My view on learning and memory
Neurobiology of
Learning and Memory
Stephan Anagnostaras
Several modern disciplines study
neurobiology of learning and memory
Psychology
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Cognitive Neuroscience/Neuropsychology
Physiology
• Synaptic Plasticity
Molecular Genetics
• reverse, forward, and epigenetic approaches
Biology
• Neuroethology of birdsong learning
Learning versus Memory
Historically there was deep animosity between
behavioral & cognitive psychologists. Why?
Problem relates to view of associationism.
Behaviorism - the cornerstone is behavior
because it is observable. Goal is to find lawful
relationships between external events & behavior
Cognitive psychology - a key tenet is the
concept of an internal representation. This is
how knowledge is stored, and operations can
occur between representations. Can usually only
be inferred or known through introspection.

For this class:
Field is broad and the breadth is important,
so we will follow good examples to keep
depth
Several different fields cover learning and
memory. My view is there should be one
field and we would all be in the learning
and memory building. Course will come
from an eclectic perspective
Learning and Memory
Why learning and memory?
Learning - current views on this term are from the
field of learning theory/behavioral psychology.
A relatively permanent change in behavior as the result of
experience - BF Skinner
Memory - current views from in information
processing theory (cognitive psychology and
computer science).
The capacity to store and retrieve of information (comp sci)
The faculty of the mind by which it retains the knowledge of
previous thoughts, impressions, or events. (cognitive psych)
Origins of the study of L&M
• The study of learning is closely related to the
beginning of experimental psychology (around 1900)
and, before that epistemology (philosophical study of
how we have knowledge)
Nature-Nurture Debate
Renee Descartes (1641)
Nativism - knowledge is innatively given - e.g.,
knowledge of God, perfection, infinity
Rationalism - knowledge gained by reasoning logic
and intuition.
–In both instances, knowledge is independent of
experience
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 Origins of the study of L&M Origins of the study of memory
 
Ebbinghaus (1885)
Aristotle (350 BC) - 4 laws of memory
Used introspection to study forgetting in himself
1. Similarity
list of 12-16 consonant-vowel-consonant
2. Contrast
(CVC) nonsense syllabus (e.g., KEG, MIW)
3. Contiguity
4. Frequency memorize the list by repeating until recalled,
then record # of trials and wait 20 min - 31 d
John Locke (1690)
Empiricism (Associationism) - Relearn the list = SAVINGS
knowledge is gained by experience
as provided to the mind by the senses.
• Most forgetting in first 20 min, very little between
-these views advanced by others
20 min and 31 d
- esp David Hume in the 1700s
-Enquiry concerning human understanding, 1748

Origins of the study of memory Origins of the study of memory

 
Ebbinghaus also discovered serial position effect
(primacy & recency effects)

Glanzer, M. & Cunitz, A.R. (1966). Two storage mechanisms in free recall. Journal of
Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 5, 351-60

Origins of the study of memory

 
William James (1890)
Serial • argued there must be at least
position two types of memory
effect is
ubiquitous Primary memory
-information currently contained
in consciousness

Secondary memory
-stored information which can be brought into
consciousness

First of many suggestions that there were multiple

memory systems.

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Origins of the study of memory

The study of memory developed into information
processing theory in the 1960s
* Multi-store Memory System
* Sensory Memory
* Short Term Memory
* Long Term Memory
Origins of the study of learning
Behaviorists tended to be somewhat hostile and
engaged in many turf battles
In the domain of clinical psychology they were
battling it out with the psychoanalytic approach.
Very much against introspection, tended to become
extreme in this domain, and rejected cognition as
well.

* Information Processing in Memory In the domain of animal behavior, they were

* Encoding battling it out with the ethologists. Ethologists
* Storage believed everything was innate and nothing was
* Retrieval learned, hence behaviorists believed nothing was
innate and everything learned.

Behaviorist Tradition Behaviorism

 

Behaviorism focuses on objectively observable behavior John B Watson, the

and discounts unobservable mental activities. father of American
Behaviorism
Behaviorists mostly studied animal and human learning
focusing on observable behavior and ways to change – Began a scientific
behavior. Their studies of learning came to be known movement for
as learning theory and their studies of how to
Psychology, against
change behavior is known as behavior modification
several mystical
squishy fields, esp.
• Largely relationships between external stimuli and Freudian
events and their ability to influence behavior
Psychoanalysis

Radical behaviorism allows no intervening processes

(e.g., BF Skinner) while other forms are more lenient.

