mnesia: retrograde & anterograde
Retrograde amnesia: forgetting everything before the damage
Anterograde amnesia: not being able to remember types of memories after the damage
Henry Molaison (Patient HM)
Damaged Hippocampus. Cant form new long-term declarative memories. Anterograde amnesia
Hippocampus
Important for declarative long-term memory. Medial temporal lobe.
Declarative memory: memories we can declare to eachother
Somatic
Episodic
Non-declarative memory: memories we cant declare to eachother
Delayed non-matching-to-sample task
A test of object recognition used on monkeys required monkeys to declare what they remembered by identifying which of two objects was not seen previously. Monkeys with damaged hippocampi struggled with this task.
Patient NA
Damage to the dorsomedial thalamus and mammillary bodies. Cant form new long-term declarative memories. Anterograde amnesia.
Korsakoff’s syndrome
A degenerative disease where damage is found in the mamillary bodies and dorsomedial thalamus BUT not the hippocampus. Often people dont realize their memory problems with this.
Patient KC
Could no longer retrieve Episodic memories but still could retrieve Semantic memories of his past damage to parieto occipital lobes, cerebral cortex, and shrinkage of both hippocampi. Unknown what caused this.
Episodic vs semantic memory
Episodic: a personal memory (episode of your life) Medial temporal lobe, neocortex
Semantic: facts you learned (something you would learn in a seminar) Medial temporal lobe, neocortex
Skill learning
The process of learning how to perform a challenging task through practice over and over. Medial temporal lobe not required. Striatum, motor cortex, cerebellum
Basal ganglia
Important for sensorimotor skills, perceptual skills, and cognitive skills.
Priming
When exposure to a stimulus stimulates a subsequent response to the same or similar stimulus in the neocortex
Associative learning
An association is formed between two stimuli or a stimulus and a response
Classical conditioning
Making an initially neutral stimulus predict an event. Amygdala and Cerebellum
Operant/instrumental conditioning
Type of associative learning where an animal connects its behavior to a consequence
Cerebellum
Important for Simple eye blink conditioning and in classical conditioning in general
Place cells
A neuron in the hippocampus that fires when in a specific location
Neuroplasticity
Changes in the structure or function of synapses
Environmental enrichment/impoverishment & dendrites
Good environment has thicker cortex, more dendritic branches (and spines), more neurons, larger cortical synapses
Hebbian synapse
When a presynaptic and postsynaptic neuron are repeatedly activated together the synaptic connection between them would be stronger and more stable