Learning and Memory
Definitions
Learning = Acquisition
Memory = store & retrieve
Intermediate: Last for hours to days
Long: information being transferred from short term and stored. Example: Remembering how to ride a bike, specific details of what house you grew up in.
Short: Minutes
Working: currently using, retrieve info from long term memory to working memory. Example: Multiplication facts
Haptic: auditory information
Echoic: auditory information
Iconic: visual information
Retrograde: lost memories prior to the injury, remember things from childhood
Anterograde amnesia: not being able to learn new information after the injury
Habituation = response to stimulus decreases with repeated exposure
Sensitization= response to stimulus increase with repeated exposure, intense and unpleasant stimulus
Know and be able to recognize and/or give examples of different types of information:
Short- and long-term store: minutes, days, years, decades
Explicit/declarative memory: conscious
Implicit/procedural memory: unconscious
Examples:
Semantic: Facts about anything = Paris is the capital of France
Episodic: Fact related to us = When I was in Paris last year, I ate a delicious croissant
What is evidence that HM and Clive Wearing's ability to learn new skills was intact even though they couldn't learn new declarative information:
Learn new procedural skills while struggling to form new memories
Hippocampi removed --- > Could not form new memories
Conscious memory was impacted the most
He was also able to learn new skills
Understand contextual fear conditioning and brain areas involved and why
Contextual fear conditioning:
Shock is delivered without a tone, as a result the environment where the shock was delivered serves as the conditioned stimulus.
Amygdala & Hippocampus
Operant conditioning:
Reinforcement and Punishment
Basil ganglia -- > striatum
Also: mPFC, Amygdala
Mesolimbic reward pathway
(All contribute to goal directed behaviors and stimulus response behaviors)
Hippocampus & odor sequence learning:
Rats with hippocampal damage are unable to remember particular sequence of odors, even with no problem remembering individual odors.
Results: rats with hippocampal lesions are impaired in the sequence memory but not recognition memory
This and similar findings suggest that the hippocampus is critical for the memory for sequences of events, a key component of episodic memory
Know what place cells are, where they are:
Dots indicate positions where action potentials were recorded, with color indicating which neuron emitted that action potential.
Neurons fire when in a specific place
Activation of specific space cells
Black = trajectory of a rat through a square environment.
Red dots = locations at which a particular entorhinal grid cell fired.
Connecting the centers of their firing fields gives a triangular grid
Know Hebb's rule and what it means:
Neurons that fire together, wire together
suggested that memory might rely on simultaneous activity of the presynaptic and postsynaptic neuron
Every time we practice info or retrieve same neurons are firing again, connections between them get stronger = how we build memory and long-term storage
Long-term potentiation - what it is, what it does, characteristics
Definition: Strengthening then of those synaptic connections
Can last weeks
Can be homosynaptic (occur at one synapse)
Can be associative (spread between synapses) --- > Ex. a weaker synapse becomes stronger when it fires at the same time as the stronger synapse
Has an early phase and late phase
Alzheimer's disease - what is it, what brain areas
Most common type of dementia
Gradual loss of
Memory
Planning
Decision making
Core symptom
Deterioration of episodic memory = forget things about their own lives
Then, executive functions= forget to feed or will not drink, can get really sick
Structures that stabilize forces and hold axons together to function
Those structures start to break down and become tangled
Get plaques of amyloid beta, until we see their brain to determine if they had Alzheimer's