Exam 3 Ch 13

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