This course will highlight the most interesting experiments within the field of psychology, discussing the implications of those studies for our understanding of the human mind and human behavior. We will explore the brain and some of the cognitive abilities it supports like memory, learning, attention, perception and consciousness. We will examine human development - both in terms of growing up and growing old - and will discuss the manner in which the behavior of others affect our own thoughts and behavior. Finally we will discuss various forms of mental illness and the treatments that are used to help those who suffer from them. The fact of the matter is that humans routinely do amazing things without appreciating how interesting they are. However, we are also routinely influenced by people and events without always being aware of those influences. By the end of this course you will have gained a much better understanding and appreciation of who you are and how you work. And I can guarantee you that you'll learn things that you'll be telling your friends and family about, things that will fundamentally change the way you think of yourself and others. How can you resist that?!
Lecture 8 - What is Not Forgotten (14:39 min)
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Del curso dictado por University of Toronto
Introduction to Psychology
2241 calificaciones
De la lección
Memory
This topic is Memory, and it's a big topic, and one I know a fair amount about. It was hard to figure out what to present and what to leave out. I tried to include some of the most interesting stuff. I hope you agree. After this section you'll be able to define and summarize topics such as False Memory and Amnesia.
Conoce a los instructores
Steve JoordensProfessor
Department of Psychology
Alright. this'll be the last lecture in the memory
section of this course. And so what I hope to do is kind of tie
things together a little bit. and, or at least, once again, put an
exclamation mark on that notion that there really isn't a thing called memory.
There's multiple memory systems. But I want to make that point now,
And kind of come all the way back to the first lecture this week.
but make it in the context, again, of the amnesias.
So, let's do that, Week 5, Lecture 8. So I've entitled this one, What is not
Forgotten? because what I really want to highlight
is that when, when we say that amnesics have lost their memory.
What we're really talking about is their episodic memory, if we can go back to
Lecture 1. So they're, they're not remembering
events or people, from their life. But they haven't lost their semantic rem,
memory, they still know what seven times six is.
They still know what capitals of places are.
And interestingly, they haven't lost other kinds of memory, or the ability to
still learn certain kinds of things. That's the story for today, so, I want to
begin by fi, kind of famous study from a guy named Edward Claparede.
Claparede was a medical doctor. He worked in, in a war that included
amnesic patients and the famous story is that Claparede would bring his patients
in the hallways, extend his hands. And one patient in particular, he would
shake her hand and he would say, hello, we met yesterday, do you remember me?
And this patient had anteriograde amnesia.
So she wasn't able to form new memories. So she said no, I do not.
And he said oh, well my name's Edward Claparede.
when I meet you tomorrow I will ask you my name.
And he did that a few days in a row, and she could never remember his name.
Which is of course what he expected. But then he did something a little
sneaky. He hid within his hand, a little pin.
Just enough to give her a little bit of pin prick when she shook his hand.
And so the first day after he did this, he went up and saw her.
Put out his hand, said hi nice to see you.
She shook his hand, and got the pin prick and pulled her hand back.
he did this a few days in a row, but it didn't take long at all.
Depending on what you read, some people claim it only took once, others said it
took a few times. But, before long, at least, she refused
to shake his hand. He would reach out his hand and say,
hello, nice to meet you. And she would say hi, nice to see you
too, but she wouldn't return the handshake.
And when he said why wouldn't you not shake my hand, she would say things like,
well, sometimes people hide things in their hand.
And he said have I ever done that to you. And she would say, well no.
But, of course, she didn't even remember him.
But she said, no, no I'm not saying that you're doing that.
It's just sometimes people do that. Okay, so the point of the Claparede story
is that even though this woman could not remember his name.
Or any new information from one day to the next, She was still learning
something. It's not as though her memory or at least
her total memory was gone. There were things that she was learning
and that she was remembering, even if she didn't remember learning.
Let's take this a step further. There's a lot of people who've done these
sorts of studies with amnesics, so if we go back to our memory system.
some people talk about memory in these terms.
This is one of the problems, I guess you'd call it, with the memory
literature. Is that there are sometimes different
terminologies that represent similar things.