Watson & Raynor's famous experiment with "Little Albert" Watson & Rayner's (1920) famous experiment with "Little Albert"

 

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Watson & Rayner's famous experiment with "Little Albert" Behaviorism of the time was very anti-
genetics, in part because of the evil mental
 testing movement


Give me a dozen healthy infants, well-

formed, and my own specified world
to bring them up in and I'll guarantee
to take any one at random and train
him to become any type of specialist I
might select--doctor, lawyer, artist,
merchant- chief, and yes, even
beggarman and thief, regardless of
his talents, penchants, tendencies,
abilities, vocations, and race of his
ancestors - John Watson

Concept of "Tabula rasa" - organisms John Watson and

are born as blank slates Rosalie Rayner

Tabula rasa v. intelligence Russian Reflexology

 

• Notice our education system is still scarred by

the nature-nurture debate

• “Social scientists” who think everything is

nurture US UR CS

• Mental testers who think everything is nature

Ivan Pavlov
• As a result, very little study of genetics of CS CR
learning until 1992 CS-US pairing

Pavlov’s Little Albert Learning and Performance

 

Distinction between learning/memory and performance

an important problem in animal and human studies

Learning can only be inferred by performance:

in humans, a response or a change in behavior
in rats, a change in behavior

• Performance may not occur:

Latent learning [Tolman & Honzik (1930)]

CR Test anxiety

• Require extensive controls

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 Operant/Intrumental Operant/Intrumental
Conditioning
 Conditioning

Law of Effect (1911) Response is paired
“Of several responses made to the with an outcome (appetitive or
same situation, those which are aversive),
accompanied by or closely followed R-S*
by satisfaction to the animal will, all
Edward Thorndike other things being equal, be more Response increases
firmly connected with the situation, so -Positive Reinforcement-app
that, when it recurs, they will be more -Negative Reinforcement-avs
likely to recur… discomfort…
weakened. The greater the Response decreases
satisfaction or discomfort, the greater -Punishment -avs
the strengthening or weakening of -Time-out/Diff Reinf Other -app
the bond.”

Behaviorism split into two camps Learning theory today

 

Learning theory - theories relating Learning theory was more successful but
environmental events and behavior could ultimately self-destructed by dozens of
have a limited number of inferred wrong assumptions, most of which were
processes & phenomena excessively simplistic
e.g., association, generalization, etc.
• equipotentiality of stimuli
Radical behaviorism - could only make • single associative value
laws between behavior and environmental • indepedence of path
events (only things that are observable)- • invariance of path
typified by Skinner

Learning theory today Animal Cognition

 

• Survives primarily as a subdiscipline Cognitive Psychology emphasizes internal

of behavioral neuroscience mental representations and operations
between them, both it and computer
science are referred to as information
• Strong integration of principles and theory. Memory and knowledge are
rigor into other fields of study cognitive terms.

Tolman emphasized flexibility of animal

knowledge, in contrast to the very
Edward Tolman mechanistic views of most behaviorists

Also rejected the idea of Tabula rasa

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Tolman's path integration Tolman & Tryon: Selective breeding of
maze bright and maze dull rats
experiment  

Influence of Rearing Environment

 

Cooper & Zubeck (1958) compare with Enrichment first done

Rosenzweig & Tryon (1950) by D.O. Hebb (1949)

Behavioral Neuroscience &

Neuropsychology
Neuropsychology 

• Studies the breakdown of function after brain

damage in humans

• First original case of Lebourgne by Paul Broca

(1861), Broca’s language production area
(Wernicke-1894 - language reception)

Strong push toward localization

of function
Early push was from Gall’s
Laws of equipotentiality Karl Lashley, father of Organology (Spurzheim’s Phrenology)
and mass action Behavioral Neuroscience
Read the critique by S.I. Franz

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 Neuropsychology
Theodore Ribot (1882)
-Reviewed cases of retrograde amnesia
associated with brain damage
--in most cases memory acquired remotely before
the insult was preserved compared to that
acquired recently
--Ribot’s law of regression - loss of memory is
inversely related to the time elapsed between the
event to be remembered and the injury. Ribot
concluded memories need a certain amount of
time to become organized and fixed.
Neuropsychology
Alois Alzheimer (1906)
Reported an institutionalized female patient with
progessive dementia. After being shown objects
and recognizing them, she immediately forgot
them and circumstances under which she learned
them. Both anterograde and retrograde amnesia
were present, and obeyed Ribot’s law as well.
Sergei Korsokoff (1887)
Memory impairment in chronic Alcoholics which
obeyed Ribot’s law.

Neuropsychology Neuropsychology
 
Georg Muller & Alfons Pilzecker (1900)
- large number of experiments in normal subjects Several interesting case studies since then, but
-same as Ebbinghaus, but nonsense syllables in pairs
-Recall second item when probed with first from pairs
the most influential was not until the 1950s.

-Spontaneous recall of pairs from the same list
(perseveration) which had a time-gradient of a few
minutes -- speculated reflected transient brain activity
-Put distractor lists between training and recall, get
retroactive interference -- this follows a time gradient
so that distractors are only effective for a few minutes
--Concluded brain activity perseverates after new
learning and activity serves to consolidate memory.
Phenomenon of consolidation not studied a
whole lot by animal learning people until
recently
Phases of memory are a recurring theme which
we will struggle to understand throughout the
class.

Where are we today?

 

• Further than any other area of neuroscience

- not very far

• Strong stratification of the study of learning

and memory hinder vertical integration

• Try to build an interdisciplinary framework

from molecules to cognition

• No single engram identified at the molecular-

genetic level