PSYC10006 Chap.4 Working Memory, Long Term Memory and the Amnesias
Working Memory, Long Term Memory and the Amnesias
A single container whose only activity is rehearsal cannot support what people obviously do with held information: reason with it, rearrange it, plan against it. This module replaces it with a multi-component system in which one part is a set of control processes rather than a store, and three others hold material of different formats.
It then turns to long-term memory, which divides at the top into what can be reported in words and what shows up only in performance. That division would be a piece of tidy description were it not for a case in which bilateral surgery impaired everything on one side of it and left everything on the other side intact, in the same person, from the same operation.
The module ends with consolidation, the process the pattern of loss implies: memories need the hippocampus at first and, after some years, no longer do.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Why a unitary store fails, and what the word working is doing in the name
- 02
The central executive as control processes, and why it is not a store
- 03
Sound-based, visual and spatial storage, and the component that binds across them
- 04
Regions associated with each component, and how much confidence the source gives them
- 05
Measuring control: interference tasks and reversed span, and the comparison that matters
- 06
Declarative memory, and the semantic and episodic division inside it
- 07
Four kinds of non-declarative memory, including where conditioning belongs
- 08
Retrograde and anterograde amnesia, and the temporal gradient on the first
- 09
What the bilateral case lost, and the three capacities it kept
- 10
Why a preserved skill with absent recollection is an argument about structure
- 11
Consolidation: pattern completion, then direct cortical access
- 12
Remembering as reconstruction, and why every retrieval re-encodes
Predict a pattern of loss from a location
- 1Name the division the structure serves. The medial temporal lobes support declarative memory, so the prediction runs along the declarative and non-declarative boundary rather than along a boundary of severity.
- 1Predict what is spared. All non-declarative memory, including skills, conditioning and priming, since those systems never depended on the damaged structures.
- 1Predict what is lost. New declarative memories cannot be formed, which is anterograde amnesia, and declarative memories from the last couple of years before the injury are vulnerable because they had not finished consolidating.
- 1State the principle once for both directions. In each case the question is whether the hippocampus is still required: for a consolidated memory it is not, which is why remote declarative memories survive alongside the loss of recent ones.
Key terms
- Central executive
- A set of control processes that directs and allocates attention according to the current goal, sustains it on a task and switches between sub-tasks. It is explicitly not a store, which is the most common error about the model.
- Episodic buffer
- The component that integrates sound-based and visual content into a single trace of the current episode. It exists because binding across formats is an operation neither of the other two stores performs.
- Declarative memory
- Long-term memory that can be reported in words, comprising factual knowledge and memory for personally experienced events. It depends on the medial temporal lobes, which is why damage there produces such a specific pattern of loss.
- Anterograde amnesia
- The inability to form new long-term declarative memories after the event that caused the damage. It is often accompanied by a shorter period of loss for memories formed before it.
- Dissociation
- A pattern in which one function is impaired while another is preserved in the same person. It is evidence that the two are distinct systems, because no single system of any severity could be simultaneously abolished and normal.
- Pattern completion
- The hippocampus reconstructing a whole experience from a cue containing only part of it. It is required while a memory is unconsolidated and unnecessary once cortical connections can carry the retrieval directly.
- Consolidation
- The gradual strengthening of connections between cortical areas until a declarative memory can be retrieved without the hippocampus. The temporal gradient is the observation that measures how long the process takes.
Working Memory, Long Term Memory and the Amnesias FAQ
Is working memory just a new name for short-term memory?
No, and an item offering that is testing exactly this. The older account was a single container defined by rehearsal; this one is multi-component and defined by manipulating information in the service of a task. A reversed span task demonstrates the difference on the same material as a forwards one.
How confident should I be about the brain regions for each component?
Report the mapping as the module gives it and no more firmly. It assigns a region to each component and supplies no study, no citation and no sample for any of them, so the safe formulation is that a component is associated with a region rather than that it is one.
Why does one patient count as evidence when a single case usually does not?
Because the pattern of loss falls exactly along a proposed boundary. Declarative memory was profoundly impaired while procedural learning proceeded at a normal rate and short-term memory was intact, all from one operation. Normal improvement alongside absent recollection cannot be produced by one impaired system.
What does the temporal gradient actually show?
That consolidation takes years. Memories from shortly before the damage are lost while much older ones survive, which means the older ones no longer needed the damaged structure to be retrieved. Without the gradient, consolidation would be a plausible story rather than a measured process.
Does priming belong to declarative or non-declarative memory?
The module lists it as non-declarative and also describes it as giving faster access to knowledge that is itself declarative, and it presents that tension rather than resolving it. Reproduce it the same way: priming is classified by operating without awareness, not by what it gives access to.
Assessment move
Draw the working memory model from memory including the long-term row underneath it, because the exchange between each component and its long-term counterpart is the part that gets dropped. Then practise saying what the executive is not, since describing it as where important information goes is the error the module explicitly corrects.
For long-term memory, learn the taxonomy as a single top-level split with two branches rather than as a list of seven terms, and note that conditioning sits on the non-declarative branch, which connects the first two chapters of this subject to this one.
When revising the case, rehearse writing the dissociation as two clauses joined by while, because the preserved half is what most answers leave out and it is the half that carries the argument.
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