Memory

1. Memory

2. Kinds of memory • Declarative • Episodic-Semantic • Non-Declarative • The relationship between Conscious and Nonconscious memory • Declarative/Non-declarative revisited • Implicit learning • Explicit/Implicit memory • Process Dissociation

3. Grounds for distinguishing types of memory • Phenomenology of memory • Does it seem there are different types? • Knowing how vs. knowing that • Different kinds of mental experience • Autobiographical • General knowledge • Flashbulb memories • Tests for memory • Do the same manipulations of independent variables affect each the same? • E.g. episodic vs. semantic • Neuropsychology and neuroscience of memory • Results of brain damage • fMRI and PET

4. Declarative/Non-declarative • Declarative vs. Non-declarative (Procedural) • Declarative • “Knowing that” • Episodic • Semantic • Non-declarative • “Knowing how”

5. Episodic/Semantic • Episodic • Memory for a specific instance or episode. • Semantic • Memory for conceptual information • How are the two related? • Overlap of functional similarity (meaning) of examples (instances) is integrated into a single concept. • Lose the details and retain the gist.

6. Episodic memory • Memory for events • Time and place • “Where did you go for vacation last summer?” • Involves autonoetic (self-knowing) awareness • Tests for episodic memory • Free recall • Serial recall • Paired-associate recall • Cued recall • Recognition • Absolute frequency judgments • Relative recency judgments • Source judgments • Metamory judgments

7. Episodic memory • Factors affecting episodic memory: • Encoding Retrieval relationship • Levels of processing • Encoding specificity principle • Transfer appropriate processing • Generation effect • Repetition • Spacing • Concreteness • As opposed to abstract • E.g. pictures better than words • Distinctiveness • Bizarre sentences • Unusual faces • Atypical category members

8. Episodic memory • Autobiographical memory • Diary studies • Linton (1978), White (1982), Wagenaar (1986) • Focus on dates, distinctiveness, pleasantness, importance of events • Those recalled best were more unique, emotional, pleasant • Brewer (1988) • Ss record events whenever beeper went off • Given a cue (time, location, etc.) • Those recalled had been rated as more significant, emotional

9. Episodic memory • Reminiscence bump • People remember more events from certain periods of their life • Rubin, Wetzler & Nebes (1986) • Combined the results of four different experiments (N total = 285) • Found a reminiscence bump between 10 and 30 years, when older than 40 years.

10. Episodic memory • Childhood amnesia • Preponderance of ‘firsts’  reminiscence bump

11. Episodic memory • Autobiographical memories tend to be slow • Reconstructed • Good at recognition, but lose the details • Barclay & Wellman (1986) • Grad students record everyday events for 4 months • Recog test (5 times over 2½ years) • Originals • Foils that changed descriptive (surface) details • Foils that changed reactions to events • Foils that did not correspond to recorded events • Results • Recog of duplicates 94% • However… • Accepted 50% of foils that changed info and 23% of novel foils • Got worse with time

12. Semantic memory • General world knowledge • Memory for facts • Does not require time, place • E.g. The constellation Orion contains the stars Betelgeuse and Rigel • Initially new facts may contain episodic content, but will eventually become ‘sourceless’ over time • Typical semantic network • Conceptual nodes • Spreading activation from one item to those associated with it

13. Semantic memory • How long do items stay in semantic memory? • Bahrick (1984) • 50 years of second language attrition • Noticeable decrease first 3 years • Leveling off • Decrease begins again after about 15 years

14. The episodic/semantic distinction • Interdependence of two memory systems makes finding evidence for distinction difficult • Forgetting • Episodic memory is more prone to forgetting • Bahrick • Good chunk of knowledge remains years later • However, certain episodic events also appear very resistant to forgetting • Autobiographical “first time” events (reminiscence bump) • “Flashbulb” memories

15. The episodic/semantic distinction • Neuropsychology • Patients with amnesia • Retrograde amnesia: loss of memory of events before brain injury • Anterograde amnesia: disruption of memory of events occurring after brain injury, especially a disruption in acquiring new long-term memories • Cannot remember doing things five minutes later

16. Anterograde amnesia • H.M. • Severe deficit in creating new memories • Can learn procedural (non-declarative, anoetic) tasks • Mirror drawing/reading, tower of hanoi • Cannot learn with tasks requiring conscious remembering • Where’s Waldo is a nightmare • What am I looking for again? • Can’t keep track of what’s going on in the world

17. Retrograde amnesia • Korsakoff’s syndrome • Test memory for TV programs, famous people, famous events • P.Z. • Recall of info from autobiography • Graded loss

18. The episodic/semantic distinction • Episodic, not semantic memory is impaired in amnesia? • Not necessarily • Anterograde amnesia • Both episodic and semantic information hard to acquire • Gabrieli et al (1988) found little learning in H.M. • “deficits observed here point to an association between semantic and episodic memory, and do not lend support to a distinction between them. The acquisition of semantic and episodic information, therefore, appears to depend upon a common memory system” • Korsakoff’s deficits are for both episodic and semantic • PZ demonstrates poor recall of the names of scientists in his discipline, along with his major life events. • So: amnesia = impairment for both episodic and semantic? • If both affected with amnesics, is the distinction necessary?

