural rules about emotion display are different, but physiological responses and conscious feelings associated with human emotions seem to be innate and universal.

  Learned Helplessness experiment

• Animal emotions are studied in fear and happiness because these are more overt.

• Some dogs learned that there is a warning buzzer that predicts the buzz, and they would cross over the ledge to escape the shock.

• In another group, they put up a wall, so the dog couldn’t escape. When the wall is removed, they don’t go to the other side.

• When control is removed motivation is removed.

Learned helplessness

•   a phenomenon in which exposure to an uncontrollable punisher teaches an expectation that responses are ineffectual, which in turn reduces the motivation to attempt new avoidance responses

•   Understanding this phenomenon may provide clues for how to treat or protect against depression

  • A person may feel helpless because of the experiences that they are having.

  • It is a psychiatric condition that is highly impacted by emotion.

  Emotion and Encoding of Memories

•   Brain is good at remembering bad things to keep you alive in the future.

• Researchers can study the effects of emotional content on the strength and specificity of memories.

• Ex. in the emotional story where the middle was a sad, then they remember the middle more than they remember the beginning and end of the story.

• We are better at remembering the negative things in life rather than the positive things.

Mood congruency of memory

•   the principle that it is easiest to retrieve memories that match our current mood or emotional state

• If you are in a good mood, you remember more good memories.

• In a neutral condition, you remember a little more sad memories

• Negative conditions means you remember more sad memories.

Brain Substates – James Papez (emotion and memory)

• The Amygdala is very close to the hippocampus, so it helps give weight to the memory, so if you pull of the emotional weight, you pull up the entire memory

• Hypothalamus- deals with bodily systems. Close to the Amygdala, which is why we get hangery.

• Thalamus- a lot of sensory information enters the brain here, and the amygdala interoperates if that is good or bad.

• Frontal cortex-

Social learning theory

• a theory of human behavior, prominent from the 1940s through the 1960s, proposing that the kinds of reinforcements an individual has experienced in past social contexts will determine how that individual will act in any given situation.

  • Humans bounce off each other.

  • We use each other as reinforcements.

    • A natural set of operational conditioning intertwined in it.

  • Ex. Teens are highly influences by their social environment.

  • This theory gained prominence because they happened during war times.

    • Tying to figure out how these violent actions came to be.

Bandura’s idea with social learning

• According to Bandura, observers can gain information about whether a particular action will be rewarded or punished by witnessing the outcomes of a model’s actions.

• How do people decide if an action would be reward or punished in a social setting

  •   Bobo doll experiment.

  •   If the adult was rewarded for hurting the doll, the child went on to hurt the doll also

• You are using you amygdala to create these memories

Four steps in social learning theory

• Attention: Attention is required during the observation

  • We need the person to pay attention to the thing first

• Retention: What was previously observed needs to be stored as memory and integrated into what’s already known.

  • This is where the emotion comes to play

• Reproduction: If what was observed is stored to memory, reproduction of the behavior is evidence that learning occurred.

  • The person needs to be able to reproduce what they learned

• Motivation: There needs to be motivation to observe – whether that be due to interest, consequences, reinforcement or some type of internal reward.

  • If you aren’t motivated, then you won’t do the behavior.

Associative Learning (Classical and Operant Conditioning) might be related to how we learn and acquire social information

•   Conscious and unconscious associations with the environment/ Making links

  •   Attention & Retention: picking up on patterns & associations and remembering them.

    •    Pick up on how a social cue leads to a certain result.

  • Reproducing and Motivation: we might consider learning to have occurred if it’s reproduced.

    •   If you really like to social interactions, then you will be more motivated to do it.

  • Motivation and reward can help these behaviors become observable

    •   Links back to behaviorism

Observational Conceptual learning in infants- Language learning

• We learn sounds and moth movements first.

  • Study looked at babies that were just learning how to make words

    •    Babies are good at trying to make sense of the world.

    •   We pair these babies with a competent adult (a parent. The kid has a lot of experience with the kid. Males real associations) and an incompetent adult (adult is a new person and will also make fake associations)

    •   Competent adult would say “That’s a bird. A bird. Look at the bird”

    •   Incompetent adult would call the bird an apple.

  • The baby was presented with a new object and it was call by its right name by both adult

  • In competent groups, kids pick up more familiar words and more novel words.