So some people talk about declarative or explicit versus non declarative, or
implicit memory. And for declarative's they say it's our
memory of facts and events. Well, you know this is what we sort of
what we call Semantic Memory. This is what we sort of called Episodic
Memory. And we know by the way that there is a
part of the brain called the medial temporal lobe and especially the
diencephalon there. That is responsible for a lot of these in
the sense that we have damage in this area.
We have damage in retrieving facts, and events.
Declarative, it's given that term, because this is, these are the memories
that people know they have. They can declare, I remember what I had
for supper last night, or I know what the capital of Germany is.
you know, these are things they can declare.
But then the claim is there's this other non-declarative thing.
There are experiences we have that affect us, and change the way we behave in the
future, and therefore they are memory. But they are ones that we don't kind of
notice. so things like skills, and habits.
If we engage in some task over and over and over again, we almost always get
better at it. So we're getting better as a result of
previous experience, that's a memory. and we know that the striatum, a part of
the brain called the striatum, is what's often underlying, this sort of learning.
There's things called priming. Remember when I told you that if you go
into a hospital, your mind is particularly ready to hear or see
hospital related items. Well, that kind of memory and it's
memory, because we've learned in the past, hey when I'm in these hospital
things, these are the things I see. And so that past learning now makes us
expect to see those things in the future. And we know the Neocortex is a big part
of that sort of thing. But again this is non-declarative.
You know people are in the hospital and they just expect to see certain things
and they're just more readily able to perceive them.
But they're not thinking they're having a memory, that's the difference.
They wouldn't describe this as memory, but it certainly is the past experiencing
the program, present. All of this, sort of, classical
conditioning stuff we talked about. associations that are formed you know, a
car with a beautiful model and you start to lust after the car.
that's something when you see the car again, it's not like you remember the
beautiful model and then you go, oh, yeah, I like that car.
Because it was associated with a beautiful model, you like the car.
Okay, that association is something again, that's what we call
nondeclarative. and different parts of the brain, when
it's emotional associations, we know the amygdala is strongly involved, skeletal
responses. These are much more basic lower level
associations. We know that the cerebellum's involved.
and then there's also what's called non-associative learning.
We're not going to talk about that too much.
we're not going to worry, in fact, what, what I want to worry about mostly Is this
over here. The skills and habits, because that's
what's been studied the most with amnesic patients.
And, in fact, they do experiments like the following, this is what's called a
mirror drawing task. So this is a star and there's, it's
really two stars, right, one within another, so it leaves a sort of gap
around that decide. And the task you can give people to do,
anybody, is to take a pencil, and draw inside this star.
Well, that's easy enough, right? I'm not doing a horrible job with my
mouse right here. But, we add a twist.
The person is sitting up here, and we put a piece of cardboard, so that they can't
directly see the star. But this is a mirror, so what they can,
what they can see is their reflection. So, they can see their hand in the mirror
and they can see the star. But, the trick is, every motion that they
see is reversed in the mirror. So, when you try this, it's extremely
hard when you're drawing, we use that visual stimulation to guide our hand.
And now all the visual stimulation is reversed.
And so it makes us want to the opposite, we have to learn how to, we have to kind
of remap vision onto drawing. And so if you give this to a normal
person at first you'll see a lot of mess in their drawing.
They'll keep going outside the lines. But trial, after trial, after trial, they
start to learn how to remap that visual, dual input and they get better and
better. That's the skills and habits, okay?
Now, you can give an amnesiac this task, like HM, let's say.
Somebody with anterograde amnesia who cannot lay down new memories, at least
that's what we said, but we really meant this kind of memory, declarative.
It turns out they can get better at things like this line drawing.
In fact, they can do it almost as well and sometimes even a little better then a
non-amnesic patient. So, they're not impaired at all and it's
learning how to do this artificial task we've created.
Now of course we bring them in day after day and do this.
Each time we bring them in, we will say, do you remember this task.
And they'll say, they'll say, no, I don't have any memory of ever doing this.
And then we'll say, okay, we'll give it a try.
And it turns out they will be pretty good.
so they, they're gaining proficiency without any memory of the experience.
