LEARNING AND MEMORY

Memory is one of the most fundamental mental processes. Neuroscientists study this process by
using extremely diverse strategies. Two different approaches aimed at understanding learning
and memory were introduced in this symposium. The first focuses on the roles played by
synaptic plasticity, especially in long-term depression in the cerebellum in motor learning, and
its regulatory mechanism. The second approach uses an elegant chick-quail transplantation
system on defined brain regions to study how neural populations interact in development to form
behaviorally important neural circuits and to elucidate neurobiological correlates of perceptual
and motor predispositions. Memory is defined in at least two ways. It is used to refer to a
presumed ‘mental storage device’ in which information may be held, as in the concept of a
phonological store. Additionally, it is used to refer to a putative ‘capacity of mind’, as in the
concept of episodic memory. Psychologists recognize different types of memory, distinguished
in relation to the types of information they process (e.g. words vs pictorial information), their
capacity or persistence (e.g. short-term vs long-term), and their operating characteristics (e.g. the
mental codes in which information is held).
The brain is the organ that is responsible for what we call the mind. It is the basis for thinking,
feeling, wanting, perceiving, learning and memory, curiosity, and behavior. Memory is a
fundamental mental process, and without memory we are capable of nothing but simple reflexes
and stereotyped behaviors. Thus, learning and memory is one of the most intensively studied
subjects in the field of neuroscience. Various approaches have been used to understand the
mechanisms underlying this process. In this session, T.H. and E.B. presented their original
approaches toward understanding learning and memory.

We define memory as a behavioral change caused by an experience, and define learning as a

process for acquiring memory. According to these definitions, there are different kinds of
memory. Some memories, such as those concerning events and facts, are available to our
consciousness; this type of memory is called “declarative memory.” However, another type of
memory, called “procedural memory,” is not available to consciousness. This is the memory that
is needed, for example, to use a previously learned skill. We can improve our skills through
practice. With training, the ability to play tennis, for example, will improve. Declarative memory
and procedural memory are independent. There are patients with impaired declarative memory

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whose procedural memory is completely spared. Because of this fact, neuroscientists believe that
there must be separate mechanisms for each type of memory that probably also require separate
brain areas as well. The cerebrum and hippocampus are considered important for declarative
memory, and the cerebellum for procedural memory. In any case, neuroscientists think that
memory must require alterations to occur in the brain. The term memory is also widely used
alongside specific networks in the brain, such as a group of structures or set of neuronal
connections that is thought to carry out memory functions. The ‘medial temporal lobe memory
system’ The most popular candidate site for memory storage is the synapse, where nerve cells
(neurons) communicate . In other words, a change in the transmission efficacy at the synapse
(synaptic plasticity) has been considered to be the cause of memory. A particular pattern of
synaptic usage or stimulation, called the conditioning stimulation, is believed to induce synaptic
plasticity. Many questions remain to be answered, such as how synaptic plasticity is induced and
how synaptic plasticity is implicated in learning and memory. Many studies concerning these
issues are now in progress.

We use the words learning and memory routinely in ordinary discourse but they are also

scientific concepts, defined formally by psychologists and neuroscientists. Lay usage of the term
‘learning’ is generally restricted to situations where there is some element of deliberation or
intent – such as in learning a language or learning to drive. One would not, for example,
ordinarily learn what one had for breakfast. In contrast, memory tends to be used most frequently
in reference to the recall of events that, at the time they happen, we do not deliberately memorize
– as in remembering what happened last Christmas.
In contrast, formal psychological definitions of these terms do not entail any reference to intent.
Learning is generally defined as ‘the act of acquiring information or skill such that knowledge
and/or behaviour change’. It may occur in a variety of different ways.

Definitions of learning and memory in neurobiology bring in such factors as the

neuroanatomical localization of a putative system, or the physiological and cell-biological
mechanisms involved. In stepping along this path, neuroscientists recognize that learning is an
act of acquiring information, as psychologists define it, but also assert that it is a process that is
thought to engage specific areas of the brain, to depend on specific patterns of neural activity

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and, importantly, to result in biological changes in brain cells that outlast the learning
experience.

