Anterograde Amnesia and Memory Disorders

Anterograde Amnesia

• Anterograde amnesia results from damage to the medial temporal lobe, which includes the hippocampus, amygdala, mammillary bodies, and thalamus.

Korsakoff's Disease

• Korsakoff's disease is caused by thiamine deficiency, often due to alcoholism.
• Degradation of the mammillary bodies is associated with anterograde amnesia.
• Patients with Korsakoff's disease may confabulate and are unaware of their memory problems.

Alzheimer's Disease

• Alzheimer's disease is a retrieval problem, not a storage problem.
• Researchers have restored long-term memory in mice with fear reactions by tagging and light-activating neurons associated with the fear response.

Amnesiacs and Procedural Memory

• Amnesiac patients demonstrate intact procedural learning on performance tasks.
• Examples include HM's improvement on mirror drawing and patients learning to weave.

Threshold Reading Task

• Hippocampal patients displayed normal priming but impaired recall in a threshold reading task.
• Occipital patients demonstrated impaired priming but normal recall in the same task.
• This difference represents a double dissociation between declarative and non-declarative memory.

Selective Attention

• Selective attention allows us to choose which stimuli to focus on by "priming" brain regions to attend to specific objects, features, or spaces.

Posner Cuing Task

• During a Posner Cuing Task, the temporal parietal junction (TPJ) is more active during invalid trials and for the target, but not for the cue.
• The intraparietal sulcus (IPS) is active for both valid and invalid trials, and for the cue.

Attention and Sensory Processing

• Enhanced responses occur in the brain when a target is presented on the attended side during an ERP study and Posner Cuing Task.

Stroop Task and Attention to Color

• The Stroop task shows greater activity in the color area and less in the word area compared to a control task, suggesting that the parietal lobes direct sensory/perception regions to be enhanced or inhibited.

Disorders of Spatial Attention

• Unilateral neglect involves a deficit in attending to information on the contralateral side of space.
• Extinction refers to the inability to perceive stimuli on the contralateral side when there are stimuli on the healthy side.
• Balint's syndrome results in the ability to only see one object at a time.
• These disorders often affect the right parietal lobe, specifically the inferior parietal cortex (IPC).

Action Video Games

• Action video games that emphasize attention, flexibility, and speed can improve cognitive abilities.
• Non-action video games do not provide the same cognitive benefits.
• These benefits are not observed in individuals with ADHD, older players, or lazy-eye patients.

Cumulative Cultural Evolution (CCE)

• CCE is the process by which incremental changes to a cultural trait lead to improved performance.
• It requires social learning.

Chimpanzee Experiment

• Naive chimpanzees could not master a skill involving a drawer mechanism on their own, but could learn it by observing a trained conspecific.
• The more times chimpanzees observed the task being solved, the faster they were to start interacting with it and solve it.

Mirror Neurons

• Mirror neurons in the premotor cortex (frontal) are activated for both observing and performing an action.

Fine Motor Coordination

• The basal ganglia and cerebellum are involved in fine motor coordination.
• The cerebellum is involved in transitions between motor patterns.

Akinesia and Bradyphrenia

• Akinesia involves a slowness or absence of movement.
• Bradyphrenia is a problem with shifting cognitive states.

Parkinson's Disease

• Parkinson's disease results from the loss of dopaminergic projections from the substantia nigra to the striatum.
• This leads to reduced excitation of the cortex and increased inhibition of the thalamus.

Sleep and Memory

• The hippocampus replays memories during REM sleep, which is crucial for memory consolidation.

Targeted Memory Reactivation (TMR)

• TMR involves playing specific sounds while individuals are memorizing items, aiding in later retrieval.

Movement and Action

• The brain regions involved in movement and action include:
  • Motor cortex: Motor execution
  • Secondary/Association cortex: Motor planning and action perception
  • Cerebellum: Motor coordination and feedback learning
  • Basal Ganglia: State changes

Action Plans during Memory/Delay

• Action plans for both potential tasks are active during the memory/delay period.
• At the cue, one plan is enhanced while the other is suppressed.

Brain-Machine Interface

• A brain-machine interface decodes brain activity patterns to control a robotic limb or a person's own limb based on their intentions.

Long-Term Memory

• Long-term memory has two main branches:
  • Explicit/Declarative memory: Includes episodic memories (events) and semantic memories (facts and world knowledge)
  • Implicit/Non-declarative memory: Includes skills, conditioned responses, perceptual priming, sensitization, and habituation.

Disorders of Declarative Memory

• Anterograde amnesia involves difficulty forming new memories.
• Retrograde amnesia presents difficulty recalling past memories.
• Clive Wearing had both anterograde and retrograde amnesia due to bilateral hippocampal lesions and some prefrontal damage.

Explore the intricacies of anterograde amnesia and related memory disorders such as Korsakoff's disease and Alzheimer's. This quiz delves into the causes, symptoms, and procedural memory in amnesiacs, along with recent research findings on memory restoration. Test your knowledge on how different conditions impact memory functions.