The strange case of the woman who couldn't remember her past – and can't imagine her future.

The strange case of the woman who couldn't remember her past – and can't imagine her future.

כתבה מעניינת מאד על חיים ללא זיכרון אפיזודי.   

הכתבה מתוך האתר המעניין כשלעצמו:   

SDAM– SEVERELY DEFICIENT AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MEMORY

Why experts get it wrong

Why experts get it wrong: being knowledgeable about a subject implants false memories

 Sarah Knapton,   the telegraph 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2016/08/24/why-experts-get-it-wrong-being-knowledgeable-about-a-subject-imp/

The Interleaving Effect: Mixing It Up Boosts Learning

The Interleaving Effect:

 Mixing It Up Boosts Learning

Studying related skills or concepts in parallel is a surprisingly effective way to train your brain

By Steven C. Pan on August 4, 2015

Scientific American

Episodic and Semantic Memory

Dr. Mark A. Gluck, Professor of Neuroscience at Rutgers University

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-2s_7YvDq8

הרצאה מצוינת!  דר' גלוק מציג חומרים מעניינים, ומציג אותם בדרכים מעניינות ובצורה ברורה, בהרצאה זו על זיכרון סמנטי ואפיזודי.

A great lecture!  Dr. Gluck presents interesting findings in interesting and clear ways, in this lecture about episodic and semantic memory.

The Development of Autobiographical Memory

The Development of Autobiographical Memory. Robyn Fivush.   Annual Review of Psychology  2011.62:559-582.

http://www.psychology.emory.edu/cognition/fivush/lab/FivushLabWebsite/papers/Fivush2008AnnualRev.pdf

Autobiographical memory is defined as a sense of a self as continuous in time, linked across specific experiences, placed on a personal timeline that stretches back into a personal past, linked to the present and projected into the future.

This interesting paper assumes that autobiographical memory is a cultural activity.  In TULVING'S familiar conceptualization, episodic memory (memory of life events that are stored with reference to the place and time of their occurrence) and autobiographical memory are one and the same.  Fivush argues (not in a very convincing way I must say) that it's possible to distinguish between episodic and autobiographical memory.  I won't elaborate on this point, and focus on other interesting things in this paper:

The culture in which we live defines a "culturally canonical biography" or a "life script" –   how a life typically unfolds in terms of specified events at specified developmental points  (for example, school, college, marriage, children etc.).  Our culture's typical narratives and schemes shape the way we remember our personal past.  Autobiographical memory defines the self, and the present self defines which life memories will be more, or less, accessible.

Autobiographical memory is formed by reminiscing about an event with people that witnessed the same event and also by telling about events to people that did not witness them.  The act of telling about the event, and the active participation of others in the act of telling, shapes the way the event is remembered.  Reminiscing allows us to compare the way we remember an event to the way others remember the same event.  Through shared reminiscing, children learn to form a coherent narrative that creates a personal timeline linking past events and thus defining the self.

Apparently, there are significant differences in the way mothers talk with their preschool children about events they both shared.  Some mothers tend to elaborate, asking open ended questions and encouraging their child to recall more details about the event.  They lead the child through the event and help him remember details while weaving the details they remember and the details the child remembers into a coherent story.  Mothers with a less elaborate style focus on specific details and ask their child yes/no questions.  They don't help the child unfold the whole story.

By age 5-6, children of  elaborative mothers tend to tell narratives that are more detailed and coherent about their experiences.  By age 12, these children have first memories from a younger age than children of non elaborative mothers.  This is important, since people who can create coherent life stories are mentally healthier.

When non elaborative mothers were trained to elaborate, they succeeded in doing so even months after training.  As a result their children began to tell narratives that were more elaborate and more coherent.

Apparently, mothers and fathers are more elaborative when reminiscing with their preschool daughters than with their preschool sons.  By age 5-6, girls tell longer, more detailed and more coherent narratives than boys.

Autobiographic memory begins to emerge by the end of the preschool years, but fully consolidates in adolescence and early adulthood.  This is related to the development of understanding of time concepts.  Two - three year olds use the word "tomorrow" to refer to any event in the future and the word "yesterday" to refer to any event in the past.  Preschool children can accurately judge which of two events happened in the near or far past only if both events happened relatively recently.  If the events happened more than a few months ago, even 8 year olds have difficulties judging which event preceded the other.

The development of autobiographical memory is also related to the ability to link the present self with the past self.  This ability begins to develop around age 5.  In order to study this, researchers engaged children in play and surreptitiously placed a sticker on their head during the interaction (I hope the sticker didn’t stick too hard…).  They then showed the children a videotape of themselves in the playroom with a sticker on their head, either immediately after the play session or a few days later.  Three-year-old children did not make the connection between their depiction on the videotape and the sticker at all. They simply did not reach for the sticker. Four-year old children did reach for the sticker, but they did so regardless of when they were in the playroom. Even a few days later, they immediately reached for the sticker, assuming it is still on their head. Only at age 5 did children begin to understand the temporal connection between past and present self: If shown the videotape immediately after the play session, they reached to remove the sticker; if shown a few days later, they pointed and laughed but indicated that they were aware that it was in the past and the sticker is no longer on their head. Thus, it seems that it is only by the end of the preschool years that children are able to make temporal connections between the past and present self.

