Learning and Memory

Working memory is the gateway to long-term memory
Long-term memory systems
1. Nondeclarative
  1. Procedural (knowing how)
    1. Learning a procedure
    2. Includes motor memory
  2. Priming
    1. Improvement in identifying or processing a stimulus as a result of its having been observed previously.
    2. Perceptual priming
      1. Words presented quickly and subjects asked to identify them
      2. Some time later subjects are presented with word stems and asked to complete them
      3. increased probability of choosing previously presented words
  3. Classical conditioning
    1. Conditioned Stimulus can illicit a conditioned response which is very similar to the Unconditioned Response in the absence of the Unconditioned Stimulus
  4. Non-associative learning
    1. does not involve the association of two stimuli to illicit a behavioural response
    2. Habituation
      1. decrease in level of response through repeated exposure to a stimulus
    3. Sensitisation
      1. Increase in level of response through repeated exposure to a stimulus
2. Declarative
  1. Semantic memory
    1. memory for facts
  2. Episodic Memory
    1. Role of the hippocampus
      1. HM
      2. recall predicted by single cells in human hippocampus
    2. In animals?
      1. birds choose the worms when they are fresh but not when they have learnt they will be bad
        remember what food they stored, where they stored and when they stored it.
      2. Rats with hippocampus lesions cannot remember the combination of what, where and which: deficit in episodic-like memory.
    3. Receives and stores information about temporally dated episodes or events and the temporal-spatial relations among these events.
      1. What happened, where it happened, when it happened.
      2. Autonoetic consciousness added later
Cellular Mechanisms for Memory Consolidation (Synaptic Plasticity)
1. Learning must involve changes in synaptic function
2. For long term memory these changes must be long lasting
  1. Long term potentiation (LTP)
Spatial Memory and Navigation
1. Component of episodic memory
2. Map-like cognitive representation of familiar spatial locations.
3. Supported by right hippocampus
  1. Posterior hippocampus larger in taxi drivers (more experience = bigger hippocampus) but not bus drivers
  2. Damage impairs spatial ability in rats
  3. Entorhinal cortex supports both
4. Place cells
  1. O'Keefe
    1. “ …Each place cell receives two different inputs, one conveying information about a large number of environmental stimuli or events, and the other from a navigational system which calculates where an animal is in an environment…”
  2. 67% of place cells on the central stem of the T-maze differentiate between left and right turn trials.
5. Grid cells
6. Allocentric memory

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Learning and Memory

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	Created by natalieclark29 over 10 years ago