  • The incompetent adult group, kids did worse in recognizing familiar and new words.

  • All infants could pick the correct “familiar” object

  • Those that had been trained by an “incompetent” adult were less likely to learn new object names and imitated them less

Language Development Requires Socialization

•   Language “happens” at the same rate for most healthy humans across cultures and requires no formal instruction.

• Its not just listing and producing words, you also pick up meaning

• Reflexive communication- if you tickle the bottom of their feet, they will pull in their toes

Language development: Children vs Adults.

•   Children

  • Better at learning things related to pronunciation/ grammar

    • This is what their brain is gathering

  • Around 11, new words are created or they apply new meaning to a word.

• Adults

  • Better at vocabulary

  • Adults stop acquiring pronunciation skills

  • When adults learn a new language, we start learning the vocabulary.

• Babies

  • Babbling is a stage where you are practicing saying words.

    • At one year, they can produce one-word.

Language & Social Learning- Foreign language

•   Babies are born with enhanced interest in language compared to other sounds.

• Experiment exposes baby to Japanese if the mother speaks English. Vice versa for Japanese mothers.

  •   Fetal heart rate increases when exposed to a new language

    • Heart rate drops after you habituate.

  •   (lower measures mean higher HR in this graph)

  • Exposure to a familiar Japanese word did not increase the heart rate a lot, but a new Japanese phrase made heart rate spike more.

Linking Social Behavior to Language Learning- Deaf school

• First Nicaraguan school for the deaf led to a new sign language through play!

  • In rural areas of developing countries may not be able to provide a way to teach deaf people sign language.

  • The kids in the school for the deaf didn’t learn sign language in a class, so they developed their own type of sign language.

• Some linguistic input IS required…. But even with very little input, we find a way to communicate through Social input & Associative Learning.

Experience-Expectant Learning

•   Experience-expectant brain plasticity refers to changes in the organization of the brain that are ubiquitous to individuals within a species, such as light and sound.

• These kinds of experiences are likely to be had by members of a species within certain windows of development.

• There are areas in the brain that are plastic, but they need sensory input to develop correctly.

  • Areas of the brain expect sensory input

• Species specific

• Ex.

  • Parents engage with kids in a way that makes them feel cared for. Social interaction allows for dendritic growth. Dendritic growth in social areas of the brain

  •   Kids experienced severe neglect. They did not often have the dendritic growth for social development.

Impact of social isolation

• “Genie spent almost her entire childhood locked in a bedroom, isolated, and abused for over a decade. Her case was one of the first to put the critical period theory to the test. Could a child reared in utter deprivation and isolation develop language? Could a nurturing environment make up for a horrifying past?” – Very Well Mind

• She was exposed to sound, but because of the small amount of social interaction, language couldn’t development

• Her neural development (dendritic growth) and physical growth was stunted (looked like she was 7 years old when she was 13.

Play Based Learning

•   Experience dependent

• Child Directed Learning (versus teacher directed learning) that is voluntary, internally motivated, and rewarding.

• Through Play, Children Develop:

  • Social and emotional competencies

  • Problem Solving Skills

  • Supporting others

  • Self Regulation

    •   If they loose a game, how would they react.

  • Associations

• “Farran points out that families of means tend to choose play-based preschool programs with art, movement, music and nature. Children are asked open-ended questions, and they are listened to.”

• Kids who went to a preschool that highlighted play and play dependent learning.

  • This kind of preschool is not available to everyone.

Learning through development- responses before birth

• Habituation. Fetuses can habituate to sound before birth.

• As habituation occurs, you have a decrease in your response.

  • In order for this to happen.

  • You need LTD to occur

  • The baby must have the hippocampus.

• Happens at about 25 weeks

The creation of the Brain

• Notochord- Required to form dual hemispheres

  • The slit in the middle of the image.

•   Neural Tube– a hollow structure from which the brain and spinal cord form

  • Happens at about four weeks

  • Folded inside of itself

  • The spinal chord is in the middle and the brain is on top.

• Spina bifida- this occurs when this does not develop properly, and the spinal chord is not closed

  • This happens at week 6

How neurons are formed in the brain- Neurogenesis

•   Neurogenesis : the process by which new neurons are formed in the brain.

  • You are left with these neurons for the rest of your life

  • For the most part, you are born with all of the neurons you have.