Patterns of neural activity serve as memory cues and reactivate traces later. The resulting output
is what psychologists and neuroscientists agree as being memory.
Another meeting point for experimental psychologists and neurobiologists is that we all
recognize that we can subdivide learning and memory into distinct temporal phases or processes
– encoding, storage, consolidation and retrieval. Encoding has to do with the formation of
memories – what must happen for a memory to form in the first place. Storage has to do with
what lasts in the mind or brain, with different kinds of storage device mediating short-term and
long-term memory. Retrieval refers to the process of memory reactivation. The concept of
consolidation refers to something that happens to memory traces after they have been stored and
that alters their persistence or sensitivity to brain. This ‘something’ is not the same as memory
retrieval per se, although one view of consolidation is that it entails repeated acts of retrieval and
re-storage that may even happen during sleep.

The most obvious result of selective attention is that we tend to become conscious of the objects
of attention, as we can prove by reporting our conscious experiences. Episodic memory is
generally defined as memory for specific conscious episodes, like the sight of a coffee cup.
However, we also have evidence that the hippocampal system can be stimulated by unconscious
events, such as a subliminal picture of snakes or of emotional facial expressions.

Attention and learning

A great deal of learning happens simply when we pay attention to something new, and especially
if we interact with it. If you learn to play a video game, you might not try to memorize anything
deliberately, but simply by playing the game you learn more and more every time you try it. You
never need to have a conscious goal of memorizing them. They are simply acquired by conscious
exposure. This is labeled “incidental learning,” because the process of learning occurs as a spin-
off from merely paying attention. It seems likely that in natural situations much of our learning
occurs incidentally.

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Learning works best when you pay attention without being distracted. Trying to study in a place
where lots of interesting things are happening tends to interfere with learning. Psychologists have
used “divided attention” or “dual task” techniques to understand the role of attention (and
consciousness) to memory. In a typical study, participants are asked to learn material, like words
or pictures, while at the same time having their attention diverted by another task, like tracking a
dot on a screen or rehearsing letters in short-term memory. Learning under divided attention is
much worse than learning with full attention. Successful encoding requires attention and
presumably consciousness.

Exactly why is not well understood. One possibility is that deeper processing requires time, and
divided attention may limit the time for encoding. Another possibility is that consciousness is a
necessary contributor to memory. If one is not fully conscious of the processed material, learning
will suffer accordingly. A third possibility is that attention limits elaboration or organization,
both of which are known to improve learning and memory.
However, there is some evidence for learning without consciousness, especially in the case of
biologically or emotionally important stimuli. Learning unconscious input is often confused with
“implicit learning,” but these are very different types of learning. When a young child learns its
first language, the parents often repeat a word many times, using the singsong that we all tend to
use with small children. Toddlers are very attuned to words, and they repeat them spontaneously.
It is clear enough that they are conscious of the words and phrases they hear. While it takes time
for young children to learn the difference between the sounds of /ba/ and /pa/, these phonemic
distinctions in their native language are generally learned in the first two years of life. Thus
children who know their native phonology are conscious of the speech sounds that are shared by
most native speakers.
However, children are not known to consciously learn the rules of syntax—whether a word is a
noun or a verb, for example, or whether the verb of a sentence comes before the object. Many
perfectly fluent speakers never learn the rules of grammar at all. It therefore seems that syntax is
learned implicitly. That idea has been verified many times by asking people to learn “miniature
grammars.” These are typically learned without consciously knowing the sequencing rules of
words or other symbols.

“Implicit learning” therefore involves conscious elements, like words, from which a child seems
to infer a set of syntactic rules and regularities that are not conscious. Many other examples of

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unconscious inferences are known in perception, problem solving, and language. It seems that
implicit learning has a conscious component, therefore, but that it also has an unconscious rule-
inferring component.

However, implicit learning tasks always ask subjects to pay attention and become conscious of a
set of stimuli. It is the rules and regularities underlying those stimulus sequences that may be
learned without consciousness, just as we normally learn the rules of natural language without
knowing those rules explicitly. But we must hear spoken words and phrases consciously for
implicit learning to occur.

The terms implicit and explicit memory are used in the context of remembering—that is,

retrieval of stored information. Explicit memory refers to memory with conscious awareness—
namely, memory of which the individual is aware, can declare its existence, and comment on its
content, either verbally or nonverbally. For this reason, such memories also are known
as declarative memories .They are the kind of memory to which we typically refer in everyday
conversation when we ask, “Did you remember to call your aunt to thank her for the birthday
present?” or “Do you remember who won the Academy Award for best actor or actress?”