19. The episodic/semantic distinction • K.C.: frontal brain damage due to a motorcycle accident • Suffers both retrograde and anterograde amnesia for episodic memory though semantic and procedural memory is intact • Could remember how to play chess, knew father taught him and that he and his father played chess • Couldn’t remember ever playing with anyone else or specifics of times played

20. Semantic Dementia • Progressive fluent aphasia (Hodges et al., 1992) • Degenerative pathology inferolateral temporal cortex (relative sparing of hippocampus in early stages) • Progessive, selective deterioration in semantic memory, affecting verbal and nonverbal aspects of knowledge about objects, people, facts, concepts and word meanings. • E.g. Patients response when shown a picture of a giraffe • Time 1: A giraffe • Time 2: A tall African animal • Time 3: A horse • Time 4: An animal • Time 5: Don’t know. • Episodic memory is relatively preserved (at least early in the course of the illness)

21. The episodic/semantic distinction • Brain imaging studies • Compare pattern of brain activation when someone is • (1) thinking about astronomy • (2) personal memory • Different brain regions were active in the two conditions with • (1) activating more posterior regions • (2) more frontal regions

22. The episodic/semantic distinction • There is something that seems different (subjectively) about remembering personal information vs. general world knowledge • However, there is little compelling evidence that the distinction reflects the operation of two completely distinct memory systems. • The debate is still active, and the terms are widely used, just not necessarily in the way in which Tulving proposes • Baddeley speculates that “semantic memories” result from an accumulation of similar episodic memories. They become “knowledge” when we are no longer able to retrieve individual learning episodes (sources)

23. Non-declarative memory • “Knowing how” • Encompasses a broad range of human skills and abilities • Classical conditioning • Priming • Complex problem solving • Motor skill learning • A key difference compared to declarative is the time it takes to enter into memory • Not necessarily verbalizable • I don’t know, I just do it

24. Non-declarative memory • Acquisition of procedures • Singley & Anderson 1988 • Ss (experienced typists but not with word processing) learned editing skills on a word processor • Planning time is the difference b/t total and execution time • Decreases dramatically over the six days • Decrease in execution time due to decrease in key strokes (not faster)

25. Stages of Skill Acquisition • Cognitive • Develop a “declarative” representation of the skill • Associative • Transfer declarative knowledge to motor performance • Explore necessary motor skills • Refine representation of the task • Declarative representation is incomplete or inaccurate. • Add components to representation • Feedback

26. Stages of Skill Acquisition • Autonomous • Procedure is further refined • Increase in speed and accuracy • Practice effects • Fine-tuning • Loss of declarative (verbal) representation • Sometimes experts make poor instructors

27. Non-declarative memory • Transfer Appropriate Processing • With episodic memory, people retrieve more info when in the same mood, place or state as initial learning takes place • Same can apply to procedural memory • Kolers 1975, 1976 • Inverted sentence reading • Even after a year they were still better than when they started out and better for those sentences from the first time around (allowed for the procedures from last time to be used again) • Kolers & Ostry 1974 • Recognition better for inverted sentences if were previously learned that way

28. Non-declarative memory • Expertise • Highly practiced, domain-specific skills • Chess expert’s interrelated knowledge allows for very quick moves early on • Memorized rules for best moves of known chess board arrangements • Expert knowledge includes domain-specific procedures and large amount of domain-specific declarative knowledge

29. Non-declarative memory • Summary: • People’s initial knowledge is initially in a declarative state • Practice leads to automaticity • Transfer of knowledge to procedural • Can occur with or without ‘awareness’ • Curran & Keele (1993): visuospatial task • Berry & Broadbent (1984) • Cognitive task (control sugar production) • Ss improved without explicit knowledge of how

30. Conscious/Nonconscious Memory • Most of our memory at any given time is nonconscious • E.g. who was your 6th grade English teacher? • Even recall itself can be conscious (explicit) or not (implicit) • What is the link between consciousness and memory?

31. Memory System Consciousness Autonoetic “self aware” Episodic Noetic Aware of info, not origin Semantic Anoetic “Unaware” Procedural Memory and Consciousness The relationship between types of LTM and varieties of consciousness (Tulving, 1985).

32. Memory and Consciousness • Each memory system is characterized by a different kind of consciousness • Autonoetic: aware of the event as a part of one’s own past existence • Noetic: aware of and can cognitively operate on objects, events and their relations • Anoetic: temporally and spatially bound to the current situation; “awareness” unnecessary (automatization)

33. K.C. No autonoetic consciousness for before and after a traffic accident Although remembers personal events, knowledge of past is similarly detached as toward general knowledge (noetic consciousness) Language skills and semantic memory relatively intact “Let’s try the question again about the future. What will you be doing tomorrow?” 15 sec pause “I don’t know” “Do you remember the question?” “About what I’ll be doing tomorrow?” “Yes. How would you describe your state of mind when you try to think about it?” 5 sec pause “Blank, I guess.” Regarding yesterday: “same kind of blankness” Man with no memory

