The Neuroscience Center

Scientists have learned that Mid-Temp region is closely connected to widespread areas of the cerebral cortex, including the regions responsible for thinking and language.

 

Mid-temp: Not responsible for long term storage, but resp for FORC (forming, organizing, retrieving, consolidating)

 

Midtemporal regions are closely connected to wide areas of the cortex

 

Cortical Areas then coordingate long term storage of detailed knowledge abt facts and events and how to use it. 

 

 

 

Declarative memory

learn, consciously remember everyday facts and events 

coordinate perception, movement, emotion, and cognition, each of which contributes to the overall experiences captured in declarative memories.

cerebral cortex w/ hippo 

 

 

Children up to the age of about 7 learning languages using procedural, while adults use declarative.

 

Working memory

• new experiences = enters working memory 

• Maintain and manipulate (pfc)

• frontal and parietal lobes (speech, planning and decision-making)

• Studies on animals have shown that pfc maintains info and may incorporate sensory info

• co-evolved with speech

• Studies with young children point to a critical role for WM in learning language, suggesting that this memory system may have co-evolved with speech

 

 

Semantic memory

• facts, meanings, concepts and knowledge about the external world

• categorization scheme is depicted in the image

• verbal symbols

• frontal and temporal cortices

 

 

Episodic memory

• enters hippo, consolidates & stores in neocortex

• sensual facets of memory are stored in their respective areas

• personal experience, spatial and temporal data

• spatial mem mostly confined to the hippocampus, esp. right hippocampus, which seems to be able to create a mental map of space, thanks to certain cells called "place cells".

• also temporal lobe, but mainly in order to ensure that these personal memories are not mistaken for real life.

• Two structures are very important for episodic memory - the perirhinal cortex (PRH) which mediates the sense of familiarity about the past and the hippocampus (HIPPO) which encodes events and places

 

We have learned a lot about what episodic memory is by studying neurological patients who, following a stroke, brain tumours or viral infections such as herpes encephalitis, sometimes have very specific deficits in this type of memory. Studying such patients carefully has been the major way to work out the anatomical organization of this and other memory systems.

 

This difference in the neurological processing of episodic and semantic memory is illustrated by cases of anterograde amnesia cases (a good example being a case known as“C.L.”) in which episodic memory is almost completely lost while semantic memory is retained.

 

PFC in Memory recall

executive functions, ex. selection, rehearsal, and monitoring of information being retrieved from LT memory.

large network of posterior cortical areas that encode, maintain, and retrieve specific types of information — visual images, sounds, and words, for example — as well as where important events occurred and much more.

 

Long term memory

perceptual representation: store and later recognise things 

emotional and nonemotional learning are called conditioning.

 

Amazingly, amnesic patients can learn some things that they cannot consciously remember! They can be taught motor skills or to read backwards very quickly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amnesia

The damage that causes this distressing condition can occur in a number of brain circuits. Areas of the midbrain called mamillary bodies and the thalamus seem to be critical for normal memory, as is a structure in the medial temporal lobe called the hippocampus. Damage in these regions seems particularly to affect the formation of episodic and semantic memories.

 

Semantic dementia (a type of Alzheimer’s Disease) 

can cause fascinating patterns of breakdown of semantic memory. Early on, patients will be quite capable of telling you that the pictures they are being shown in an experiment are of a cat, or a dog, or of a car, or a train. Later on in the disease, they may hesitate to call a picture of a mouse a mouse, saying instead that it is a dog. What this confirms is that factual information is organised categorically, with animate information stored together in one place well away from inanimate information.

 

1. The attachment that develops between an infant and its mother has been studied in young chicks in a process called imprinting. Chemical transmitters that are released to act on receptors involved in storing some kind of an ‘image’ of the mother.

2. Young animals also need to know what foods are safe to eat by tasting small amounts of food at a time, and learning those that taste bad.

 

during imprinting or the tasting of food: cascade of 2nd msngers transmit signals to genes, then are activated to make special proteins that can literally fix the memory

Place cells

• fire APs only when an animal explores a familiar place

• Different cells code for different parts of the environment

• Different cells code for direction the animal is moving in

• using two systems:

  1. the map of space

  2. the sense of direction

• may help animals to remember where events have happened

  • Ex. finding food and water and way back to the burrow, nest, or other home is vital for survival

• relates to both semantic and episodic memory

 

Place cells may code more than just place - they may help animals to remember where events have happened.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning about places is impaired when a drug that blocks NMDA receptors is applied to the hippocampus

gene knockout animals of NMDAR in hippo= bad at learning & very inaccurate place cells

 

really serious forgetfulness might be alleviated by:

make NMDAR or AMPAR work better (i.e. increase amount current passed or increase number of R)

drugs to stimulate the cascade of 2nd messenger signals (2animals)

 

Cognitive Engineering:

"is concerned with mental processes, such as perception, memory, reasoning, and motor response, as they affect interactions among humans and other elements of a system. The relevant topics include mental workload, decision-making, skilled performance, human-computer interaction, human reliability, work stress and training as these may relate to human-system design."

 

The idea is to take advantage of what has been learned about how information is encoded, stored, consolidated (the ‘fixing’ process) and then retrieved, and then adapating behavior to better memory. 

Paying attention, spacing out learning sessions, and getting frequent reminders to help the ‘fixing’ process are all examples.