Problem 3
Learning Goals:
1. What are both types of amnesia? And how do they affect your
memory?
2. What causes memory loss?
3. How are false memories created?
4. How do leading questions affect people’s memories?
5. How reliable is eye-witness testimony?
6. How are we influenced by fake news?
7. How does misinformation get spread? Why do we believe it?
Problem A
Amnesia
Amnesia- severe deficits in episodic memory
Retrograde amnesia- loss of memory for events that occurred
prior to brain damage especially for events that occurred during the
years before the damage
Anterograde amnesia- loss of the ability to form memories for
events that have occurred after brain damage
- H.M. – patient who had his hippocampus (important in learning
and memory tasks) amygdala and part of his temporal region
removed due to having severe epilepsy
- After the surgery he had normal semantic memory and could
recall events before the surgery but could not learn or retain new
information e.g. meeting new people
- Usually can’t recall any memory after they developed amnesia
and find it difficult to imagine events in the future
Warrington and Weiskranz – list of words presented to patients with
anterograde amnesia and asked to do recall and recognition tasks
- Patients performed much more poorly on both kinds of explicit
memory tasks
- When testing implicit memory patients performed equally as well
as the control group
- Dissociation- when a variable has a large effect on one kind of
test, but little to no effect on another kind of test
When tested, some patients apparently remember nothing when
their memory is tested on a recall task, but perform quite well when
memory is measured in a different fashion
Episodic memory impairment
Anterograde amnesia
Anterograde amnesia- problem in encoding, storing or retrieving
ongoing info that can be used in the future
Retrograde amnesia- loss of access to events that happened in
the past, typically before the onset of amnesia
, In it’s pure form, amnesic syndrome involves grossly impaired
episodic memory, together with preserved working memory,
semantic memory, implicit memory and intelligence
Psychological explanations of amnesia
- Amnesia disrupts the capacity to associate a specific event or
episode with its context, its location in time and place
- Episodic memory allows individual specific memories to be
retrieved due to the fact that these episodes are linked to a
specific time and place of the experience
- Loss of capacity to link experiences to their spatial and temporal
context would therefore disrupt subsequent recollection
Winocur and Mills- animals with hippocampal lesions were
particularly bad at making use of environmental context in a spatial
learning task
- Suggests that a failure to associate memories with context may
also apply to human amnesic patients
Huppert and Piercy- presented pictures either once or twice on 2
successive days. Then were shown a sequence of pictures and
asked if they recognised each picture. If they did, they had to decide
which day it was shown
- Amnesic patients were more likely to say that items presented on
day 1 (twice) had in fact been presented on day 2 – presumably
due to a higher degree of familiarity
- Controls showed the exact opposite, being more accurate in
assigning items to day 1 if they had been presented twice
- In the absence of the link to context provided by episodic
memory, amnesic patients had to reply on the feeling of
familiarity. This didn’t allow them to distinguish between greater
familiarity resulting from two presentations. And that resulting
from a more recent experience
Schacter, Harbulk and Mc Lachlan- used trivial pursuit questions to
test amnesic patients. Found that although they were able to recall
the ‘fact’, they are bad at recalling that they had just been given
this information
- Source amnesia- tendency to confuse the source of a given
memory i.e. where they received the information from
Amnesic patients have a difficulty imagining future activities e.g.
lying on a sandy beach surrounded by palm trees
- However, could imagine the component experiences on their own
- May be due to damage of the hippocampus needed for spatial
processing
A simplified model
Modal model of amnesia- simple interpretation of the syndrome
that captures most of the evidence
consolidation hypothesis- learning in episodic memory involves
associating items with their context using a ‘mneumonic glue’
Learning Goals:
1. What are both types of amnesia? And how do they affect your
memory?
2. What causes memory loss?
3. How are false memories created?
4. How do leading questions affect people’s memories?
5. How reliable is eye-witness testimony?
6. How are we influenced by fake news?
7. How does misinformation get spread? Why do we believe it?
Problem A
Amnesia
Amnesia- severe deficits in episodic memory
Retrograde amnesia- loss of memory for events that occurred
prior to brain damage especially for events that occurred during the
years before the damage
Anterograde amnesia- loss of the ability to form memories for
events that have occurred after brain damage
- H.M. – patient who had his hippocampus (important in learning
and memory tasks) amygdala and part of his temporal region
removed due to having severe epilepsy
- After the surgery he had normal semantic memory and could
recall events before the surgery but could not learn or retain new
information e.g. meeting new people
- Usually can’t recall any memory after they developed amnesia
and find it difficult to imagine events in the future
Warrington and Weiskranz – list of words presented to patients with
anterograde amnesia and asked to do recall and recognition tasks
- Patients performed much more poorly on both kinds of explicit
memory tasks
- When testing implicit memory patients performed equally as well
as the control group
- Dissociation- when a variable has a large effect on one kind of
test, but little to no effect on another kind of test
When tested, some patients apparently remember nothing when
their memory is tested on a recall task, but perform quite well when
memory is measured in a different fashion
Episodic memory impairment
Anterograde amnesia
Anterograde amnesia- problem in encoding, storing or retrieving
ongoing info that can be used in the future
Retrograde amnesia- loss of access to events that happened in
the past, typically before the onset of amnesia
, In it’s pure form, amnesic syndrome involves grossly impaired
episodic memory, together with preserved working memory,
semantic memory, implicit memory and intelligence
Psychological explanations of amnesia
- Amnesia disrupts the capacity to associate a specific event or
episode with its context, its location in time and place
- Episodic memory allows individual specific memories to be
retrieved due to the fact that these episodes are linked to a
specific time and place of the experience
- Loss of capacity to link experiences to their spatial and temporal
context would therefore disrupt subsequent recollection
Winocur and Mills- animals with hippocampal lesions were
particularly bad at making use of environmental context in a spatial
learning task
- Suggests that a failure to associate memories with context may
also apply to human amnesic patients
Huppert and Piercy- presented pictures either once or twice on 2
successive days. Then were shown a sequence of pictures and
asked if they recognised each picture. If they did, they had to decide
which day it was shown
- Amnesic patients were more likely to say that items presented on
day 1 (twice) had in fact been presented on day 2 – presumably
due to a higher degree of familiarity
- Controls showed the exact opposite, being more accurate in
assigning items to day 1 if they had been presented twice
- In the absence of the link to context provided by episodic
memory, amnesic patients had to reply on the feeling of
familiarity. This didn’t allow them to distinguish between greater
familiarity resulting from two presentations. And that resulting
from a more recent experience
Schacter, Harbulk and Mc Lachlan- used trivial pursuit questions to
test amnesic patients. Found that although they were able to recall
the ‘fact’, they are bad at recalling that they had just been given
this information
- Source amnesia- tendency to confuse the source of a given
memory i.e. where they received the information from
Amnesic patients have a difficulty imagining future activities e.g.
lying on a sandy beach surrounded by palm trees
- However, could imagine the component experiences on their own
- May be due to damage of the hippocampus needed for spatial
processing
A simplified model
Modal model of amnesia- simple interpretation of the syndrome
that captures most of the evidence
consolidation hypothesis- learning in episodic memory involves
associating items with their context using a ‘mneumonic glue’
