Cognitive Processes C:
Amnesia- loss of memory in general
Alzheimers- disease (1 kind of dementia)
Korsakoffs Syndrome- Deficiency of vitamin B1, destruction of areas in frontal and
temporal lobe. (usually results from alcoholism), severe and permanent memory
impairment. Results in anterograde amnesia.
Brain Regions:
Skills and Habits: Basal Ganglia
Facts and Events: Hippocampus
Classical Conditioning: Cerebellum
Memories:
Episodic Memory: events (mental time travel—the experience of traveling back in time
to reconnect with events that happened in the past).
Semantic Memory: facts
3 Selves:
Experiencing the self
Remembering self
Anticipating Self
E.P contracted a virus (herpes virus). All of his memories up until a year before the virus were all
intact. After contracting the virus he could not remember new memories dating back 40 years
ago.
How did E.P remember old memories? Memories go through changes as to where they are
stored and how they are stored over time.
How Memory undergoes consolidation (resistant to damage, strong).
1. Short term stage- (Synaptic consolidation) the whole brain is involved in memory ( e.g-
when remembering which restaurant you ate at, you picture it, think of its location..ect)
2. Long term stage- (Systems Consolidation), change in location of storage over time.
G.P has a tiny bit of memory, he had enough memory to realise that he had memory problems,
he was always upset.
Can these people who can’t remember anything learn new things?
Mirror Tracing Task - trace a star with a magic marker but without looking at the picture,
instead there is a mirror and you must trace the mirror image (visual motor skill). The mirror-
tracing activity is a visual and motor test that involves learning a new motor skill. The task
requires you to move a pencil to trace the diagram of a star while looking at your hand only as a
reflection in a mirror.
In this task EP & GP were able to do this task (amnesia- these two patients even improved after
every time). BUT if you look at patients with Huntington and parking sons disease, they cannot
improve their motor skills (damage to basal ganglia).
1
,Tower of Hanoi- must put rings on a stick in order according to size, without taking the disks off
of the rings( you can switch rings on different sticks). e.g- for 3 disks you need 7 moves.
First time HM tries it, it took him 46 moves and from there on his reaction times became shorter.
HM has a skill for learning but when re doing this over the course of many times he did not re
call ever doing it. Even without a conscious memory you can still acquire new skills.
Conditioning:
Eye Blink Conditioning - you hear a tone and then you blink, after a few tries your brain
expects a tone and blinks.
Episodic and Semantic Memory:
Semantic Memory - Things you learn in college (remember that the basal ganglia is involved in
motor functioning without remembering which class it was taught in).
COGNITIVE SPRING LECTURE 2:
Challenges to Memory for Events:
Issues in Eyewitness Testimony:
Attention and Bias Factors During Event: Weapon Focus (encoding)
Misleading Post Events (can influence how we remember current event), (consolidation)
Information + Reconsolidation interference
Constructive Nature of Memory (retrieval)
Solution: Enhanced Cognitive Interview (memory-enhancing strategies to try and get an
accurate description of what happened from the witness)
Retroactive Interference: more recent
learning interferes with memory for
something in the past. Original memory trace
is not
replaced.
2
,Researchers staged a robbery in front of students: An actor pretends to steal something from a
student’s bag and conceals it in his coat.
The student cries: ‘’ he's taken my tape recorder’’
Witnesses were phoned after the event to ask what they saw.
50% of witnesses claimed they saw the tape recorder with detailed descriptions.
Constructive Nature of Memory:
Bartlett ‘’War of The Ghosts’’- repeated reproductive paradigm. Participants were asked to
read a story twice and then reproduce it 15 minutes later and then hours later and days
later..ect.
- Over time the story got shorter, less detailed, less accurate. More convergent with cultural
schemes (e.g- rowboat instead of canoe).
Bartlett then used technique of Repeated Reproduction- The same participants came back a
number of times and tried to recall the story at longer and longer intervals after the initial time
reading it.
Source Monitoring - Participants created memories from 2 sources.
1. Original story
2. what participants knew about stories in their own culture.
As time passed, participants used information from both sources, so their reproductions became
more like what would happen in Edwardian England (culture). This idea that memories can be
influenced by the sources of information involves a phenomenon called source monitoring,
which is at the heart of the constructive approach to memory.
Source monitoring errors- when the statement is attributed to the wrong person.
