ppt presentation

1. Memory Disorders
Psychology 3717

2. Introduction
• The strange case of
Charles D’Sousa
• Or is it Philip
Cutajar?
• Rare type of
disorder
• Some stuff clearly
spared
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

3. Introduction
• Results with amnesiacs has lead to
many discoveries about memory
– Episodic vs. semantic memory
– Procedural vs. declarative memory
– Implicit vs. explicit memory
– Phonological loop vs. visuo spatial
sketchpad

4. problems
• Taxonomy
• Individual differences
• Interpretation
• Application
• Mostly comes down to a lack of control,
which of course is inevitable

5. Case studies
• We pretty much have to rely on these
• They are, thankfully, rare
• Usually some sort of accident or a
stroke

6. Case SP
• Stroke patient
• Both Medial temporal lobes, left Hp and
lots of surrounding area, but not the
amygdala
• Had trouble naming objects
• Anterograde and retrograde amnesia
• Similar to KC

7. Clive Wearing
• Case of encephalitis
• Pervasive amnesia
• Both semantic and
episodic impairment
• Temporal lobe
dilation
• Hp destroyed
QuickTime™ and a
TIFF (Uncompressed) decompressor
are needed to see this picture.

8. Performance Patterns
• Retrograde amnesia
– Losing past memories
• Anterograde amnesia
– No new memories
• Spared function
– Often implicit tasks, such as priming or
ability to learn a new skill

9. Typically spared
• Working Memory
• Semantic memory
– Even KC could learn new stuff
• Declarative information using Tulving’s
method
– Restrict errors

10. Why?
• Difficulties in interference, retrieval and
encoding
• Consolidation
– Tends to come down to something to do
with HP
– Context or sending item off for processing
or some such thing

11. Semantic memory problems
• What is a cat?
• Temporal lobe problems
• Oddly enough, episodic memory often
intact in these rare cases

12. Working Memory Problems
• There are cases of people with intact
phonological loops and visuo spatial
sketchpads that are pretty much toast
• And vice versa

13. Alzheimer’s
• More than half of all
dementia is from AD
• 2 times more
women than men
– Could be because
women live longer
though
• dementia and brain
stuff
– Neurofibrillary
tangles and neuritic
plaques

14. AD
• MASSIVE cell death
• In essence, you get like lesions
everywhere
• ‘cortical’ dementia, but you get these
lesions, holes really, everywhere

15. Neurotransmitters affected
• ACh is important in memory, especially
in HP
• The ACh system is severely damaged
in AD
• Indeed it is almost targeted
• Other systems too though

16. Memory effects
• Episodic effects
• Eventually semantic effects
• Retrieval cues don’t help
– Information was not even encoded
• Nondeclarative stuff, skills etc, are the
last to go

17. Treatment
• Most drugs target the cholinergic
system
• This disease not only affects the victim,
but also his/her family
• NGF is promising
• Treatments will come, but, reversal, I
dunno
• Respite care is key for the family

18. Conclusions
• Frankly there is not a great deal of hope
for most amnesiacs
• That said, neuroscience is moving
pretty fast
• Has helped us understand normal
function