Assignment 6

   In this article, they address the seven sins of memory and they can be misleading at times. Our memory is known to change, especially over longer periods of time. Because of this, we often tend to leave out pieces of information or add inaccurate information to a past memory. This article specifically, focuses on the Clinton and Monica Lewinksy scandal. It mentioned how Clinton failed to recall incidents or statements when from when he testified before the grand jury. Incidents like this are surprisingly common, especially with eyewitness identification. Identifying an offender from a lineup can become difficult and even inaccurate due to alterations of our mind over time. 

    Scientists have/continue to study and research how our memory is affected in our day to day lives. They have come to name these distortions of memory "The seven sins of memory". Our seven sins of memory come from the combination of social, clinical, and cognitive psychology. One major contributor used to gain information in this area about how the brain works are studies that have been conducted on patients with brain lesions in regards to memory performance. They asses these changes in neural activity through localization. This is done through medical technology such as fMRIs and PET scans.  

    The particular sin that I would like to focus on is blocking. This refers to when we momentarily can't retrieve information that has been previously encoded into our memory. This sin in particular is especially frustrating because you know that the information is somewhere in your brain, but you simply can't access it at the time. It is also known as the tip of the tongue phenomenon. These retrieval blocks often occur in episodic and semantic memory. High stress situations are normally the cause of this mental block. Sometimes, you can retrieve the relevant phonological or semantic information regarding the memory but not in its entirety. Cues that are related to the information can help to assist in retrieving the information. This normally happens in older individuals and can be most prevalent in situations such as recalling names. 

     In the text, they provide an example study which included evaluating a crime scene. A college student's room was staged as a crime. The experimenters would then ask questions regarding specific items in the room, which fell under a certain category. When the experimenters asked questions about objects that did not fall in a category, the participants would have trouble recalling those items. This due to the fact that the participants' memory appeared to be blocked by retrieval of related items that were also those categories. In addition, the article also discussed a PET scan which ended up showing neurological evidence that the brain experiences activation localization during the act of proper name production. This helped come to the conclusion that the left temporal lobe was associated with retrieval deficits. 

     I particularly enjoyed this article because I could relate to it a lot. I often have trouble with the seven sins of memory, given that I am a generally forgetful person. Learning some of the scientific reasons that they occur helped me to understand the reasons why I forget things so often. Therefor I would say this article was both beneficial and informational. 

Schacter, D. L. (1999). The seven sins of memory: Insights from psychology and cognitive neuroscience. American Psychologist, 54(3), 182-203.

Assignment 5

In this article, the author talked about how memory is an increasingly important topic in the field of cognitive psychology. Recently, substantial progress has been made to attempt to create human like memory in deep learning systems. This process introduces key questions that are important to keep in mind. They are: What makes memory such a complex subject in deep learning systems? What are the main techniques used to represent memories in deep learning models? Where can we draw inspiration about memory architectures? 

Neuroscience and cognitive psychology are among the fields of psychology that have had the most influence on our knowledge of memory. Neuroscience mainly focuses on how memories are created, destroyed, and stored as either short term or long term. One case study that provided a huge breakthrough in this field was Henry Gustav Molaison, or patient HM. He suffered an accident when he was young that ultimately caused him to have seizures on a regular basis. When he became an adult, he went through surgery that aimed to cure his symptoms. Unfortunately, the surgeons accidentally cut a part of his hippocampus, which caused HM to be unable to create new memories. Post-surgery, he was only able to retain information for a few minutes and became unable to form new long-term memories. This helped lead to a better understanding of how memories are stored, created, and recalled. 

A substantial challenge related to the aspect of the neuroscience theory of memory is the binding problem. The binding problem is difficulty scientists have understanding how small fragments of memories can be put together by the mind to form a complete memory. All memories of different events or things are stored in small parts in different areas of the brain, and only one que can cause you to remember the entirety of the event. Although researchers are still unsure of the exact reason for this, a possible explanation is that parts of a full memory are linked by electromagnetic vibrations. These would then cause a link between memory fragments; which would activate them together when recalling a memory.  

To better understand this binding problem, we need to consider other psychological factors that impact memory recollection. A leading theory that explains associations in memory is called the priming effect. The priming effect is one of the most significant explanations for associations in memory. It states that being primed, even with one word, can trigger a flood of memories associated with the word. For example, if you hear the word “college” you may immediately think about classes, exams, or partying. The memories or events that one remembers through priming differs based on personal experience. 

This article was very intriguing to me.  Ever since I was young, I have always wondered how we formed memories and what science was behind it. I am not shocked that researchers still struggle to explain the binding problem. The concept of understanding it completely seems incredibly challenging. The information provided in this article ties in very well to what we have been learning in class and aided a lot in helping to connect aspects of the last couple chapters to real-life research.  

Citation: 

Rodriguez, J. (2018, July 25). Understanding Memory in Deep Learning Systems: The Neuroscience, Psychology and Technology? Retrieved from https://towardsdatascience.com/understanding-memory-in-deep-learning-systems-the-neuroscience-psychology-and-technology-78922ae6a1dd