PSYC 211 Chapter Notes - Chapter 12-15: Amyloid, Premotor Cortex, Nigrostriatal Pathway
27 Aug 2018
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Learning and memory the process by which experiences change our nervous system (neurons are growing, they form new synapses) and our behavior is called learning. We refer to these changes as memories (memory traces or memory engrams). Memories can be transient or durable, conscious or unconscious, personal or impersonal. Memory traces can degrade or be corrupted, and thus be gone forever. They can also simply become inaccessible, either temporarily or permanently, but still exist somewhere in the brain. To determine if an animal has gone through the process of learning and has a new memory, we test them: we assess how their behavior changed and how the response to stimuli has been altered to previous experience. Non-associative learning refers to the phenomena of habituation and sensitization, which are when you start to respond differently to a stimulus just because you have perceived it (smelled, seen, heard it) a frequent number of times before.
