Declarative Memory

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Memory is the means by which we draw on our past experiences in order to use this information in the present (Sternberg, 1999). Memory is essential in everyone’s lives. Without a functioning memory of the past, there is no way to function in the present of think about what lies ahead in the future. No memory means the inability to learn anything. Memory helps to process vast amounts of information. Further research has helped to distinguish the types of amnesias, memory manipulation, sleep and memory, and neurodegenerative diseases. The five cases will be going over their symptoms and what tests they may need to diagnosis them.
For the case of patient JB, it seems he is suffering from retrograde amnesia.
JB appears to be fluent in multiple …show more content…
It is a subset of implicit memory and is referred to as unconscious memory or automatic memory (McLeod, 2010). DRY is still able to read which shows that she still holds onto procedural learning and doesn’t have global memory deficit. The tasks that she needs to be observed in would be the mirror-tracing task by Milner or the incomplete line drawings of objects. With practice, amnesics showed an increase of accuracy (Brooks & Baddeley, 1976). Another category that deals with preserved learning and memory in amnesia is repetition priming, performance is enhanced as a result from previous exposure to an item, the pictures that are less degraded should allow DRY to accurately guess the drawings (Cohen, 2003). Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease occur from dysfunction and damage to the striatum, these areas are critical for skill learning (Cohen, 2003). Also the striatal damage in patients with Parkinson’s or Huntington’s prevents them from having as large an increase in time on target compared to neurologically intact individuals (Gabrieli, 1995). These patients showed no improvement in error rate in the rotary task, but amnesic patients improved. If DRY improves in error rate and performance of mirror tracing over time, she must have conserved procedural memory. The tests that have been given to DRY will help to know how much of her procedural …show more content…
The patterns of activity during sleep have been also found to reveal the order of cells fired during spatial exploration. This relation was stronger for sleep after the behavioral session than before it, but the activity during sleep shows changes formed by experience (Bate, 1995). The memory for temporal order of neuronal firing could be created by interacting between the temporal integration properties of long-term potentiation and the phase shifting of spike activity with respect to hippocampal theta rhythm (Skaggs, 1996). Sleep actually helps with memory, but sleep impairment will turn to memory impairment since memory is affected with a lack of sleep. Since Mr. W cannot sleep at all, he will not be able to strengthen his memories of experiences he went through, especially the day before. His insomnia will show that it causes major memory impairments because it will be difficult to retain declarative memories that are new. With a good night of sleep, Mr. W should be able to perform the transitive inference task more accurately since that will the task given to him. Potentially REM- dependent stage supports the incorporation of older memories into rich associative networks (Walker, 2010). A sleep EEG test will be given to evaluate Mr. W’s sleep stages when he sleeps regularly at night. The test will see the
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