Learning and Memory

Eye-witness memories

• Can change based on the questions being asked

• Can plant false memories just by a suggestive question, not by telling people that something happened, but by asking if it happened

  • Using a particular verb can change the image that the person has in their mind

False memories

• Initial interview on memory for real childhood events included a false one experiment

  • At a wedding reception when you were 5 you ran into the table and spilled the punch bowl on the bride’s parents

  • When you were 5 you were at the mall and got separated from your family. A stranger helped you find them again

    • Made none of these actually happen to the person

  • No memory reported then (said no to both above)

  • In later interviews 20-40% of participants reported the two fake memories as real memories

How real are false memories?

• Same physiological responses to recall of alien abductions as with PTSD of war veterans/victims of violent crime

• Same patterns of re-activation in the brain

  • Often hard to tell between a false memory and a real memory

• Absolutely certainty in court testimony

• If you can imagine it, your memory can make it true

But maybe those things really did happen?

How common are false memories?

• Memory is a highly constructive process

  • When we retrieve experiences from memory, we fill in details

  • We then store those filled-in details as part of the memory

  • The next time we retrieve that memory we fill in other details, etc.

  • Some things we fill in happen to be correct, but some are not

• In some sense, all memories are false, some just happen to be true…

Creating your own personal narrative

• Autobiographical memory is shaped by the stories we tell

• 80% of the stories we tell contain inaccuracies

• Our memories are our sense of self

To make memories, you need some key brain areas

• The median temporal lobe (crucial for containing memories and consolidating new memories)

• The MTL

• The hippocampus

• The amygdala

Non-declarative/implicit

People can learn things without memory

But for skills, practice does make perfect

What is Memory?

• A change in the system, brought about by experience, that influences subsequent processing and behavior

• A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely unhappen

Priming: any kind of immediate prior experience that changes the likelihood of an outcome or behavior

ex: increased probability of using phrase recently heard

Conditioning

• think of what Jim did to Dwight with the altoid mint and computer noise

• Operant conditioning: selects and reinforces natural behaviors

Conditioning and Learning

• Conditioning as a mechanism for all learning

  • encourages new connections to strengthen or some old connections to weaken

• System of rewards and punishments that reinforce some behaviors and suppress others

• Is this the foundation for all our behavior?

• What kind of behavior can’t it explain?