Memory, dementia, articulatory suppression, semantic memory, episodic memory, amnesia, consolidation, prefrontal cortex, false memory, confabulation

1. Cognitive Psychology
Lesson 6 - Spring 2019
The remembering brain
Professor Valentina Bazzarin
USAC Reggio Emilia

2. A very long
goodbye
Ageing society
https://www.ted.com/talks/tony_luciani_a_mother_a
nd_son_s_photographic_journey_through_dementia

3. 50 million people
are living with dementia

4. Memory: short-term, long-term, working
The ability to learn and to remember has several evolutionary advantages. It enables
one to predict future outcomes on the basis of the experience and adapt to new
situations.
Plasticity: the brain’s ability to change as a result of experience.
Short-term memory: memory for information currently held “in mind”; it has limited
capacity.
Long-term memory: memory for information that is stored but need not to be
consciously accessible; it has an essentially unlimited capacity.
Working memory: a system for the temporary storage and manipulation of
information.

5. Memory’s main aspects
The capacity limit of phonological short
term memory
Articulatory suppression: silently
mouthing words while performing some
other tasks (typically a memory task)
https://youtu.be/bSycdIx-C48

6. Focus on working memory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_
memory
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWKvpFZ
JwcE

7. Different types of long term memory 1/2
Declarative (explicit) memory: memories that can be consciously accessed
Non-declarative (implicit) memory: memories that cannot be consciously accessed
(e.g. procedural memory)
Procedural memory: memory for skills such as riding a bike.
Semantic memory: conceptually-based knowledge about the world, including
knowledge of people, places, the meaning of objects and words.
Episodic memory: memory of specific events in one’s own life.

8. Amnesia as a deficit in consolidation; potentiation
Consolidation: the process by which
moment-to-moment changes in
brain activity are translated into
permanent structural changes in
the brain.
Long-term potentiation (LTP): an
increase in the long-term
responsiveness of a postsynaptic
neuron in response to stimulation of
a presynaptic neuron. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/neuroscience/mem
ory-consolidation

9. Different types of long term memory 2/2
Anterograde memory: memory for events
that have occured after brain damage
Retrograde memory: memory for events
that occured before brain damage
Korsakoff’s syndrome: amnesia arising
from long-term alcoholism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgxV-kfOnJ
E

10. Theories of remembering, knowing and forgetting
Recognition memory: a memory test in which participants must decide whether a
stimulus was shown on a particular occasion.
Recall: participants must produce previously seen stimuli without a full prompt
being given.
Familiarity: context-free memory in which the recognized item just feels familiar.
Recollection: context dependent memory that involves remembering specific
information from the study episode.

11. Why do we forget things?
Levels-of-processing account
Information that is processed semantically is more likely to be remembered than
information that is processed perceptually.
Encoding specificity hypothesis
Events are easier to remember when the context at retrieval is similar to the context
at encoding.

12. The role of the prefrontal cortex in long-term memory
Prefrontal cortex of the frontal lobes → online control of memory related processes
Retrieval-induced forgetting
Retrieval of a memory causes active inhibition of similar competing memories.
Directed forgetting
Forgetting arising because of a deliberate intention to forget.
Constructive memory
The act of remembering construed in terms of making inferences about the past, based on
what is currently known and accessible.
Source monitoring: the process by which retrieved memories are attributed to their original
context.

13. False memories and confabulation
False memory
A memory that is either partly or wholly
inaccurate but is accepted as a real
memory by the person doing remembering
Confabulation
A memory that is false and sometimes self
contradictory without the intention to lie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LmHH3Nra6
o