PSY 250 Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Iconic Memory, Rhinal Cortex, Dementia

• School: Stony Brook University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 250
• Professor: Hoi- Chung Leung

Document Summary

Learning deals with how experience changes the brain; involves neuroplasticity. Synaptic connections involves reorganizing existing ones or modifying new ones. Memory refers to how these changes are stored and later reactivated. So, learning and memory may refer to different aspects of the same neuroplasticity (reactivation of connections). The more you think about something, the stronger those synaptic connections become. Lashley"s search for the engram or memory trace. Performed lesions - investigated what connections in the brain are important for memory. Found that no single cut or combination of cuts interfered with a rat"s learning and memory of a maze. (memory is not localized. ) Lashley thus concluded that mnemonic functions are equally and diffusely represented in the brain. Thompson and colleagues studied simple classical conditioning (e. g. eyeblink conditioning/pavlovian conditioning). Associating a neutral stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus (ucs): pairing two stimuli changes the response to the formerly neutral stimulus. First shocked its leg, then its head.