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Chapter 12: Learning, Memory, and Intelligence:

Chapter 12 Section 12.1: Learning, Memory, and Memory Loss:

Classical conditioning
• Pioneered by Ivan Pavlov
• Pairing two stimuli changes the response to one of them
o Conditioned stimulus
▪ Didn’t have any implicit motivation to the dogs
▪ But Pavlov gave the metronome meaning, making it conditioned
o Unconditioned stimulus
▪ No need to train the dog to salivate when it sees the food (aka the UCS)
o Conditioned response
▪ Repetitive response led to the dog salivating on its own
o Unconditioned response
▪ No need to conditioning it to salivate
• Trying to understand how learning occurs by how humans pair two things
together (unconsciouslyj)
• Used dogs as test subjects, Pavlov proved that the dog associated the metronome
with the food. Dogs would salivate when the metronome was turned on.
• KEY FACTS:
o The conditioned stimulus MUST be presented before the unconditioned stimulus
(IN ALL CASES)
o Time is key for classical conditioning
o Completely unconscious or involuntary process

Instrumental conditioning (also known as operant conditioning):

• Individual’s response followed by reinforcer or punishment

• Reinforcers
o Events that increase the probability that the response will occur again
• Punishment
o Events that decrease the probability that the response will occur again

Lashley’s Search for the Engram:

• Engram
o A physical representation of what had been learned in the brain
o Example: a connection between two brain areas
• Tested the rats to see if they remembered what they were recently taught after
cutting parts of their brains.
• Lashley’s hypothesis that there was one circuit for learning was disproven …
o … but he discovered some properties about the nervous system
• Equipotentiality: all parts of the cortex contribute equally to complex
functioning behaviors (e.g., learning)
 • Mass action: the cortex works as a whole, and more cortex is better

Types of Memory:

• Hebb (1949) differentiated between two types of memory:

• Short-term/working memory: memory of events that have just occurred
• Long-term memory: memory of events from times further back
1. Short-term memory has a limited capacity, but long-term memory does not
2. Short-term memory fades quickly without rehearsal, while long-term
memories persist

3. Long-term memories can be stimulated with a cue/ hint and short-

term memories cannot

Memory Loss:

• Amnesia is simply defines as memory loss

o Different kinds of brain damage can result in amnesia
• Two common types of amnesia related to disorders:
o Korsakoff’s syndrome:
▪ Brain damage caused by prolonged thiamine (vitamin B1) deficiency
▪ Impedes brain’s ability to metabolize glucose
▪ Leads to a loss of or shrinkage of neurons in the brain
▪ Often due to chronic alcoholism
o Alzheimer’s disease

Infant Amnesia:
• Not a disorder
• Universal experience
• Children do form memories—the question is why they forget them
• Hypotheses:
o Learning language and complex reasoning abilities don’t develop until the child is
older
o Changes in the hippocampus and growth of new neurons

Section 12.2: The Hippocampus and the Striatum:

The Hippocampus:
• Different areas of the hippocampus are active during memory formation and later recall
• Damage results in amnesia—and much of what we have learned about memory
has been from patients with localized brain damage

H.M.:

• Person called H.M. is a famous case study in psychology

• Hippocampus was removed to prevent epileptic seizures
• Afterwards, H.M. had great difficulty forming new long-term
 o Short-term/working memory remained intact
o Suggested that the hippocampus is vital for the formation of new long-
term memories

Anterograde and Retrograde Amnesia:

• Two major types of amnesia

o Anterograde amnesia: loss of ability to form new memory after the brain
damage
o Retrograde amnesia: loss of memory of events prior to the occurrence of
the brain damage
• H.M. showed both types of amnesia after the surgery

Semantic and Episodic Memory:

• Semantic memory
o Memories of factual information
• Episodic memory
o Memories of personal events
• Explicit memory
o Deliberate recall of information that one recognizes as a memory
• Implicit memory
o The influence of experience on behavior even if one does not recognize that
influence
• Procedural memory
o Development of motor skills and habits

The Hippocampus and Spatial Memory:

• Navigation depends on your surroundings and your spatial memory

• Damage to the hippocampus also impairs abilities on spatial tasks such as:
• Radial mazes: a rat must navigate a maze that has eight or more arms with a
reinforcer at the end
• Morris water maze task: a rat must swim through murky water to find a rest
platform just underneath the surface

Cells responsible for spatial memory:

