Neuroscience Lecture 26: Memory - Context/Reactivation & Forgetting

Recognition memory tests

requires participants to decide whether a test stimulus was previously encountered (in particular context)

Free recall tests

require participants to produce appropriate information form memory without specific test prompt

Critical Neural Substrate in Declarative Memory

Hippocampus/MTL

Critical Neural Substrate in Nondeclarative memory

Basal Ganglia

What cognitive processes are associated with successful encoding/retrieval from episodic memory?

context reinstatement

encoding specificity hypothesis

information will be easier to remember when the context at retrieval is similar to the context at encoding

retrieval involves

reactivation of regions engaged during encoding

contextual reactivation at retrieval is a

subset of regions engaged at encoding

False positive error

false memory

false negative error

forgetting

what is a fundamental mechanism of episodic retrieval

contextual reinstatement

____ doesn't necessarily mean absence of information

forgetting

decay/transience

forgetting with the passage of time

proactive interference

old learning interferes with new

retroactive interference

new learning interferes with old

____ plays relatively modest role in forgetting, compared to the ____

passage of time, amount of intervening events/information

specific information about item/stimulus is (at least partially) located in

modality-specific cortex (e.g. visual information in visual cortex

how is context linked to relevant information about specific items/stimulus

Hippocampus and Medial Temporal Lobe (MTL) structures

the evidence for ___reinforces importance of context

neural reactivation