PSY372H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Clive Wearing, Herpesviridae, Episodic Memory
Lecture 1 (January 10, 2017):
• What is memory?
o What is it like to not have memory?
▪ Adrift in eternal present
▪ Many people with Alzheimer’s
o Coherence, reason, feeling, action
o Glue for all of cognition
▪ Takes an instant and links it to everything else
• 1985 Clive Wearing with Herpesviral encephalitis
o Memory only lasts seconds
o Man is still lucid, but he can’t understand what is wrong
o Extreme case
▪ Emotional volatility along with memory loss
o Islands of memory are preserved like music and the love for his wife
• Memory
o Location where memory is kept
o Engram
▪ Representation or thing that holds the contents of experience
▪ Memory trace
o Process to learn
o Not a unitary process
▪ Clive could not remember a sentence from a moment ago, but he still
knew music
o Modal model of memory (good place to start, but it’s not exactly how it works)
▪ Sensory register which take in sensory perceptions about the world
• Visual
• Auditory
• Haptic
▪ Short-term store (can go into long-term store)
▪ Long-term store
• What is memory not?
o Biggest misnomer is that they are like computer files
▪ Easily accessible
▪ Doesn’t degrade
▪ In storage and retrieved when needed
▪ However
• What we remember depends on how we remember
• Field memory
o Exactly what I’m seeing, in the moment and remembering
it that way
o More likely to experience the memory as more vivid and
more emotionally intense and powerful
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• Observer memory
o Looking at a video of something and remembering
o Less emotionally intense experience
o Memories are passive or literal recordings of reality
▪ Problems with eye-witness accounts
▪ We are forgetting and recreating things all of the time
▪ Memories reconstruct how we have experienced events, not replicas of the
events themselves
▪ Sometimes certain biases are efficient
• You know a food is poisonous, you know to avoid the food
• Tulving’s Triarchic Theory of Memory
o Hierarchical model of memory based on the level of consciousness
o Episodic memory
▪ Mental time travel
▪ Able to go back and re-experience an event
▪ Always implies semantic knowing
▪ Autonoetic
• Need to have a representation of you who are and be able to move
it around in time
• Only humans have this ability
• Our ability to represent ourselves in abstract ways back in time is
apparently things only humans can do
o Semantic
▪ General knowledge
▪ You just know things, don’t have to experience things
• Knowing does not imply experience
▪ Noetic
• You don’t have to know about yourself
o Procedural
▪ Doing automatic things
▪ Anoetic
• No conscious awareness needed
• Classic view of the organization of long-term memory
o Implicit/non-declarative memory
▪ Without awareness
▪ Procedural memory
▪ Priming, classical conditioning
o Explicit/declarative
▪ With awareness
▪ Semantic
• Knowing the Eiffel Tower is in Paris
▪ Episodic
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
