Human Memory EXP 4504 Ira Fischler

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Human MemoryEXP 4504Ira Fischler

• Welcome and introductions
• A look at the Web Page
• Overview of course
• Integrating different perspectives
• What youll be doing
• Themes in the study of memory

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THEMES IN THE STUDY OF HUMAN MEMORY

• How should memory be described?
• Phenomenological
• Behavioral
• Information processing
• Biological
• What does it include? Is memory singular or
  plural?
• Episodic versus semantic
• Declarative versus procedural
• Short term versus long-term
• Implicit versus explicit
• How are lab studies related to everyday memory?
• The issue ecological validity

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SCHACTERS THEMESMEMORYS FRAGILE POWER

• Memory is powerful
• Who we are is what we remember
• Its role in everyday tasks
• Normally functions in the background
• Memory is fragile
• Omissions, distortions and constructions in
  everyday life
• These may be adaptive
• Its vulnerable to a host of impairments
• Memory is not singular
• Differences based on duration, content,
  accessibility
• Different processes can be selectively impaired
• And tied to different brain regions
• The search for dissociations

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MEMORYS FRAGILE POWER(contd)

• Remembering is an act of synthesis
• Combining fragments of the past with present
  state and goals
• Memory as an attribution
• Different subjective states of memory (e.g.,
  remember or know?)
• Memory has both automatic and effortful aspects
• Most remembering as a mixture of the two
• Different brain regions involved in automatic and
  strategic aspects of memory?
• The challenge of understanding memory
• The case of Kim Peek, the Rain Man

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AN OBSESSION WITH MEMORY

• Marcel Prousts In Search of Lost Time
• 1908-1922 7 volumes, 3,000 pages
• Recollections, and meditations
• I understood that all the material of a literary
  work was in my past life, I understood that I had
  acquired it in the midst of frivolous amusements,
  in idleness, in tenderness and in pain, stored up
  by me without my divining its destination or even
  its survival, as the seed has in reserve all the
  ingredients which will nourish the plant.
• "a perfume smelled in that past time, a
  remembered light shining into our room, will
  suddenly bring back so vividly, that it fills us
  with . . . intoxication, so that we become
  completely indifferent to what is usually called
  'real life.' "

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TWO CASES OF AMNESIA

• GR (from Schacter 96)
• 67-yr old Italian poet artist
• Stroke damages left thalamus
• Almost complete amnesia for episodic past
  (retrograde amnesia)
• Little ability to remember new events
  (anterograde amnesia)
• Near-full recovery a year later
• Sheila (from Campbell Conway 95)
• 32-yr old school teacher
• Severe herpes encephalitis
• Damage to temporal lobes, right frontal lobes
• Mild RA, profound AA (the classic amnestic
  syndome
• Little hope for recovery

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REMEMBERING VERSUS KNOWING

• The remember-know distinction (Tulving, 85)
• Importance of contextual and sensory detail of
  episode
• Dissociations based on
• Divided attention at study selectively reduces
  remember judgments (Gardiner Parkin, 1995)
• Elaborative encoding at study selectively
  enhances remember judgments, and
• Study of pictures versus words selectively
  enhances remember judgments (Rajaram, 1993)

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A RECENT CASE OF MEMORY THEFT

• Binjamin Wilomirskis Fragments
• 1995 book by Holocaust survivor
• 1999 Expose by Ganzfried
• Was it fraud? Or reconstruction?

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A PHENOMENAL MEMORY

• Kim Peek, the Rain Man
• Severely abnormal brain
• No corpus callosum
• Dwarf cerebellum
• Other abnormalities
• Astounding memory
• C. 9,000 books
• Sports trivia
• Universal calendar
• All US zip codes
• The human mapquest
• Musical literacy
• Astounding encoding
• C. 10 sec / page
• Two pages concurrently?
• Developing new skills
• Piano playing and improvisation
• Composing?

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