In another study, researchers asked preschoolers to predict how a child might behave in a certain situation (e.g., reactions to a new dog encountered in the park). They then told children about previous experiences of particular children (e.g., this child met a dog that frightened him). They then asked the children to link together these stories with predictions about behavior in the present. Children under the age of 5 had great difficulty with these tasks. Regardless of the stories told about specific previous experiences of specific children, they continued to predict that the child will eagerly approach the dog. At about age 5, children began to link up the past and the present; they predicted that this specific child will be afraid of the dog  and they were able to explain their predictions by linking previous experiences to the present through mental states that persist through time.

Does the state of our cognitive abilities affect the self?

A lot of our sense of self is embedded in our autobiographical memory – the memory of our life event, our "life story".  People usually don’t remember events that happened prior to the age of 4, and remember more events from the last 5 to 10 years of their lives.  People also tend to remember more events from the period when they were between the ages of 10 to 30 than from other periods of their lives. 

 Why?

 New and unique events happen in adolescence and early adulthood, among them events that are important for our self identity.   Due to their uniqueness, these events are kept in memory better.  They are also retrieved better, since they serve as examples to similar events encountered later in life.  This phenomenon of more memories between the ages of 10 to 30 has a cognitive explanation as well:  the cognitive systems and the memory systems (like working memory and long term memory) function optimally at this period of time.  That's why storage and retrieval of memories formed at this period is better.

The cognitive explanation for the phenomenon of more memories in the age range of 10-30 is related to the basic systems approach to autobiographical memory.  This approach argues that autobiographical memory depends on other cognitive systems since it involves the senses (the memory of an event involves sights, smells, tastes, sounds and touch) as well as language and emotions.  A deficiency in one of the cognitive systems will lead, according to this approach, to a deficiency in the content of autobiographical memory.

What do we know about success in verbal and visuospatial memory tests?  Women outperform men on verbal memory tests, while males outperform women on visuospatial memory tests.  Higher educated people succeed more on verbal and visuospatial memory tests than lower educated people.  Adolescents and young adults perform better on these tests than middle aged adults, and middle aged adults outperform older adults.  Performance on visuospatial memory tests reaches a higher peak in adolescence and early adulthood and deteriorates more steeply in middle age and older adulthood than performance on verbal memory tests.

One way to measure autobiographical memory is to compare between retrieval of a personal event right after its occurrence and retrieval of the same event after a while.  This procedure is usually done with the aid of diaries.  As the time gap between the event's occurrence and its retrieval lengthens, retrieval deteriorates.  Retrieval is affected by the valence of the event, its frequency (if it's very frequent it will be difficult to distinguish it from other similar events happening before or after this event, and so it will be harder to remember this specific event), and the amount of reminiscence (how much the person recalled this event in the time period between its occurrence and the point in time when memory for the event is tested).

This research

The relation between verbal and visuospatial memory and autobiographical memory. 

Kristo, Rouw, Murre and Janssen

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810014001792

was performed, like many other recent studies, through the internet.  The researchers created an internet site which has various memory tests, among them verbal and visuospatial tests, as well as questionnaires about autobiographical memories.  The site is open for every person who registers and takes as many tests as he wishes, when he wishes.

617 people wrote in the internet site about a personal event that occurred in the three days prior to writing.  They wrote, according to the researcher's requests, about the essence of the event, who was involved, where and when the event took place and described one important and one unimportant detail of the event.  They also rated the event's importance and emotional importance and its frequency.  The same people also took verbal and visuospatial memory tests.  After a period of 2,7,14,30 and 45 days the researchers contacted the participants (by email) and asked them about the events that they had previously described.

People who performed better on verbal and visuospatial memory tests performed better on the autobiographical memory tests (remembered the events better) than participants of the same age group that did less well on the verbal and visuospatial memory tests.  The ability to remember the personal event was more strongly related to the scores on the verbal memory tests than to the scores on the visuospatial memory tests.  The researchers suggest that a possible reason for this is that they did not ask visuospatial questions about the personal event (not at the time of writing nor at the later time).  Focusing attention on visuospatial aspects of the event might have contributed to a stronger relation between visuospatial memory and memory of the event.

Intelligence and cognitive abilities – Long term storage and retrieval

Intelligence and cognitive abilities – part six:

Long term storage and retrieval

is found here.

Memory is a very wide topic.

I've tried to focus here mainly on CHC conceptualizations of long term storage and retrieval, with minimal additions.