NEUR 2600 Lecture Notes - Lecture 14: Thiamine, Metaplasticity, Growth Factor
CHAPTER 14: HOW DO WE LEARN AND REMEMBER
● The brain is plastic
○ Experiences that change the brain
■ Development
■ Culture
■ Preferences
■ Coping
○ Learning is common to these experiences
○ Neuroplasticity: the nervous system’s potential for physical or chemical change,
which enhances its adaptability
● Connecting learning and memory
○ Learning
■ A change in an organism’s behaviour as a result of experience
○ Memory
■ The ability to recall or recognize previous experience
■ Memory trace
● A mental representation of a previous experience
● Corresponds to a physical change in the brain, most likely
involving synapses
○ Studying learning and memory in the laboratory
■ Pavlovian conditioning
● Learning procedure whereby a neutral stimulus such as tone (CS)
comes to elicit a response (CR) because of its repeated pairing
with some event such as the delivery of food (US); also called
classical conditioning or respondent conditioning
● CS + US= UR; after several pairings: CS=CR
● Conditioned stimulus (CS)
○ In pavlovian conditioning, an originally neutral stimulus that
triggers a conditioned response (CR) after association with
an unconditioned stimulus
● Unconditioned stimulus (US)
○ A stimulus that unconditionally- naturally and
automatically- triggers an unconditioned response (UR)
● Unconditioned response
○ In classical conditioning, the unlearned, naturally occurring
response to the unconditioned stimulus, such as salivation
when food is in the mouth
● Conditioned response
○ In pavlovian conditioning, the learned response to a
formerly neutral conditioned stimulus
■ Eye-blink conditioning
● A tone (CS) is associated with a painless puff of air (US) to the
participant’s eye
● Blinking is a normal reaction (UR) to a puff of air
● Learning has occurred when blinking is a response to the CS
alone (CR)
■ Fear conditioning
● A tone (CS) is present just before a brief, unexpected mild electric
shock (US). When the CS is presented later, without the shock,
the animal acts afraid (CR), becoming motionless
●
■ Operant conditioning
● Edward Thorndike (1898)
○ Learning procedure in which the consequences (such as
obtaining a reward) of a particular behaviour (such as
pressing a bar) increase or decrease the probability of the
behaviour occurring again
○ Also called instrumental conditioning
○ Thorndike’s puzzle box
■ Cat gradually learned that its actions had
consequences: on the initial trial, the cat touched
the releasing mechanism only by chance as it
restlessly paced inside the box
■ Cat learned that something it had done opened the
door, and it tended to repeat its behaviours from
just before the door opened
■
○ Two categories of memory
■ Implicit memory
● Unconscious memory: subjects demonstrate knowledge, such as
a skill, conditioned response, or recalling events on prompting, but
cannot explicitly retrieve information
■ Explicit memory
● Conscious memory: subjects can retrieve an item and indicate that
they know they retrieved the correct item
■ Gollin figure test
● On a retention test, participants identify the image sooner,
indicating some form of memory for the image
● Amnesic subjects also show improvement on this test, even
though they do not recall taking it
■ Implicit motor-skills learning
● People with amnesia, a partial or total loss of memory, perform at
normal on tests of implicit memory
○ Presented with the same task a week later, both controls
and amnesics take less time to perform it
○ Amnesics fail to recall having performed the task before
Document Summary
Chapter 14: how do we learn and remember. Neuroplasticity: the nervous system"s potential for physical or chemical change, which enhances its adaptability. A change in an organism"s behaviour as a result of experience. The ability to recall or recognize previous experience. A mental representation of a previous experience. Corresponds to a physical change in the brain, most likely involving synapses. Studying learning and memory in the laboratory. Learning procedure whereby a neutral stimulus such as tone (cs) comes to elicit a response (cr) because of its repeated pairing with some event such as the delivery of food (us); also called classical conditioning or respondent conditioning. Cs + us= ur; after several pairings: cs=cr. In pavlovian conditioning, an originally neutral stimulus that triggers a conditioned response (cr) after association with an unconditioned stimulus. A stimulus that unconditionally- naturally and automatically- triggers an unconditioned response (ur)
