Amnesiacs And Explicit Memory

"Memory is composed of several different abilities that depend on different brain systems (1). A fundamental distinction is between the capacity for conscious recollection of facts and events (declarative or explicit memory) and various

Hacker, J. S., & Pierson, P. (2016). American Amnesia: How the war on government led us to forget what made America prosper. Simon and Schuster.

Memory is defined as “the mental capacity to encode, store, and retrieve information” (American Psychological Association, 2002). It is a part of the means by which humans function. The process of forming and recalling memories involves various complex neurological processes and disruptions to these processes can result in loss of memory or the inability to form new memories. Amnesia is a memory disorder, in which, due to trauma or a head injury, certain parts of the memory is inaccessible. The two main types of amnesia are anterograde amnesia and retrograde amnesia. Anterograde amnesia refers to the inability to create new memories (Mastin, 2010). “Retrograde

Additionally, to further support these theories, researchers tend to conduct studies on the famous patient case, HM, to propose the consolidation deficit theory, in which those with amnesia cannot turn short-term memories into long-term memories (Dewar et al., 2010). However, researchers Dewar, Della Sala, Beschin, and Cowan (2010), mentioned that HM’s case does not fully explain why a patient with anterograde amnesia has the ability to get better at cognitive tasks despite being unable to recall having performed those tasks at a previous time. On the same hand, Duff, Wszalek, Tranel, and Cohen (2008) mentioned that most individuals with anterograde amnesia experience heightened intelligence, attention, skill, and reasoning levels (procedural memory).

Treatment: cognitive therapy, no medication for this disorder but you will need to treat pre-existing disorder(s) if there is one, family therapy, creative therapy, clinical hypnosis

A couple of articles were able to explain more about anterograde amnesia. One of those articles was “Widespread cognitive impairment in psychogenic anterograde amnesia”. The article explains the experiments scientists are doing to try and find out what causes anterograde amnesia. According to the article “Retrograde psychogenic amnesia is common but anterograde psychogenic amnesia is rare” (cite). In order to attain anterograde psychogenic amnesia the person needs to have widespread cognitive impairment. Psychological stress can put a lot of strain on the body and brain. Sometimes stress even can cause people to break down. In order to explain a cause of anterograde amnesia scientist studied a 38-year-old man.

Amnesia is a critical health issue that happens to all us in our lifetimes. Whether it is from sports, a health condition that turn for the worst, or our body just slowly deteriorate and break apart. Scientists and doctors collaborate to find a way to prevent amnesia or put it to a standstill. The sole reason why Amnesia struck me is because I personally experience some small form of amnesia. When I was younger, I got hit near my right eyebrow by a hockey puck. I lost consciousness for a minute and woke up on the ground, not remembering what happened and to discovered my head is bleeding. I often find myself forgetting a lot of things such as things that was recently spoken or discussed. However, it is not just me that prompted me to learn and research about Amnesia. My father often forget things as well. He is only in his 50’s and had multiple surgeries that made me wonder if his surgeries has to do anything with it.

Memory repression is more likely to occur in the adolescent mind due to underdevelopment of the brain.

The purpose of this experiment is to demonstrate that people can forget what they have just previously remembered. People are more likely to recall a stimulus correctly if the context is the same as previously presented; people are more likely to forget if the context is different. Participants were St. Francis Xavier University undergraduate students in Cognitive Psychology. There were three different phases of the experiment; Phase I: a series of 44 word-pairs was presented. Participants read the words silently; Phase II (cued-recall): a cue-recall test was imposed. Participants were to recall a word that matched the cue presented; Phase III (memory judgment): a cue and parget-pair were displayed. Participants were to remember whether they had recalled the target previously in Phase II. It was found that there is a statistically highly significant difference between conditions “same” and “different”, F(1,46) = 139.7, p < .001, indicating that our memories are often contingent upon context.

“Cognitive Psychology helps us try to understand the human thought process and how we acquire, process, and store information (www.careerinpsychology.org).” Amnesia is just one of many aspects that happens in the brain, and it hinders our memory. According to Solso, Otto and Kimberly, amnesia is forgetting caused by problems in the brain. In chapter seven, we talked about two types of Amnesias, and how they affect memory. Retrograde and Anterograde amnesia affect your memory as well as, other disease processes like Alzheimer’s and Korsakoff’s syndrome.

A fundamental aspect of human memory is that the more time elapsed since an event, the fainter the memory becomes. This has been shown to be true on a relatively linear scale with the exception of our first three to four years of life (Fitzgerald, 1991). It is even common for adults not to have any memory before the age of six or seven. The absence of memory in these first years has sparked much interest as to how and why it happens. Ever since Freud (1916/1963) first popularized the phenomenon there have been many questions and few robust empirical studies. Childhood amnesia is defined as the period of life from which no events are remembered (Usher & Neisser, 1993) beginning at birth and ending at the onset of your

The key to intentional forgetting is what happens when memories are retrieved. The importance of retrieval has been demonstrated in studies that compare recall and recognition memory tasks. Success on either kind of task requires that items be encoded and stored. Whereas recall tasks require active search and retrieval of a memory, recognition tests present the studied item as a direct cue to memory. That item needs only to be checked against whatever representation is stored. Because the directed forgetting eVect is strong on recall tasks but weak or absent on recognition tasks, theorists have concluded that retrieval inhibition, rather than unlearning, is key to intentional forgetting (Bjork, 1989; Geiselman, Bjork, & Fishman, 1983; but see

Fawcett, Lawrence & Taylor (2006) focused on whether deliberate forgetting of certain memories would impact the probability of recovering it later from long-term memory. The participants were fifteen females and five male undergraduate students who

The person may experience amnesia when the behavior of a person is being taken control by an alter. Being manipulated by alternate personalities, patients are therefore unable to remember personal information to an extent that it cannot be compared to normal forgetfulness. They are vigilant and aware of the surroundings but may face unexplained events such as finding themselves somewhere without remembering how they got there. The amnesia appears to be caused by stressful or traumatic experiences endured such as physical or sexual abuse, rape, financial troubles or natural

Studies that find no forgetting as a function of retention-interval duration tend to use sequential presentation of memory items, while studies that find forgetting as a function of retention-interval duration tend to use simultaneous presentation of memory items (Ricker, & Cowan, 2014). This raises the question as to whether the disuse, which accompanies lapse of time, is effective in causing loss of retention (Twining,