• May-Britt Moser, Edvard Moser, and John O’Keefe shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in
Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of the cells responsible for spatial
memory.
• Place cells: hippocampal neurons tuned to particular spatial locations, responding
best when an animal is in a particular place and looking in a particular direction
• Time cells: some place cells also function as time cells that respond at a particular
point in a sequence of time
• Place cells receive input from cells in the entorhinal cortex
The striatum:
• Episodic memory, dependent on the hippocampus, develops after a single experience.
Many semantic memories also form after a single experience.
• However, to learn habits or learning what will or will not likely happen under a set
of circumstances relies on part of the basal ganglia
o The striatum is the caudate nucleus + putamen

The Striatum and “Will it Rain?” Example

• Multiple strategies for guessing yes or no with different probabilities of being correct
• With more trials, you would likely get more accurate—even if you couldn’t describe
your “strategy”
• Gradual, probabilistic learning depends on the basal ganglia

Other Brain regions and memory:

• Most of the brain contributes to memory

o Amygdala associated with fear learning
o Parietal lobe associated with piecing information together
o Damage to the anterior temporal complex results in loss of semantic memory
▪ Semantic dementia
o Prefrontal cortex involved in learned behavior and decision-making

Section 12.3: Storing Information in the Nervous System:

• Hebbian synapse
o A synapse that increases in effectiveness because of simultaneous activity in the
presynaptic and postsynaptic neurons
o Such synapses may be critical for many kinds of associative learning
• Habituation: decrease in response to a stimulus
• Sensitization: increase in response to a mild stimulus as a result to previous exposure
to more intense stimuli

Single-Cell Mechanisms of Invertebrate Behavior Change:

• The aplysia is a slug-like invertebrate that is often studied due to its large neurons
• This allows researchers to study basic processes such as:
o Habituation
o Sensitization

Long-Term Potentiation:

• LTP occurs when one or more axons bombard a dendrite with stimulation
• Leaves the synapse “potentiated” for some time and the neuron more responsive

Long-Term Depression:
 • A prolonged decrease in response at a synapse that occurs when axons have been
less active than others
• Compensatory process: as one synapse strengthens, another weakens

Biochemical Mechanisms:

• Studied most in the hippocampus, but occurs at many other synapses in a variety
of other brain regions, including the cortex, amygdala, and cerebellum
• LTP depends on changes at glutamate synapses
o Also GABA synapses, to a lesser extent
• Two types of glutamate receptors
o AMPA receptors
o NMDA receptors

• An illustration shows the AMPA and NMDA receptors during LTP. Two axons labeled
Axon releases glutamate repeatedly; glutamate molecules marked with G are received
by Two AMPA receptors and one NMDA receptor, creating a channel through the three
receptors. Text at the ends of the channel of AMPA receptors reads as Much Na (plus)
enters and text at the end of the NMDA receptor reads as Na (plus) and Ca (plus plus)
enter. A magnesium molecule labeled as Displaced magnesium molecule marked with an arrow
moves out of NMDA receptor. The Dendrite is labeled as Dendrite, much depolarized.

Processes of LTP:

1. Repeated glutamate excitation of AMPA receptors depolarizes the membrane

2. The depolarization displaces magnesium molecules that had been blocking
NMDA receptors
3. Glutamate is then able to excite the NMDA receptors, opening a channel for calcium
ions to enter the neuron
4. Entry of calcium through the NMDA channel triggers further changes
5. Activation of a protein sets a series of events in motion
6. More AMPA receptors are built and dendritic branching is increased
7. These changes potentiate the dendrite’s future responsiveness to incoming

glutamate Presynaptic Changes:

• Changes in the presynaptic neuron can also cause LTP

• Extensive stimulation of a postsynaptic cell causes the release of a retrograde
transmitter that travels back to the presynaptic cell to cause the following
changes:
o Decrease in action potential threshold
o Increase neurotransmitter release
o Expansion of the axons
o Transmitter release from additional sites
 lOMoARcPSD|31383405

Downloaded by Joyce Marie (0406jmarie@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|31383405

Downloaded by Joyce Marie (0406jmarie@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|31383405

Downloaded by Joyce Marie (0406jmarie@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|31383405

Downloaded by Joyce Marie (0406jmarie@gmail.com)

 lOMoARcPSD|31383405

Downloaded by Joyce Marie (0406jmarie@gmail.com)