Chapter 13

• the process of acquiring new and relatively enduring information, behavior patterns, or abilities, characterized by modifications of behavior as a result of practice, study, or experience

  learning
• 1. the ability to learn and neurally encode information, consolidate the information for longer-term storage, and retrieve or reactivate the consolidated information at a later time
  2. the specific information that is stored in the brain

  memory
• The terms learning, the process of acquiring new information, and memory, the ability to store and retrieve that information, are so often paired that it sometimes seems as if one necessarily implies the other. 
• Amnesia is a severe impairment of memory, usually as a result of accident or disease.
• Loss of memories prior to an event (such as surgery or trauma), called retrograde amnesia, is not uncommon. After an accident that damages the brain, people often have retrograde amnesia regarding events that happened a few hours or days before the accident, or even a year before.
• Despite dramatic depictions you may see on TV, it is unlikely that longer-term (or "complete") retrograde memory loss has ever occurred.
• the late Henry Molaison, a man who was unable to encode new declarative memories because of surgical removal of medial temporal lobe structures

  Patient H.M.
• anterograde amnesia


  the inability to form new memories after an event
• Henry's case proved that there is a clear distinction between short-term memory and long-term memory.
• Henry's surgery removed the amygdala, most of the hippocampus, and surrounding cortex from both temporal lobes. The memory deficit seemed to be caused by loss of the medial temporal love, including the hippocampus, because people who had only the lateral temporal cortex removed had no memory impairment.
• Each day, Henry was given a test and although if he was asked about the test from the day before, he couldn't remember taking it, his scores improved.
• a memory that can be stated or described


  declarative memory
• "procedural memory" a memory that is shown by performance rather than by conscious recollection

  nondeclarative memory
• a test in which the individual must respond to the unfamiliar stimulus in a pair of stimuli

  delayed non-matching-to-sample task
• Declarative memory is what we usually think of as memory: facts and information acquired through learning. It is memory we are aware of accessing, which we can declare to others. 
• Declarative memory was severely impaired by Henry's surgery.
• Declarative memory is the type of memory we use to answer "what" questions, and is therefore difficult to test in animals.
• Nondeclarative memory is memory about perceptual or motor procedures and is shown by performance rather than by conscious recollection, which was the form Henry excelled at.
• Nondeclarative memory is the type of memory we use for "how" problems and is often nonverbal.
• A way to measure declarative memory in monkeys and other animals is the delayed non-matching-to-sample task in which monkeys with damage next to the medial temporal lobe, similar to H.M., are severely impaired on this task. ]
• To determine which parts of the temporal lobe are crucial for declarative memory, researchers selectively removed specific parts of the medial temporal lobes of monkeys to confirm that the amygdala —one of the structures removed in Henry’s surgery—is not crucial for performance on tests of declarative memory. 
• Declarative episodic memory is also called:

  autobiographical memory.
• Which type of nondeclarative memory is not affected by damage to the basal ganglia? ANS: 4


  1. Sensorimotor skills
  2. Perceptual skills
  3. Cognitive skills
  4. Priming
• You are riding on bus and catch a very brief glimpse of a ravine with rushing water as you pass over a bridge. The impression you have of the view is called an iconic memory, or:

  sensory buffer.
• Research shows that rats living in enriched conditions have more dendritic branches on cortical neurons and enhanced activity of _______ neurons throughout the cortex.

  cholinergic
• _______ LTP refers to the induction of LTP through training of an animal in a memory task.

  Behavioral
• LTP in the hippocampal formation depends on the excitatory neurotransmitter:

  glutamate
• Synaptic plasticity can be demonstrated in relatively simple organisms like Aplysia. Short-term habituation of the gill-withdrawal reflex to repeated stimulation of the siphon is related to a(n): 


  decrease in the amount of neurotransmitter released at the sensory-motor synapse.
• Declarative memory is said to deal with _______ questions.

  "what"
• A change in the processing of a stimulus on the basis of prior exposure to the same or similar stimuli is referred to as:

  priming
• Which memory store holds the largest number of items? ANS: 2

  1. Iconic memory
  2. Long-term memory
  3. Intermediate-term memory
  4. Working memory
• Henry’s symptoms were probably caused by loss of the medial temporal

  lobe on both sides of the brain.
• The experiments with monkeys, together with Henry’s case, indicate that we need at least one intact medial temporal lobe (including the hippocampus) in order to make new declarative memories.
• a still-living man who is unable to encode new declarative memories because of damage to the dorsomedial thalamus and the mammillary bodies


  Patient N.A.
• In 1960, a young man known as Patient N.A. had a bizarre accident in which a miniature sword entered his nostril and injured his brain. Like Henry, N.A. has shown profound anterograde amnesia ever since his accident.
• a limbic system structure that is connected to the hippocampus


  dorsomedial thalamus
• Korsakoff's syndrome, a degenerative disease in which damage is found in the mammillary bodies and dorsomedial thalamus, but not in temporal lobe structures like the hippocampus.
• MRI study of N.A. shows damage to several limbic system structures in the medial diencephalon that have connections to the hippocampus: the dorsomedial hypothalamus and the mammillary bodies.
• The similarity in symptoms suggests that the medial temporal lobe damaged in Henry’s brain and these midline regions damaged in N.A. are parts of a larger memory system.
• The mammillary bodies serve as a processing system connecting the medical temporal lobes to the thalamus and, from there, to other cortical sites.