34. Implicit Learning • Learn systematic (i.e. rules, organization, etc.) information without explicitly applying (or awareness of) knowledge • Categories • Grammars • Spatial relations • Loosely defined as ‘learning without awareness’, though such a definition is problematic • Qualifications: • Implicit learning of one task may not compare with that of another • Underlying mechanisms, representations could be different • Implicit learning of one task might be possible but not for another

35. Implicit Learning • The problem of operationalizing implicit learning • Defining awareness • Support for IL depends on what is used to assess awareness • What about attention? • Separating the mechanisms from the products of learning • One system or two? • Still not resolved

36. Frensch & Runger 2003

37. Implicit learning • A: No learning without awareness • B: Single learning mechanism, contents may or may not be accessible to consciousness • C: Implicit learning process eventually leads to explicit learning • Tennis player notices improved serve, relates to higher toss • D: explicit learning process for control of behavior, may then provide input for implicit learning mechanism • E: separate, unrelated systems for explicit and implicit learning

38. Learning Artificial Grammar • Reber (1967) used an Artificial Grammar defined by a series of rules about how letters may be related to one another • Group A learned sequences of letters generated by the grammar • Group B learned random letter sequences • Both groups were shown letter strings, half grammatical and half random letters • Subjects who learned grammatical sequences recognized 79% of the new grammatical sequences

39. Implicit learning • Other examples of implicit learning • Conditioning • Priming • Anesthesia • Subliminal learning • Serial RT task • Learn to respond to spatial location of a stimulus which is presented according to some rule (Nissen & Bullemer 1987) • Complex repeating sequence

40. Implicit learning • Shanks and St. John (1994) • Examine the possibility of dissociable (implicit/explicit ) learning systems • Subjects may know something about the task they are acquiring, however, whether it is enough to give an explicit explanation is a different matter • Though explicit information is available, it may lack the merit for description

41. Implicit Learning • The subject must not be aware of the association at time of learning • Information Criterion • Must show that the information sought in the awareness test is really responsible for performance change • Learning might reflect some other associations that are explicit • Sensitivity Criterion • Must have a measure of unconscious learning that has the appropriate sensitivity to the learning • Must have access to what all is consciously available

42. Implicit Learning • Subliminal learning • Of that which has seemingly been demonstrated, it does not seem to last long and may be more of perceptual/working memory processing than true learning • Longer lasting effects seen are outweighed greatly by negative results • Classical conditioning • Many studies do not address awareness directly, and those that do suggest contingency is learned only with awareness

43. Implicit learning • Grammar learning • Is verbal report sensitive to test of conscious knowledge? (Sensitivity criterion) • If subjects learned something other than the rules then asking about the rules may lead to erroneous conclusions (Information criterion) • Servan-Schreiber & Anderson (1990) • Strings with gaps T PPP TX VS • False alarms for PPPTXTVS 50% of the time • Evidence that Ss are only learning particular instances (explicitly), not unconscious learning of rules

44. Implicit learning • Anesthesia studies* • Same problems with verbal report • Different doses for different folks • The only instances in which we know for certain in which someone is UnC there is no learning • Shanks & St. John • Although there are some unusual findings out there, the majority of the evidence suggests no learning without awareness *FYI, it is possible to be conscious during surgery but not remember it afterward.

45. Explicit/Implicit Memory • Explicit Memory • Specific attempt to recall and apply previous experience • Actively encode • Information is used without active encoding. • Incidental Memory • Ability torecallinformation without actively encoding • e.g., Source Memory • Implicit Memory • Previous exposure to information changes responses made without direct retrieval

46. Explicit/Implicit Memory • Evidence from amnesiacs • Damage to hippocampus produces profound deficit in ability to consciously recollect one’s past • No new memories? • H.M. • Got better at mirror drawing but never knew he’d practiced it • Completion tasks show previous influences • Converse situation • Confabulation • Awareness of memories for non-existent events • The two situations suggest a complex relationship between retention and expression of prior experience, and the awareness of that experience • What about normal folk?

47. Explicit/Implicit Memory • Explicit test of memory • Visual/Auditory presentation • Shallow vs. Deep • LOP effect • Implicit test of memory • E.g. stem completion • Just complete with whatever comes to mind • Modality effect • No LOP • C and NonC forms of memory operate differently

48. Explicit/Implicit Memory • Divided attention at encoding • Typically affects explicit memory more than implicit memory (but see false fame effect) • Memory can occur in the absence of reportable awareness • Conscious (explicit) memory of an event not necessary to affect performance

49. Implicit Memory • “Unrelated” exposure to information increases familiarity of item in a different context • Stem Completion • Judgments • Frequency • Pleasantness • Recency • Priming • Readiness to respond to stimuli • Familiarity

50. Implicit Memory • Other Implicit Memory tests/phenomena • Perceptual • Mere Exposure • Exposure produces a preference. • Perceptual Identification • Identifying degraded pictures or sounds • Word-Stem/Fragment Completion • _ e m _ _ y • Conceptual • Word association • Object categorization • Procedural • Tower of Hanoi