  • 10th to the 20th gestational weeks of pregnancy

    • Development of neurons.

  • They originate from a layer of cells in the ventricles of the neural tube.

    • Inside the neural tube is hollow.

    • The lining of the neural tube is a ventricle. From that area, neurogenesis begins

How neurons are formed in the brain- Embryonic stem cells.

• Embryonic stem cells:

  • Cells come from embryos that are three to five days old. At this stage, an embryo has about 150 cells.

    • This is before the brain takes place.

  • These are pluripotent stem cells, meaning they can divide into more stem cells or can become any type of cell in the body.

    • They are dividing, trying to create the foundation for all the cells that create the human body.

  • Those that make to the neural tube are neural stem cells

  • “make it to” means that the cells are splitting and shifting and begin to develop into that piece.

Steps of Neurogenesis:

1. Starting with the Stem Cell

2. The stem cell elongates

   1.    After it elongates it breaks into two

      1. Ending with two daughter cells is called differentiation.

3. . It then differentiates into either a new stem cell or a nerve cell.

   1. Daughter cell and a neuron

4. After this it migrates to another part of the brain

   1.   Migrating neurons.

   2. These shift a little bit to make connections with other neurons, so it can fill in the global structure of the brain

OR

5. The process starts over!

   Proliferation and migration happen at almost the same time.

  About 20 cycles of this event result in creating our 86 billion neurons.

  We retain most of these neurons for our whole life and are not generally replaced by other neurons except in some areas such as the hippocampus.

What happens when proliferation does not occur?

•   Finding after the explosion of the two first atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

• Japanese children who had been exposed to intense radiation between the 10th and 20th gestational week were born with small skulls (brain did not develop) and exhibited severe challenges through development.

  • 10-20^th week is when proliferation and migration occurs.

• Children exposed to the radiation before or after the critical period were not affected to the same extent, although they may have suffered from other complications.

  • This means that neural development has a sensitive period.

What is everything that happens in neural migration.

•   Neural genesis

  • Little buds of neurons

• Axons and dendrites grow

  • Some neurons will connect with others

  • Dendrites are reaching out

  • Axon is getting bigger too.

• Synapses refine

  • The synapse binds close to the neurons.

• Inside ventricles of the neural tube keep developing until you have the cerebral hemispheres.

•    Brain region are formed but not connected during migration and proliferation.

• Branching and synaptogenesis

  • Connecting the brain regions together

• Developing of glia cells

  • Protect the brain and clean it up

• You don’t need a central nervous system to habituate so it would occur between 22-28 weeks of gestation.

• Research says that migration continues after you are born.

  • Brains can migrate and forms connections to up to 3 months after

Making new Synapses- Synaptogenesis and 2 phases

• The creation of new synapses, called synaptogenesis, begins in the human brain as early as 5 months after conception

• The vast majority of synapses on cortical neurons occur on new spines.

  • The neuron sprouts extra spines across the dendrite

  • They are being created rapidly, so they can connect to more synapse.

  • Looks like a brussels sprout plant.

• The number of neurons across these panels (from 36 weeks to 6 years) DOES NOT CHANGE

  • First phase- synapse formation- The neurons are growing, migrating, and making new connections. The brain doesn’t know what it needs, so it connects to everything.

  • Second phase- Synaptic pruning- getting rid of the synapse that you don’t need.

Pruning of Synapses

• Pruning: Unneeded spines disappear.

  • Cleaning up, and only keeping what it needs

• Some may be replaced by new spines elsewhere on the dendrite that may prove more useful.

• The big question is not why do some connections die, but rather why do some connections not die?

  • Especially those that have not been used yet.

  • How do the neurons for speech remain when the baby just babbles.

• Babies are born with 15% more neurons than what they will have as adults!

• Early- blooming

  • Making many synapses.

• Later- pruning

  • Makes the brain more specific.

• Improper pruning can lead to sensory disorders, Autism & Schizophrenia

  • This is why psychologists are interested in this neuroscience.

  • If the neurons for processing light is not pruned, then there are multiple ways to stimulate that neuron and many ways to interpret it.

    • Its too easy to excite those neurons, so you will be easily overstimulated by light.

• Schizophrenia appears in late adolescence and early adulthood, which makes it interesting to discuss in development.

