Forgetting and the Brain

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Lecture 13

• Forgetting and the Brain

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What is the best way to study for an exam?

• Distributed practice (studying over time)
• Massed practice (cramming in 1 or 2 days)
• All-nighters (cramming in 1 or 2 hours)

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Remembering exactly where you were and what you
were doing on 9/11/2001 is an example of

• Intentional learning
• Elaborative encoding

• A flashbulb memory
• Depth processing

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Summary Differences between memory models

• Ways information gets stored
• Rehearsal
• Attention
• Deep Processing
• Strong Emotion

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Objectives

• Consider how people study forgetting
• Consider major theories of forgetting
• When retrieval goes wrong
• Consider mnemonics to reduce forgetting
• Consider what happens in the brain during memory
  and forgetting

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Retrieving information

• Recognition matching stimuli to a stored
  representation (like multiple choice)
• Recall the act of intentionally bringing stored
  representations to awareness (short answer)
• Which is easier?

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Demonstration

• Recall and Recognition

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What Causes Forgetting?

• Decay
• Theory that memories fade over time because
  relevant connections between neurons are lost
• Interferences
• Theory that the disruption of the ability to
  remember one piece of information is caused by
  the presence of other information
• Retroactive New information interferes with old
• Proactive Old information interferes with new

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Other factors related to forgetting

• Encoding failures
• Intentional forgetting

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Amnesia Physiological causes of forgetting

• Retrograde amnesia disrupts previous memories
• Infantile amnesia
• Anterograde amnesia leaves already consolidated
  memories intact but prevents the learning of new
  facts
• Patient H.M.
• Movie Memento

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Using Cues

• Cues stimuli that help you remember
• Tip of the tongue phenomenon (demo)
• Encoding specificity
• State dependent retrieval
• Hypermnesia improval of memory over time

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Retrieval More Than the Past

• False memories
• In the Bugs Bunny study, Loftus talked with
  subjects about their childhoods and asked not
  only whether they saw someone dressed up as the
  character, but also whether they hugged his furry
  body and stroked his velvety ears. In subsequent
  interviews, 36 percent of the subjects recalled
  the cartoon rabbit.

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Demonstration

• Productions of false memories

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False Memories Loftus and colleagues (1978)
People watched a series of slides that showed a
red Datsun stopping at a stop sign and then
proceeding into an accident Participants were
asked Did another car pass the red Datsun while
it was stopped at the stop sign? OR Did
another car pass the red Datsun while it was
stopped at the yield sign?
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The Repressed Memory Debate

• Are they real memories that are forced out of
  consciousness and then later emerge, as
  hypothesized by Freud, or are they false
  memories?
• Evidence is mixed

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Improving Memory

• Depth and breadth of processing
• Transfer appropriate processing
• Distributed practice
• Mnemonic devices
• Visualize interacting objects
• Method of loci
• Peg word system 1 is a bun
• Acronyms (NOW), Initialisms (VFW), Sentences My
  very educated mother

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Biological Foundations

• The role of the hippocampus
• Supporting evidence HM (and others)
• Stress and memories

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Biological Foundations

• The role of the hippocampus
• Supporting evidence HM (and others)
• Stress and memories
• The role of other sub-cortical structures
• Imaging techniques
• Modality differences
• Implicit and explicit differences

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The search for the engram

• The role of the cortex
• Brain stimulation
• Brain removal

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Consolidation

• The process of forming a relatively permanent
  memory trace
• Long-term potentiation (LTP) is the strengthening
  of the connections between the sending and
  receiving neurons that underlies memory storage

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Biological Foundations of Memory

• Human genes clearly play a role in memory
• The apolipoprotein E (apo E) gene is present in
  many people who develop Alzheimers disease

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Video Clip Implicit v Explicit Memory

• 18. Living With Amnesia The Hippocampus and
  Memory

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Multiple choice exams are testing

• Recall
• Recognition
• Storage
• Hypermnesia

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If you decide to study while drinking, how should
you take your test?

• While drinking
• Sober

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Do you believe in false memories?

• Yes
• No

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Jamie uses the acronym HOMES to remember the
names of the Great Lakes. Jamie is using

• a mnemonic
• chunking
• rehearsal
• method of loci

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Can you diagnose this man?

• Ed is conked on the head with a baseball. While
  he is able to recall events BEFORE he was hit on
  the head he is unable to formulate new memories.

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What is Ed suffering from?

• Anterograde amnesia
• Retrograde amnesia
• Retroactive interference
• Repressed memories