BHS 499-07 Memory and Amnesia

1. BHS 499-07Memory and Amnesia Memory & Development

2. Memory Changes • Memory is not stable or static. • Every experience we have changes our ability to remember, distorts some info while making other info easier to remember. • People’s ongoing development affects memory. • Infancy and childhood – skills get better. • Old age – some skills decline but others improve.

3. Infancy • Testing infant memory is difficult because they cannot understand or produce language. • Nonverbal behavior is studied to see how it changes as a result of some remembered experience. • The meaning of these behaviors must be inferred, so some findings are controversial.

4. Four Methods • Looking method – infants stare at the novel, look away from the familiar. • Nonnutritive sucking – infants suck more slowly when bored (seeing the familiar). • Conjugate reinforcement – mobile kicking under different conditions. • Elicited imitation – recall of how to assemble a toy or do some task.

5. Components in Infancy • Different memory components develop at different rates based on readiness of the brain to support them. • Semantic memory – infants can create and use categories. • Ability to make some basic distinctions at 3-4 months, superordinate at 14 mo, subordinate not until 2 years.

6. Components in Infancy (Cont.) • Episodic memory – using conjugate reinforcement: • Infants 3 mo remember to kick after 1 week • Rate of kicking varies with context (crib liner) • Using a new mobile in between makes it less likely they will kick to the old one. • The length of time an imitated action can be retained lengthens with age.

7. Components in Childhood • The brain continues to develop, so development continues into adulthood. • Semantic memory – children develop complex networks in areas of interest (dinosaurs). • Schemas & scripts appear around age 3. • Categories begin to be used differently.

8. Components in Childhood (Cont) • Episodic memory – Older children infer implicit associations (coffee stirred with a spoon). • Older children tend to use structure more often to remember (organizing furniture by room). • Strategies for remembering emerge.

9. Other Childhood Changes • Working memory – rate and effectiveness of rehearsal increases. • Capacity increases because speed of processing increases (longer words retained). • Bigger knowledge base increases retention. • Better able to inhibit irrelevant information – directed forgetting increases with age up to 10 years old.

10. More Childhood Changes • Metamemory – steadily increases with time. • Serial position – young children do not report recent items, but older ones do. • Young children do not understand how their memories work, but acquire knowledge. • Test taking strategies develop.

11. Problems with Studying Elderly • Longitudinal vs cohort studies. • Cohorts differ in level of education. • Longitudinal studies difficult to carry out. • Health problems distort results. • Most elderly are healthy but those who are not may have problems affecting memory. • Use it or lose it – decline in mobility parallels cognitive decline.

12. Changes in Old Age • Neurological changes – decline in neural conduction speed produces slowdown, especially for complex tasks. • Declines in frontal lobes – dorsolateral prefrontal lobes affected most. • This is the area where working memory and the central executive are found. • Decline in dopamine system.

13. Old Age Changes (Cont.) • Temporal lobe – older adults show global problems with learning and retrieving information. • Lateralization decreases – perhaps older adults need to recruit more cells to do the same job, decreasing specialization. • Imaging studies show that older adults use their brains differently than younger.

14. Theories of Decline • Speed theory – speed affects memory because some information is forgotten during the stream of thought. • Older adults process at 1.5 speed of younger. • Reduced working memory – reduced attentional capacity. • Light & Capps manipulated where a pronoun appeared in a short story. The further from the name, the more forgetting.

15. More Theories of Decline • Inhibition theory – related but irrelevant info clogs the stream of thought. • Difficulty doing directed forgetting task. • Unable to suppress info from previous tasks. • Self-initiated processing – less able to monitor their own memory processes. • Recall more affected than recognition, so problem may be retrieval and metamemory.

16. Components in Old Age • Episodic memory – decline in the quantity of information remembered. • Organization of the info stays the same. • Impact of positive info increases, negative info decreases, increase in mood congruency effects. • More susceptible to retroactive interference, larger fan effects.

17. Reliance on Schemas • Due to declines in remembering, reliance on schemas is greater for older adults. • More likely to make predictions using schemas. • Episodic memory for details most likely to be forgotten. • Semantic memory is stable or improves. • More likely to report semantic autobiographical information, not episodic.

18. Source Monitoring Problems • Older adults are less effective at source monitoring. • Reliance on internal feelings instead of memory for perceptual details leads to greater reality monitoring failures. • Confuse perceptually similar sources (photos) • More willing to produce false memories. • Less likely to use environmental cues to aid recall (less able to self-initiate).

19. Metamemory Problems • Prospective memory – worse than younger people at both time-based and event-based tasks. • Self-initiated processing worse (take cookies out of oven). • Not caused by inability to make a plan. • Better in real life because alternative strategies are used.

20. Metamemory (Cont.) • JOLs & FOKs less accurate than for younger people. • Similar to younger people in ability to adjust accuracy based on the info to be learned. • If a person thinks memory will be worse, it declines. • Activation of age-related stereotypes affects performance of elderly but not young.

21. Strengths in Old Age • Semantic memory – little decline and knowledge accumulates. • Older adults outperform younger ones on general knowledge tests. • Priming effects do not change. • Real-world knowledge is an advantage.

22. More Strengths • Episodic memory – some aspects remain strong and even improve. • Quantity vs quality – quantitative decline but qualitative improvement. • Organization stays the same or improves. • Higher-level memory – mental models improve. Better at remembering content of news stories & sources.