Sensation, Perception
and Beyond
The Biopsychology of Learning and Memory
What’s the importance of studying
learning and memory?
• Learning and memory underpin so many aspects of human behaviour
• Acquire new skills, knowledge, language, habits
• But also, who we are
• Think back to consciousness last week
• Sense of loss experienced when we have a family member diagnosed with
dementia
• Prevention, diagnosis and treatment
Lecture outline
• What brain areas are implicated in memory?
• What happens in the brain when we learn something new?
• Seminar/independent study;
- biopsychology of strength memories
- should we be able to erase memories?
How do we know what we know?
• By studying its absence
• And the neurological correlates of this
• Brief history:
• The case of H.M.
• Changed the landscape of understanding the link between cog and bio
• Who was H.M.?
• Henry Molaison, passed away 2008 (aged 82)
Different kinds of learning and
memory!?
• Amnesia
• Anterograde
• Retrograde
• H.M.
• Evidence that short- and long-term memory are distinct
• Amygdala, medial temporal lobes (bilateral)
• Hippocampus (most)
• Lateral = no memory loss
• Mirror-tracing task
• Showed improvement despite no recollection of it
• Evidenced a certain type of long-term memory
If you practice reading text that is mirror-
reversed, you will get better and better at
deciphering the text quickly. This is an example of
learning a perceptual skill, and does not require
an intact hippocampus
If you practice reading text that is mirror-
reversed, you will get better and better at
deciphering the text quickly. This is an example of
learning a perceptual skill, and does not require
an intact hippocampus
• The distinction is thus not between motor and verbal memory
• Declarative memory
• ‘knowing that…’
• Nondeclarative memory
• Things you can show people
Comparative research
• Monkeys need to remember
what object is new
• Form of object recognition
• Monkey declares memory for
red box by not choosing it
• Damage to medial temporal
lobes = impairment on task
mediated by time delay
Spiegler & Mishkin, 1981
Animal studies & Declarative
memory
• Selectively removed parts of the temporal lobes in monkeys and
measured declarative memory using DNMS task (Zola-Morgan et al.,
1994)
• Humans show greater impairments when there is bilateral damage to
medial temporal cortex and hippocampus (Rempel-Clower et al., 1996)
…not just the hippocampus!
Mammillary bodies
Patient N.A.
• Anterograde amnesia
• Limbic system structures that have connections to the hippocampus
• Dorsal medial thalamus
• Mammillary bodies
• Could gain new nondeclarative (procedural) memories
• Normal STM
• Issue forming declarative long-term memories
• Due to similarity in symptoms, it suggests that they are part of a wider
‘memory system’
Korsakoff’s syndrome
• Degenerative disease affecting limbic system due to thiamine deficiency
• But not hippocampus
• Processing system
• Connecting medial temp. lobes to thalamus and then to other cortical areas
• Lack a sense of familiarity
• Confabulate
• Likely frontal lobe damage
• Conclusion: hippocampus, mammillary bodies and thalamus needed for
NEW memories
• So, what about ‘OLD’ memories
• Research from brain damaged patients has revealed a further
important distinction within declarative memory
• Episodic
• Semantic
• Patient KC
• Poor episodic memory but intact semantic
Skill acquisition
• Process of learning a new challenging task by repetition
• What skills have you got?
• Ride a bike?
• Juggle?
• Sensorimotor
• Perceptual
• Cognitive
• Basal ganglia
• Motor cortex and cerebellum
Types of learning
• Associative learning – relations between events
• Cerebellum (eye blink conditioning)
• Humans - Logan and Grafton (1995)
• Cerebellum unilateral lesions (Papka et al., 1994)
• Instrumental conditioning – operant conditioning (skinners box)
• Unable to pinpoint brain areas crucial for this…
• Cognitive maps – understanding of relative spatial organization of
objects & information)
Spatial learning
• Hippocampus is crucial
• Selectively specialised cells
that encode for spatial
location (O’Keefe & Dostrovsky,
1971)
• New place? New map! (Moita et
al., 2004)
• Birds that hide food show
larger hippocampi than those
that don’t (Krebs et al., 1989)
Hippocampal place cells
(O’keefe & Nadel, 1978)
• 10 place cells (rat hippocampus CA1) recorded simultaneously over 50
minutes of foraging
Comparative context
• Bats
• Squirrels
• Elephants
Place cells and episodic memory
Miller et al. (2013)
• Links these two by means of the event's spatial context
• Close to 26 percent of the recorded cells were classified as place-cells
(95 of 371)
• hippocampus, amygdala, entorhinal cortex and anterior MTL
• These findings demonstrate that place-cells show similar patterns of
activity for traveling through locations in space as for memory recall
related to those locations
• Rats: place cells fire corresponding to paths/routes being considered
prior to decision (Johnson & Redish, 2007)
Learning – brain plasticity
• Changes in synapses are argued to be the basis of learning
• Presynaptic, post or both
• Amount of neurotransmitter releases
• Changes to the number/sensitivity of receptors
• Inhibiting inactivation of neurotransmitters (e.g., altering reuptake)
• Inputs from other neurons
• Extra depolarisation/hyperpolarisation of axon terminals and thus neurotransmitter
release
• New synapses can from, others can die back
Reminder:
Long-term potentiation
• Increase in effectiveness of synapses following repeated strong
stimulation
Excitatory post-
synaptic potential
(EPSP) increases
markedly
Molecular/physiology of memory
• 3 pathways in the
hippocampal
formation display LTP
• Excitatory
neurotransmitter
glutamate
• Receptor: NMDA
receptor
• Drugs that block these
receptors prevent new
LTP
Support for LTP as a mechanism for
memory formation…
• Knockout mice – hippocampi are incapable of LTP and have impaired
declarative memory (Rampon et al., 2000)
• Gene altered mice to overexpress NMDA receptors have enhanced
LTP and better than average LTM (Tang et al., 2001)
• Behavioural LTP studies (Whitlock et al., 2006)
H.M…
• Loss of hippocampal mechanisms like LTP to consolidate STM into
LTM?
• Such tiny microscopic changes have such an impact on human life…
Research
— THE BR
AIN OBSE
RVATORY
®