Schema - Our expectations about a specific situation. knowledge about what characterizes a
particular situation or environment
E.G- You expect to find a sofa, chair.. in the living room
Script - Conception of sequence of actions that occur during a particular experience.
E.G- Going to a restaurant, check up at the doctors office.
To test the influence of scripts, Gordon Bower did an experiment in which participants were
asked to remember short passages. After a delay period, the participants were given the titles of
the stories they had read and were told to write down what they remembered about each story
as accurately as possible. The participants created stories that included much material that
matched the original stories, but they also included material that wasn’t presented in the original
story but is part of the script for the activity described. Participants added information that was
not part of the story.
3
, False fame: ‘’Becoming famous overnight’’- thought process: the name is familiar to me, I've
heard it before so they must be famous, even if you don't know who the person is.
Cryptomnesia: when a person incorporates events from books or movies into their
autobiographical memory, or denies events that happened to them and attributes them to such
external sources.
Gender Stereotypes- we use gender stereotypes to remember who said what.
Age influence- children and the elderly have problems with recognizing familiar content.
Chapter 8 (Goldstien):
Autobiographical Memory- recollecting events that happened in a person’s past (can be done
episodically- images of cake, who came to party, games being played. OR Semantically- where
it was, general knowledge of birthdays, where family was living at the time.
One of the factors that determines the relative
proportions of episodic and semantic
components in AM is how long ago the event to
be remembered occurred. Memories of
recent events that are rich in perceptual details
and emotional content are dominated by
episodic memory, events that happened a while
ago are semantic. (dont remember a lot)
Autobiographical memories are
multidimensional because they consist of spatial,
emotional, and sensory components.
Roberto Cabeza- measured brain activation
difference between AM and laboratory memory.
There were 2 sets of stimulus Photographs- one
set that the participant took and another set that
was taken by someone else
We will call the photos taken by the participant
A-photos, for “autobiographical photographs,”
and the ones taken by someone else L-photos,
for “laboratory photographs.”
The stimulus photographs were created by giving
12 Duke University students digital cameras and
telling them to take pictures of 40 specified
campus locations over a 10-day period.
After taking the photographs, each participant was shown his or her own photos (A-photos) and
photos taken by other participants
4
Amnesia- loss of memory in general
Alzheimers- disease (1 kind of dementia)
Korsakoffs Syndrome- Deficiency of vitamin B1, destruction of areas in frontal and
temporal lobe. (usually results from alcoholism), severe and permanent memory
impairment. Results in anterograde amnesia.
Brain Regions:
Skills and Habits: Basal Ganglia
Facts and Events: Hippocampus
Classical Conditioning: Cerebellum
Memories:
Episodic Memory: events (mental time travel—the experience of traveling back in time
to reconnect with events that happened in the past).
Semantic Memory: facts
3 Selves:
Experiencing the self
Remembering self
Anticipating Self
E.P contracted a virus (herpes virus). All of his memories up until a year before the virus were all
intact. After contracting the virus he could not remember new memories dating back 40 years
ago.
How did E.P remember old memories? Memories go through changes as to where they are
stored and how they are stored over time.
How Memory undergoes consolidation (resistant to damage, strong).
1. Short term stage- (Synaptic consolidation) the whole brain is involved in memory ( e.g-
when remembering which restaurant you ate at, you picture it, think of its location..ect)
2. Long term stage- (Systems Consolidation), change in location of storage over time.
G.P has a tiny bit of memory, he had enough memory to realise that he had memory problems,
he was always upset.
Can these people who can’t remember anything learn new things?
Mirror Tracing Task - trace a star with a magic marker but without looking at the picture,
instead there is a mirror and you must trace the mirror image (visual motor skill). The mirror-
tracing activity is a visual and motor test that involves learning a new motor skill. The task
requires you to move a pencil to trace the diagram of a star while looking at your hand only as a
reflection in a mirror.
In this task EP & GP were able to do this task (amnesia- these two patients even improved after
every time). BUT if you look at patients with Huntington and parking sons disease, they cannot
improve their motor skills (damage to basal ganglia).
1
,Tower of Hanoi- must put rings on a stick in order according to size, without taking the disks off
of the rings( you can switch rings on different sticks). e.g- for 3 disks you need 7 moves.
First time HM tries it, it took him 46 moves and from there on his reaction times became shorter.