Implicit and explicit aspects of learning

Implicit learning is not accompanied by conscious awareness of a memory; the existence of a
memory is inferred indirectly from the effects it has on behavior. Priming effects are used
extensively to test for implicit memory. “Priming” refers to the effect of a stimulus in creating
readiness for a similar one. For example, showing a picture of a face will inc rease the processing
efficiency of a following face, as measured by faster reaction time and greater accuracy. Priming
can be either perceptual or conceptual.
5.3 Implicit learning in language
The past few years have witnessed the emergence of increasing studies of implicit learning in
language. This is perhaps not so surprising in that language acquisition, like implicit learning,
involves incidental learning conditions. Further, cogent use of language likewise does not require
explicit knowledge of grammar. Recently, several authors have begun to explore this connection
empirically. For instance, Saffran and colleagues (1997) showed how incidental exposure to
artificial language-like auditory material (e.g., bupadapatubitutibu…) was sufficient to enable
both children and adult subjects to segment the continuous sequence of sounds they had heard

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into the artificial words (e.g., bupada, patubi, etc.) that it contained, as evidenced by their above-
chance performance in a subsequent recognition test.
Based on these data, Saffran and colleagues suggested that the word segmentation abilities
demonstrated by these subjects were due to the transitional probabilities of successive syllables
which are higher within words than between words. Saffran and colleagues interpreted their
findings as representing a form of implicit learning. The connection is obvious when one
recognizes that language acquisition, like implicit learning is likely to involve, at least in part,
incidental learning of complex information organized at differing levels.
Part of the convergence between language acquisition and implicit learning suggested by Saffran
and colleagues can be attributed to the impact of computational modeling on the field of memory
research. For instance, connectionist models such as the Simple Recurrent Network have been
extensively used with significant success in both the language acquisition and implicit learning
domains (Christiansen et al., 1998; Redington & Chater, 1997). In effect, the problems faced in
both domains are quite similar: how to best extract structure from a complex stimulus
environment characterized by “deep” systematic regularities when learning is incidental rather
than intentional. The answer, in both domains, appears to be embodied by distributional
approaches.
You will notice that conscious cognition leads to explicit learning and memory retrieval in this
figure. An obvious example is deliberately trying to memorize a technical term in
cognitive neuroscience. What may not be so obvious, however, is that implicit learning also
happens along with learning of conscious or explicit stimuli.

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Thus Figure shows both explicit or conscious and implicit or unconscious learning. Episodic
memory is the storage of conscious episodes (also called autobiographical memory). Semantic
memory, usually viewed as memory for facts, is also conscious, in the strict sense that people
can accurately report the facts they believe. This is the standard operational definition of
conscious brain events . Finally, perceptual memory capacities, such as our ability to “learn to
hear” music and art, also involve conscious, explicit kinds of memories.
On the right-hand side of the Figure we also see the learning of implicit memories. Infants may
hear sequences of speech sounds, but they are not explicitly learning the rules and regularities of
grammar. Those are apparently learned unconsciously, as we will see later. In general, implicit
learning is often evoked by explicit, conscious events, but it often goes far beyond the events
given in conscious experience. Over practiced habits and motor skills are also largely implicit.
As we will see, priming effects are often implicit. Contextual phenomena are often implicit, such
as the assumptions we make about visual space, the direction of the incoming light in a visual
scene, the conceptual assumptions of a conversation, and so on. These are often hard to
articulate, implicit, and to some degree are unconscious (Baars, 1988).

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Learning and memory serve a critical function in allowing organisms to alter their behavior in
the face of changing environments. This chapter considers the nature and mechanisms of
emotional learning and memory, particularly the acquisition and expression of memory for
aversive (fearful) events. Of particular importance in this regard is work with animals that has
taken advantage of invasive techniques to yield extensive information into the biology of
emotional learning and memory systems. Hence, extensive coverage is given to the anatomy and
physiology of brain systems involved in fear memory based on experimental investigations in
animals.

Learning and memory are highly interrelated and cannot be fully understood independently of
each other. Most studies on memory in aging are cross-sectional and there is typically a lack of
information necessary for ruling out the influence of the health status of the participants. The
system model of memory employed in recent research usually distinguishes between episodic,
semantic, primary, and working memory. Memory performance is seen as influenced by
numerous properties acting at both encoding and retrieval stages of memory processing. Task
properties may generally be recognized in terms of cognitive support (low–high), although there
is no evidence of a simple relation between level of support and performance.

QUESTION: Define and differentiate memory from learning. Draw and discuss the information-
processing model of memory and give an example of how it works.
Please note that your answer must be handwritten and it attract just 10 marks.
It is due for submission 11th of February.