  Role Of Experience and Enrichment In Development- rat experiment

• We put rats in a cage with each other and no toys

• Rats are together and have toys.

• The rats in the enriched environment have better levels of engagement and learning.

  • EPSPs grow with learning.

  • In mice with enrichment, they had larger EPSPS. This is BEFORE learning

    • Needs less activity to get to learning.

  Role Of Experience and Enrichment In Development- general

• Includes things about how you interact with others and the environment.

• In Experience-Expectant Learning the brain Expects experiences to occur for the proliferation of synapses during development.

• Blooming always occurs around the same rate but experience can modulate it.

  • In an enriched environment (the ability to communicate and explore) we see a much larger increase in blooming.

  • Similar phenomenon seen in rats

• “Environmental enrichment refers to various forms of stimulation provided to the brain by the surrounding environment.”

• “Brains from animals living in richer, more stimulating environments have higher numbers of synapses, and the dendritic arbors upon which these synapses reside are more complex”.

  Sensitive Periods for Neuronal Wiring and enrichment

• Sensitive periods in learning may reflect sensitive periods in neuronal development, when environmental inputs (e.g., visual stimulation) can easily alter brain organization by changing local cortical connectivity

  • Enrichment has the most power during infancy.

  • The enrichment during the first year of life aids cognitive function later

• The area in red is the sensitive or critical period.

  • Although sensitive periods restrict our later learning, they are actually beneficial to the developing brain.

How long do your have pruning for?

You still have pruning into adolescence

Down syndrome

•   Down syndrome is a congenital disorder that causes mild-to-moderate intellectual disability and shortened life span in babies born with an extra copy of chromosome 21 (called trisomy 21)

  • Higher likelihood of dementia and a shorter life.

  • In a neurotypical patient, dendrites have a lot of spines.

  • In a DS patient, they have spines on the dendrites, but they are smaller and they have fewer spines.

  •   3-6 months, structural changes happen in the brain

  • Decrease amount of synaptogenesis.

  • Different shaped (smaller) synapses.

Brain Abnormalities and Memory Impairments in Down Syndrome

•   At present, researchers do not know exactly which gene or genes cause the intellectual disability in Down syndrome.

  • Higher risks of down syndrome and trouble recalling recent episodic events.

• Brains of individuals with Down syndrome appear neurotypical at birth, but by 6 months of age, the brains are visibly smaller.

  • The hippocampus, frontal cortex (decisions and learning), and cerebellum (decision making and motor control)

  • These underlie the behavioral changes we see in down syndrome.

• Children with Down syndrome tend to be greatly impaired at recalling recent episodic events

Given what you know about the effects of environmental enrichment, how might changes in societal treatment of people with intellectual disabilities also play a role in helping individuals with Down syndrome live happier and more independent lives?

• Reading to DS kids and socializing them is going to benefit the Synapse they already have

• Enriching environments are especially helpful. They will only help them

• They will have a different learning curve, but they still have a learning curve.

• Enrichment for DS may have them still have a lower learning curve of an unenriched Neurotypical kid, but they still do better then DS without enrichment.

  Differences in Mothers’ and Fathers’ Interactions with Their Children

• Mothers spend more time with the kids, even if they work outside of the home.

• Maternal and paternal parenting and warmth are equally important.

The child’s influence on Parenting

Bidirectionality- the idea that parents and their children are mutually affected by one another’s characteristics and behaviors

Child Maltreatment and Polyvictemization

•   Action of failure to act on the part of a parent of caretaker that results in physical or emotional harm to a child or a risk of serious harm

• Polyvictemization- the co-occurrence of multiple forms of maltreatment

Risk for maltreatment

  Ignorance about needs, stress, low SES. Substance abuse, abusive partner, being maltreated as a kid (though the majority don’t end up being abusive)

Conditioning and Skill Learning in Young Children and Complex motor skills

• An explosion in learning marks the first few years of life in humans

  • Conditioning is one of the first types of learning we can see and measure.

• Acquisition of complex motor skills comes gradually, as physical development produces improvements in muscle strength and perceptual–motor coordination.

  • Motor movement is a type of skill.

  • Motor skills come around 1 to 2 years of age.

  • Between 1 and 2 years of age, children begin to master the rudiments of language, and complex grammar and reading are usually evident by 4 to 5 years.