That really shows these different kinds of memory.
In fact, this kind of memory is what I originally called Procedural Memory.
Let's get to that. So, Procedural Memory, if we think of
this thing, so now they've even separated declarative and episodic.
So different, different, ways of thinking about this separate these memory systems
in different ways. But, in declarative, in this diagram,
they say declarative, I know that, that's kind of semantic memory, right?
The facts that you know, episodic, I remember when, so that's much more that
event memory. Again, some people would call this
declarative as well, I wouldn't. But this is procedural.
I know how, for example, to pronounce and comprehend new vocabulary.
I know how to tie my shoes. I know how to play piano.
Think of Clive Wearing, let me bring that back.
Clive lost all of this, and he lost all of this, but he still had this.
This procedural memory is very strong. It's the kind of memory that underlies
our ability to do things. And we learn it through repetition.
And it seems like the mechanism that we use to do that is different, than the
mechanism we use to do these kinds of memory.
Because even when this is broken this still is working fine in fact in one
study. They even taught amnesics how to program
computers they could learn quicker and quicker.
So they would be asked to create a program each day the same program.
They would never remember having done this before, but every day we brough them
in they caught on faster and faster. So they were learning something.
There's a procedural element to programming and they were learning that.
Okay, so what I think the amnesics provide is a very powerful example of
that notion that memory is not a singular noun.
It's an active processes, and it's, and there's a number of them and they do
different things. And they're responsible for different
abilities. and that's why there's really so much to
talk about in a memory course or a section of a course on memory.
That's why I had such a challenge trying to figure out which things to tell you
about. And there's so much I haven't told you
about. But, that's just how it is.
all right, so, rounding out our, our week on memory then, got a few videos for you.
this one's Larry Squire. He does a lot of work with amnesiac
patients, and he's going to talk about memory, procedural memory a little bit,
too. So you can hear a little bit from someone
who has direct experience with them. This is an interesting thing, I think at
the end my, my notion for the last week of this course is that we're going to do
a bunch of interesting topics. I'm just going to pick a bunch of things
from psychology that we haven't talked about yet and give you just bang, bang,
bang, interesting after interesting thing.
One of them will be sleep, we'll talk about sleep.
So, this is kind of prelude to that. this is a video talking about the
relationship between sleep and procedural memory.
And it turns out that dreaming may be very important for helping us learn these
procedural memory, tasks. So, check that out, now, there's a couple
of self promotion things here. This one is me giving a talk on memory,
and it's, it's a talk I gave at here at the University of Toronto, Scarborough.
And I've thrown in a link to it, because it's, it's me talking about memory in a
very different way than I have in this lecture series.
But it'll, I think it'll connect up quite well.
So, it, it's a nice way for you to see , hear about the same kinds of things but
from a, from a different angle. So, check that out if you're interested.
And you get to see me actually walk around, instead of sitting down in this
one. and finally the readings over here.
There's a, there's a paper open access paper about Edward Claparede.
it, it's not so much about the amnesia stuff that I started off here.
It's more about his views of education. But it'll give you a sense of who
Claparede was and what his passions were. And lot of, when I read this I thought,
how does this fit with the MOOC world. What would Claparede think of a MOOC?
So, you know, that's a fun thing for you. And finally, this is an utter, true,
shameless plug, I admit it. I did a course with a, with a company
called the Great Courses, in the States. It's, 24 lectures on just memory alone.
I include this partly to show you that, y'know, I could have, this, this whole
course is 16 hours on intro psych, that whole course was 12 hours on just memory.
So that's how much there is to talk about in memory.
If, if you've got, you know, really deep pockets and, and you're interested in
memory, go ahead, and bridges my course. But that's not really why I have it
there. I, I have it there just to kind of show
you, and give you a sense of how much there is to talk about, in the memory
world. It's a, it's a fascinating world, and,
and one that I'm deeply, involved in. Alrighty, so, from here, we're going to
go on next week, and talk about Social Psychology, and I guarantee you,
fascinating study after fascinating study.
I'm looking forward to it and I hope you are too.
Have a good one.
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