Read the summary and the most important questions on learning and memory: from brain to behavior | Gluck

• 1 Brain substrates of episodic and semantic memory

• 1.1 Cerebral cortex and semantic memory

• where are semantic mems stored?

  in the cortex.

  episodic nd semantic memory depend on wide variety of brain regions

• 1.1.2 association cortex

• what is the association cortex?

  cortical area sound sensory corica involved in association info in and between modalities

• 1.1.3 agnosia

• what is an agnosia? name 3 kinds

  because of brain damage, loss of ability to process particular kind of info.

   

  1. associative visual agnosia -> can see objects, hard to recognise and name them

  2. auditory agnosia for speech: can hear sounds an echo them but not understand meaning

  3. tactile agnosia: can recogn obj bij sight or decrip but not by touch

• 1.2.1 medial temporal lobe

• what happens with damage to medial temporal lobe?

  medial temporal lobe includes hippocampus, parahippocampal cortex, and some stufff.

  a patient had it removed and had no other issues, same personality and higher IQ - but anterograde amnesia

  this was because of removal of the hippocampus and associated nearby cortical areas

• 1.2.2.1 hippocampus & mem in animals

• what is found with hippocampal lesions in animals?

  - diffficulty learning new info

  - disrupted memory for spatial and temporal context

• 1.2.2.3.3 standard consolidation theory

• what does the standard consolidation theory say about how memories are consolidated?

  - hippocampus and related medial temporal lobe are initially required for episodic memory storage and retrieval, but their contribution diminishes over time until cortex is capable of retrieving the memories without hippocampal help.

• 1.2.2.3.4 multiple memory traces theory

• what does the multiple memory traces theory say about consolidation?

  memories are encoded by cortical AND hippocampal neurons, and the cortical neurons will never be independent of the hipocampal ones.

   

  the more connections grow by rehearsal, the higher the chance memories can be spared in hippocampal damage

   

  still unclear which theory is right -> big diversity in brain damage and resulting memory issues

• 1.3 frontal cortex in storage nd retrieval

• what is the role of the frontal cortex in memory?

  1. frontal cortex may direct what we remember and what we dont remember.

  possible that it turns off hippocampus

  2. also helps bind contextual info with event memory

• 1.3.2 directed forgetting

• what is a directed forgetting task and what was shown with it?

  learn word pairs

  - get first word of em: for some words told to remember other, for some swords told to forget other

  - remembered words better they were told to remember

   

  Anderson did fmri during learning/forgeting phase:

  - more hippocampal activity with 'learning' words

  - more active prefrontal cortex during 'forgetting' words

   

   

• 1.4 subcortical structures involved

• which subcortical structures are involved in episodic and semantic memory?

  the diencephalon (incl. mamillary bodies nd mediodorsal nucleus of thalamus) and the basal forebrain (structures at base of forebrain)

   

  parts of both are connected to hippocampus through fiber bundle called fornix.

   

  damage to diencephalon, basal forebrain or fornix causes anterograde amnesia