    • 4 to 5, when school starts for kids.

Classical conditioning in infants

• Infants cant have complex motor movements and cant speak.

• Stroking forehead and giving sugar water.

• Sugar water- USC

• Pucker suck response to sugar- UCR

• Stroking head- CS

• Pucker to stroking head- CR

• Pair a stroke on the head with sucrose to elicit pucker-suck response

• Infants (2-48hrs) show pucker-suck responses to the stroke on the head as much as to the sucrose itself

  • Showing that they were classically conditioned.

elicited imitation

• One technique for assessing memories in preverbal infants is elicited imitation, in which infants are shown an action and tested for their ability to mimic this action later.

  • Infants are tested on their ability to perform and action and mimic the same actions at a later date.

• During the first few months of age, children begin to imitate the speech sounds they hear around them; and by about 1 to 2 years of age, babies learn and use individual words, usually acquiring a vocabulary of several hundred words

  • This can be through babbling.

Exuberant learning and ages

• Exuberant learning- very young infants who cant verbalize words are asked to mimic or show us actions. We can see this when they are forming associations very quickly. They can be shown one scenario before they can mimic it.

  • They show different actions between the puppets.

  • Want to see if baby will imitate (bobo experiments)

• A period of time when young infants form associations rapidly

• 6-9 months imitated actions on puppet B up to 2 weeks later

  • Adult performs an action, and baby performs that same action.

  • They can imitate these actions after 2 weeks

• 12 months were not able to do so even after 1 day

  • Imitation of a behavior reduces a lot.

• The ability returns at 18 mo.

  • Like how they were at 6-9 months.

• This is representative of the neural changes of synaptogenesis and reorganization that is occurring over the first 18 months.

  Episodic memory matures more slowly than semantic memory

• Episodic memories are closer to the center of the brain and one of the last regions to develop and mature.

• The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, which are critical for encoding and recall of episodic memories, are immature in humans at birth and continue to develop throughout childhood

  • They are one of the last regions to develop, so episodic memory also develops later.

• Very young children do not show evidence of a “cognitive self”

  • They cant recognize themselves until 16 months.

• Infants younger than 16 months do not show mirror-recognition behavior, but children older than 24 months do.

Episodic-Like Memory in Children

• Very young children can display memory for what happened where and when, even if they cannot yet verbalize those memories well

  • Children who are 4 are a lot better able to verbalize and are more chatty. 3 year olds have not acquired those skills.

  • Hide stuffed animals and verbally report the what, where, when

    • 4 year olds did much better.

  • Hide stuffed animals and show me what, where, when.

    • the child does not need to rely on a verbal response, the bars look very similar when talking about where.

    • “When” is still low for 3 because episodic memory is a bit more difficult for them.

Sensitive Periods for Early Learning

•   Sensitive period: a time window, usually early in life, during which a certain kind of learning occurs most easily and is most effective

• One big example of this is language!

Puberty Vs Adolescence

• Puberty, the process of physical change during which the body transitions to sexual maturity, occurs at different ages in different species

  • In the United States, girls begin puberty around age 10; boys at age 12

• Adolescence is defined as the transitional stage between the onset of puberty and entry into adulthood; usually ages 13–19

• Puberty is a strictly physical process, while adolescence is a period of psychological and social change

  • They occur at the same time.

Profound Changes in Prefrontal Cortex in Adolescence

•   The sensorimotor cortex forms first, then the parietal and temporal association cortex, and the prefrontal cortex comes last.

  • Prefrontal is dependent on experience (not expectant)

• Some of the most profound and obvious changes in adolescence occur in the prefrontal cortex, which does not fully mature until after the teenage years – helps regulate emotions, make decisions, behavioral flexibility.

  • Large numbers of synapses are pruned until the number of synapses plateaus at the adult level

  •   Myelination of neurons in the human cortex starts after birth and continues throughout the first 18 years of life.

  • Dramatic increase in the neurotransmitter dopamine

    •    Dopamine helps with planning, liking and wanting.

    •    Increase as regions further mature.

Maturation of Working Memory in Adolescence

• Some of the most profound changes during adolescence concern learning and memory abilities; specifically working memory and executive function: the higher-level cognitive skills you use to control and coordinate your other cognitive abilities and behaviors

• Working memory is the ability to hold information in your mind for a set period of time.

