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

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