PSYCO258 Final: Cognitive Psychology Final Exam Notes.docx

• School: University of Alberta
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCO258
• Professor: Peter Dixon

Document Summary

Autobiographical memory (am): memory for specific experiences from our life, which can include both episodic and semantic components. Am are multidimensional because they consist of spatial, emotional, and sensory components. Found that patients who had lost their ability to recognize objects or to visualize objects, because of damage to visual areas of the cortex, also experienced a loss of am. This may have occurred because visual stimuli were not available to serve as retrieval cues for memories. But memories not based on visual information were lost in these patients; this suggests that visual experience plays an important role in am. Reminiscence bump: the enhanced memory for adolescence and young adulthood found in people over 40. Subjects with an average age of 54 created i am statements, such as i am a mother or i am a psychologist, that they felt defined them as a person.