Explain How Biological Factors May Affect One Cognitive Process

Clive Wearing suffers from aterograde amnesia as well as retrograde amnesia. This means that he can not create new memories and lost all of the old ones he had. About 30 years ago he had gotten a herpes virus that attacks your nervous system. This illness has impacted his life in several ways. He became so ill that he can no longer form any type of memories except for realizing who his wife is, knowing his children, and piano playing. His memory was said to last anywhere from 7 to 30 seconds at most. His wife said while eaing he forgot what he had within the short span of time that it took his fork to reach his mouth. He could not link the taste of food with the name because he suddenly forgot everything. It was like starting over every 30

This study investigated which areas other than the hippocampus might be involved in memory. Historically, studies show that is the primary brain area involved in storage of memories. However, Wang, Teixeira, Wheeler , and Frankland (2012) predicted that the precision of the older memories is not dependent on the hippocampus.

Atkinson’s and Shiffrin’s (1968) multi-store model was extremely successful in terms of the amount of research it generated. However, as a result of this research, it became apparent that there were a number of problems with their ideas concerning the characteristics of short-term memory. Building on this research, Baddeley and Hitch (1974) developed an alternative model of short-term memory which they called working memory. Baddeley and Hitch (1974) argued that the picture of short-term memory (STM) provided by the Multi-Store Model is far too simple. According to the Multi-Store Model, STM holds limited amounts of information for short periods of time with relatively little processing. It is

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

Recollecting some of life’s experiences can be done very accurately at times where we can depict details even after a long period of time. For patient H.M. this is the exact case. Patient H.M. suffered from severe anterograde amnesia. Anterograde amnesia patients quite often show normal memory for events that have occurred prior to the incident. Therefore, making it extremely difficult to recall or store information after the incident has occurred. H.M. had been knocked down by a bicycle at the age of 7, began to have minor seizures at the age of 10, and had major seizures after the age of 16. Patient H.M. had brain surgery in the early 1950’s around the time he had been 27 years old. The surgery had been done to alleviate severe symptoms

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).

Extensive research in the field of memory and cognition have provided substantial evidence to prove that the hippocampus is a critical brain mechanism in the role of memory. Although an ongoing debate specifically in memory retrieval is the exact role of this brain structure when extracting memories. There are multiple models of the neural basis of memory retrieval that have posed a hypothesis to answer this exact question. The two theories that are dominant in this debate are the Multiple Trace Theory (MTT) proposed by Nadel and Moscovitch in 1997 and the Standard Model of Systems Consolidation

After a motor vehicle accident Tom was left with an acquired brain injury with damage to the frontal lobe and the left temporal lobe. As a result Tom has been experiencing many difficulties, in particular with his memory. Memory refers to the mental capacity to retain information and convert it into a form that can be stored and retrieved at a later time. Storing and retrieving memories involves passing information from one stage to the next and then retrieving that information from long-term memory. (Burton, Westen & Kowalski, 2012, p.261) Memory is an integral part of human survival and without it, learning new skills, such as the ones required by Tom to regain his loss of function, could never prevail.

Hippocampus is a small, curved region, which exists in both hemispheres of the brain and plays a vital role in emotions, learning and acquisition of new information. It also contributes majorly to long term memory, which is permanent information stored in the brain. Although long term memory is the last information that can be forgotten, its impairment has become very common nowadays. The dysfunction is exemplified by many neurological disorders such as amnesia. There are two types of amnesia, anterograde and retrograde. Anterograde amnesia is inability in forming new information, while retrograde refers to the loss of the past memory. As suggested by Cipolotti and Bird (2006), hippocampus’s lesions are

Anterograde amnesia, as described earlier, is an inability to form lasting memories after some disturbance to the brain, such as a brain injury or degenerative brain disease. The revelation of the H.M. case was the identification of the medial temporal lobes as memory consolidation and storage centers. Within the medial temporal lobes, the hippocampus has been identified specifically as a brain area involved in learning new information (Gluck, 2014). To put it another way, people with damage to the hippocampus will have difficulty forming new memories because they won’t be able to learn new things. The hippocampus helps to integrate objects in a spatial and temporal context. Episodic and semantic memory forming is impaired, otherwise known as declarative memory, though the person can remember declarative memory from the past. The process of encoding, storage consolidation, and retrieval seems to go through the medial temporal lobe with the hippocampus playing a key role. In anterograde amnesia, the consolidation process is damaged. Thus, in the short term new information can be learned, but since it is not consolidated, it can’t be retrieved, so it is forgotten (Webbe slides). Additionally, damage to the basal forebrain can cause anterograde amnesia. This is because the basal forebrain sends neurotransmitters to the hippocampus to tell it whether and when to process and store information (Gluck, 2014). In this way, the hippocampus is the main brain structure involved so

However, during high stress times the hippocampus, which is associated with the ability to place memories in the correct context of space and time, and with the ability to recall the memory, is suppressed. This suppression is hypothesized to be the cause of the flashbacks that often affect people with

Doctors and scientists dispute the exact role of the hippocampus, but agree that it has an essential role in the formation of new memories about personally experienced events. Some researchers prefer to consider the hippocampus as part of a larger medial temporal lobe memory system responsible for declarative memory. When a long-term, declarative memory is made, certain neuronal connections in the temporal lobe are strengthened, and others are weakened. These changes are fairly permanent, however some may take weeks or months before they are complete

These were thought of as the only two types of memory but during H.M. research they realized they were doing it wrong. Next came the separation of declarative memory into two parts; Declarative and nondeclarative. Declarative is memory that is nonvisual and like remembering names and faces and nondeclarative is memory such as skills, habits and emotions. The reason this discovery came through was because in H.M.’s ability to move was not impaired but his declarative memory was diminishing. This can be proven because of the tests ran on H.M. where he was put to the test of identifying famous people throughout history. He did quite well for a man his age during the decades prior to his surgery, but the same can’t be said for after. By observing this they figured out that the medial temporal lobe is not the storage for all of the brains long-term memory. Sometime down the road they figured out that childhood memories lost their emotional

Memory is defined as "the persistence of learning over time through the storage and retrieval of information." Our memory can be compared to a computer's information processing system. To remember an event we need to get information into our brain which is encoding, store the information and then be able to retrieve it. The three-stage processing model of Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin suggests that we record information that we want to remember first as a fleeting sensory memory and then it is processed into a short term memory bin where we encode it ( pay attention to encode important or novel stimuli) for long-term memory and later retrieval. The premise for the three step process is that we are unable to focus on too much

Without the hippocampus, the information from the short-term memory (STM) cannot be stored in long term memory (LTM). The hippocampus is a very important part of the human brain to store our memories. If we lost it, we will lose all our conscious memories. From Henry’s case, it also discovered that there are multiple memory storage areas located at different parts of the brain while the hippocampus is important to consolidate short-term memory to long-term memory. The removal of hippocampus caused Henry to suffer until he died as he lost the ability to make new conscious