HM has a skill for learning but when re doing this over the course of many times he did not re
call ever doing it. Even without a conscious memory you can still acquire new skills.
Conditioning:
Eye Blink Conditioning - you hear a tone and then you blink, after a few tries your brain
expects a tone and blinks.
Episodic and Semantic Memory:
Semantic Memory - Things you learn in college (remember that the basal ganglia is involved in
motor functioning without remembering which class it was taught in).
COGNITIVE SPRING LECTURE 2:
Challenges to Memory for Events:
Issues in Eyewitness Testimony:
Attention and Bias Factors During Event: Weapon Focus (encoding)
Misleading Post Events (can influence how we remember current event), (consolidation)
Information + Reconsolidation interference
Constructive Nature of Memory (retrieval)
Solution: Enhanced Cognitive Interview (memory-enhancing strategies to try and get an
accurate description of what happened from the witness)
Retroactive Interference: more recent
learning interferes with memory for
something in the past. Original memory trace
is not
replaced.
2
,Researchers staged a robbery in front of students: An actor pretends to steal something from a
student’s bag and conceals it in his coat.
The student cries: ‘’ he's taken my tape recorder’’
Witnesses were phoned after the event to ask what they saw.
50% of witnesses claimed they saw the tape recorder with detailed descriptions.
Constructive Nature of Memory:
Bartlett ‘’War of The Ghosts’’- repeated reproductive paradigm. Participants were asked to
read a story twice and then reproduce it 15 minutes later and then hours later and days
later..ect.
- Over time the story got shorter, less detailed, less accurate. More convergent with cultural
schemes (e.g- rowboat instead of canoe).
Bartlett then used technique of Repeated Reproduction- The same participants came back a
number of times and tried to recall the story at longer and longer intervals after the initial time
reading it.
Source Monitoring - Participants created memories from 2 sources.
1. Original story
2. what participants knew about stories in their own culture.
As time passed, participants used information from both sources, so their reproductions became
more like what would happen in Edwardian England (culture). This idea that memories can be
influenced by the sources of information involves a phenomenon called source monitoring,
which is at the heart of the constructive approach to memory.
Source monitoring errors- when the statement is attributed to the wrong person.
Schema - Our expectations about a specific situation. knowledge about what characterizes a
particular situation or environment
E.G- You expect to find a sofa, chair.. in the living room
Script - Conception of sequence of actions that occur during a particular experience.
E.G- Going to a restaurant, check up at the doctors office.
To test the influence of scripts, Gordon Bower did an experiment in which participants were
asked to remember short passages. After a delay period, the participants were given the titles of
the stories they had read and were told to write down what they remembered about each story
as accurately as possible. The participants created stories that included much material that
matched the original stories, but they also included material that wasn’t presented in the original
story but is part of the script for the activity described. Participants added information that was
not part of the story.
3
, False fame: ‘’Becoming famous overnight’’- thought process: the name is familiar to me, I've
heard it before so they must be famous, even if you don't know who the person is.
Cryptomnesia: when a person incorporates events from books or movies into their
autobiographical memory, or denies events that happened to them and attributes them to such
external sources.
Gender Stereotypes- we use gender stereotypes to remember who said what.
Age influence- children and the elderly have problems with recognizing familiar content.
Chapter 8 (Goldstien):
Autobiographical Memory- recollecting events that happened in a person’s past (can be done
episodically- images of cake, who came to party, games being played. OR Semantically- where
it was, general knowledge of birthdays, where family was living at the time.
One of the factors that determines the relative
proportions of episodic and semantic
components in AM is how long ago the event to
be remembered occurred. Memories of
recent events that are rich in perceptual details
and emotional content are dominated by
episodic memory, events that happened a while
ago are semantic. (dont remember a lot)
Autobiographical memories are
multidimensional because they consist of spatial,
emotional, and sensory components.
Roberto Cabeza- measured brain activation
difference between AM and laboratory memory.
There were 2 sets of stimulus Photographs- one
set that the participant took and another set that
was taken by someone else
We will call the photos taken by the participant
A-photos, for “autobiographical photographs,”
and the ones taken by someone else L-photos,
for “laboratory photographs.”
The stimulus photographs were created by giving
12 Duke University students digital cameras and
telling them to take pictures of 40 specified
campus locations over a 10-day period.
After taking the photographs, each participant was shown his or her own photos (A-photos) and
photos taken by other participants
4
