Cog Psych - Week 5 - Declarative, Semantic and Episodic Memory

Samantic memory

A form of long term memory Consisting of general knowledge about the world such as concepts, language and so on

.Declarative memory (aka explicit memory)

A form of long term memory involves knowing that something is the case it involves facts - semantic memory and events - episodic memory

Episodic memory

A form of long term memory related to personal experience (or episodes) occurring in a given PLACE at a specific TIME

savings method

A measure of forgetting introduced by Ebbinghaus in which the number of trials for relearning is compared against the number for original learning.

implicit memory

A memory that does not depend on conscious recollection

Parkinson's disease

A progressive disorder involving damage to the basal ganglia; the symptoms include muscle rigidity, limb tremor and mask-like facial expressions

Most used hierarchal level in general adult conversation?

Basic-level

Three approaches to categorisation

Definitional Prototype Exemplar

Definitional approach to categorisation

Determine category membership based on whether an object meets the definition of a category • Does not work well

Category-specific deficits

Disorders caused by brain damage in which semantic memory is disrupted for certain semantic categories

semantic memory relies on what brain areas?

Enotorinal, perirhinal and parahippocampal cortices that underlie the hippocamous

Episodic memory relies on what area of the brain?

Hippocampus

Where is it though memories are consolidated?

Hippocampus

Explicit memory

Memory that involves conscious recollection of information

Concepts

Mental representations of categories of objects or items

Repression

Motivated forgetting of traumatic or other threatening events (especially from childhood)

Hierarchy level normally used on free-naming tasks

People almost exclusively use basic-level names

Retrograde amnesia

Poor recall for memories formed before the onset of amnesia Semantic memory generally more intact than episodic memory

according to Spiers et al. (2001) amnesia patients with damage to the hippocampus or fornix had much fewer problems with what type of memory?

Semantic Episodic memory was impaired in all their cases

Synaesthesia

The tendency for one sense modality to evoke another

Schemas

Well-integrated chunks of knowledge about the world, events, people, or actions stored in long-term memory. • Some schemas are in the form of scripts: • Information about sequences of events. • Can be broken down into clusters

Consolidation

a psychological process involved in establishing long-term memories; this process lasts several hours or more and newly formed memories are fragile

Where are semantic memories stored?

anterior temporal lobes are where semantic memories are stored on a semi-permanent basis. Areas such as perirhinal and entorhinal cortex are probably involved in the formation of semantic memories

What concept hierarchy is used most often

basic-level categories

Recovered memories

childhood traumatic memories forgotten for several years and then remembered in adulthood

proactive interference

disruption of memory by previous learning (often of similar material)

retroactive interference

disruption of memory for previously learned information by other learning or processing occurring during the retention interval

Decay

forgetting due to a gradual loss of the substrate of memory forgetting sometimes occurs because of decay processes occurring within memory traces decay frees our cognitive resources of trivial information

retrograde amnesia

impaired ability of amnesic patients to remember information and events from the time period prior to the onset of amnesia

Semantic dementia

involves damage to the anterior temporal lobes there is a widespread loss of information about the meanings of words and concepts patients with this condition differ widely in symptoms and the pattern of brain damage. However, episodic memory and executive functioning are reasonably intact in the early stages.

Oudiette and Paller, 2013 concluded that?

memory consolidation during sleep instrumental for actively maintaining the storehouse of memories that individuals carry through their lives

Where are long term memories stored?

neocortex including the temporal lobes

Name two types of interference

proactive retroactive

Directed forgetting

reduced long-term memory caused by instructions to forget information that had been presented for learning

which hierarchal level is used to process faces

subordinate

Specialist knowledge tends to lead to which hierarchal level being used?

subordinate (more detailed)

In relation to concept hierarchies Roschet et al. 1976 proposed three levels

superordinate (global) basic-level categories (basic) subordinate (specific)

Hub-and-spoke Model

the anterior temporal lobe serves as a hub that integrates information from other brain areas modality-specific spokes interact with the hub.

encoding specificity principle

the notion that retrieval depends on the overlap between the information available at retrieval and the information within the memory trace; memory is best when the overlap is high

Distinctiveness

this characteristic memory traces that are distinct or different from other memory traces stored in long-term memory

reconsolidation

this is a new consolidation process that occurs when a previously formed memory trace is reactivated; it allows that memory trace to be updated

Exemplar

• Concept represented by multiple examples (rather than prototype). • Examples are actual category members, not abstract averages. >e.g., Markers will be given examples of a HD report, D report, C report, and a P report.

Prototype

• Items in a category resemble one another in a number of ways. • This approach assumes that we store a prototype for a category, and determine category membership based on how similar an item is to the prototype.