Human Memory
EXP 4504
Ira Fischler
• Welcome and introductions
• A look at the Web Page
• Overview of course
– Integrating different perspectives
– What you’ll be doing
• Themes in the study of memory
THEMES IN THE STUDY OF
HUMAN MEMORY
• How should memory be described?
–
–
–
–
Phenomenological
Behavioral
Information processing
Biological
• What does it include? Is memory
singular or plural?
–
–
–
–
Episodic versus semantic
Declarative versus procedural
Short term versus long-term
Implicit versus explicit
• How are lab studies related to
“everyday memory?”
– The issue ecological validity
SCHACTER’S THEMES:
MEMORY’S “FRAGILE POWER”
• Memory is powerful
– Who we are is what we remember
– Its role in everyday tasks
– Normally functions in the background
• Memory is fragile
– Omissions, distortions and constructions
in everyday life
– These may be adaptive
– It’s vulnerable to a host of impairments
• Memory is not singular
– Differences based on duration, content,
accessibility
– Different processes can be selectively
impaired
– And tied to different brain regions
– The search for “dissociations”
MEMORY’S FRAGILE POWER
(cont’d)
• Remembering is an act of synthesis
– Combining fragments of the past with
present state and goals
– Memory as an attribution
– Different subjective states of memory
(e.g., remember or know?)
• Memory has both automatic and
effortful aspects
– Most remembering as a mixture of the
two
– Different brain regions involved in
automatic and strategic aspects of
memory?
• The challenge of understanding
memory
– The case of Kim Peek, the “Rain Man”
AN OBSESSION WITH MEMORY
• Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost
Time
– 1908-1922; 7 volumes, 3,000 pages
– Recollections, and meditations
• “I understood that all the material of a literary work was in
my past life, I understood that I had acquired it in the
midst of frivolous amusements, in idleness, in tenderness
and in pain, stored up by me without my divining its
destination or even its survival, as the seed has in reserve
all the ingredients which will nourish the plant.”
• "a perfume smelled in that past time, a remembered light
shining into our room, will suddenly bring back so vividly,
that it fills us with . . . intoxication, so that we become
completely indifferent to what is usually called 'real life.' "
TWO CASES OF AMNESIA
• GR (from Schacter 96)
– 67-yr old Italian poet & artist
– Stroke damages left thalamus
– Almost complete amnesia for “episodic
past” (retrograde amnesia)
– Little ability to remember new events
(anterograde amnesia)
– Near-full recovery a year later
• Sheila (from Campbell & Conway 95)
– 32-yr old school teacher
– Severe herpes encephalitis
– Damage to temporal lobes, right frontal
lobes
– Mild RA, profound AA (the classic
“amnestic syndome”
– Little hope for recovery
REMEMBERING VERSUS
KNOWING
• The remember-know distinction
(Tulving, 85)
– Importance of contextual and sensory
detail of episode
• Dissociations based on
– Divided attention at study selectively
reduces “remember” judgments (Gardiner
& Parkin, 1995)
– Elaborative encoding at study selectively
enhances “remember” judgments, and
– Study of pictures versus words selectively
enhances “remember” judgments
(Rajaram, 1993)
A RECENT CASE OF “MEMORY
THEFT”
• Binjamin Wilomirski’s “Fragments”
– 1995 book by Holocaust survivor
– 1999: Expose by Ganzfried
– Was it fraud? Or reconstruction?
A PHENOMENAL MEMORY
• Kim Peek, the “Rain Man”
– Severely abnormal brain
• No corpus callosum
• Dwarf cerebellum
• Other abnormalities
– Astounding memory
• C. 9,000 books
• Sports trivia
• Universal calendar
• All US zip codes
• The human mapquest
• Musical literacy
– Astounding encoding
• C. 10 sec / page
• Two pages concurrently?
– Developing new skills
• Piano playing and improvisation
• Composing?