  • Most adults can hold 7 digits

• Change in working memory and executive function

• Higher level cognitive skills- coordination and control. Use a rule and apply it to something else.

  • As age increase, the number of digits someone can remember increase.

  • Planning and coordination measured in a 2 back tasks.

The Aging Memory: Adulthood Through Old Age

• Seattle Longitudinal Study tested more than 6,000 individuals and found relatively little change in most kinds of cognitive ability—including verbal memory—as participants age from their twenties to their fifties

  • Our cognition stabilizes at 20, and stays there for 30 years

• However, many cognitive abilities start to decline as humans reach their sixties and beyond

• Some forms of memory, such as working memory, start to decline in humans as young as the mid-thirties, others, such as semantic knowledge and verbal ability, tend to remain strong well into old age

  • Decline in working memory is not super apparent until later in life.

Around 25, many cognitive skills are ….

equal

What ability and memory decline the fastest?

  Numerical ability and verbal memory decline the fastest.

Conditioning and Skill Learning in Aging Adults

• In general, learning by conditioning declines with age

  • Skill learning and classical conditioning declines

• Skill learning also declines in old age

• However, even though the learning of new associations and skills is slowed in healthy aging, highly practiced skills tend to be maintained well.

  • Older skills are maintained better than newer skills.

Episodic Memory and Semantic Memory in old age

• Old Memories Fare Better Than New Learning

•   Existing episodic and semantic memories tend to survive very well even into extreme old age

  • Memories that already stabilized.

  • Childhood memories.

• Although well-formed memories may survive, elderly adults are generally less effective at forming new episodic and semantic memories

• The deficit in elderly adults appears to be due to encoding difficulties rather than retrieval difficulties

  • Consolidation theory.

  • If different brain regions are loosing neurons or changing structure, then there may be issues with encoding memories.

    • Especially in areas like the hippocampus

Loss of Synaptic Stability and Consolidation in old age

• Although the total number of hippocampal neurons and synapses does not decline appreciably with aging, there are changes in neuronal function, including a reduced ability to maintain changes in synapse strength

  • Neuronal plasticity (LTP) may become less stable, meaning that new learning may not survive for long

• Reduced and disrupted slow-wave sleep (SWS) may be another factor impairing the ability of the aged hippocampus to encode and consolidate new memories

  • Older adults are not able to have as much SWS as they age.

Adult Neurogenesis: New Neurons for Old Brains?

•   The hippocampus may experience neurogenesis, but this area of study is still very unclear.

• Adult neurogenesis continues throughout the lifespan in birds and rodents

• The extent of adult neurogenesis in humans is currently unclear

Timing and Sequencing of Practice Matters

Researchers observe differences in the outcomes after equal amounts of practice when they compare different kinds of practice

Constant practice

  practice involving a constrained set of materials and skills. Ex. Practice riding your bike outside at home like always.

variable practice

• higher outcomes

•   practice involving the performance of skills in a wide variety of contexts. Ex. Practice riding your bike in the park on different surfaces.

Motor programs

  Perceptual-motor skills that an organism can perform with minimal attention are called motor programs or, sometimes, habits.

Paul Fitts proposed that skill learning usually progresses through three stages

       Cognitive stage

       Associative stage

       Autonomous stage

cognitive stage

  when an individual must actively think to encode and perform a skill.

Associative stage

  when learners begin to use stereotyped actions in performing a skill and rely less on actively recalled memories of rules.

Autonomous stage

  when a skill or subcomponents of the skill become motor programs.

transfer of training

•   Skill memories are often highly restricted in terms of how they can be used.

    In some cases, skill memories are so specific that the introduction of additional informative cues can disrupt retrieval.

    In other cases, skills seem to transfer to novel situations, a phenomenon called transfer of training.

Skill decay and answering “The persistence of a skill depends…”

•   The persistence of a skill depends on the complexity of the skill:

• How well the skill memory was encoded in the first place

• How often the skill has subsequently been performed

• The conditions in which recall is attempted

• Psychologists call loss of a skill through non-use skill decay

• As time passes, you perform more new skills, creating more memories that potentially interfere with the recollection of earlier skill memories.

In vivo

experiments conducted within a living organism, like an animal or human

in vitro

refers to experiments conducted outside of a living organism