Question

1. How would you distinguish amnesia from normal forgetting? When would you call an absent-minded person amnesic?

2. Different types of conditioning – a form of learning – are described in the NOBA “Conditioning and Learning” and in the Lecture 18 video lecture. See if you can describe an everyday example of conditioning. What kind of conditioning is it? What brain areas are involved?

Answer 1

1. Amnesia is a term that is used to describe (can be temporary or a permanent) memory loss due to some psychological effects, or neurological effects. Normal forgetting is directly affected by factors like sleep, concentration, priority, etc. And depending upon those factors it may be permanent or temporary. Amnesia mostly affects either the episodic memory or the ability to retain new information. When a person is unable to retain anything in memory, forgetting very often and is showing decay in episodic memory, blanking-out a lot, etc. they are starting to show symptoms of amnesia. An absent-minded person can forget due to absent-mindedness, but his/her episodic memories are not affected. If he/she concentrates they are able to gain the information and retain it while, the case is not the same for an amnesic person.

2. There are 2 types of conditioning involved in our daily lives namely, Classical conditioning (Pavlov) and Operant Conditioning (B. F. Skinner). Using classical conditioning we learn about our world around us. For example, recognizing the music that we love, salivating when you get the smell of your favorite food (stimulus-Stimulus learning). While using operant conditioning we learn to respond to the world around us. For example, studying hard to get a reward promised to us if we get a certain grade, working properly to get a salary raise (stimulus-Response learning). These 2 conditioning is a part of our everyday lives as you can see in the given examples.

Scientists and researchers believe that main parts of brain involved in conditioning learning are cerebellum, hippocampus and amygdala. Amygdala is the seat of our emotions, it is the one part involved in fear conditioning. It is involved with range of emotions involving sadness, fear, aggression, etc. Hippocampus is responsible for motivation, our core emotions and memory. It is important in conditioning because it helps in motivating us to work towards our goals or rewards (in operant conditioning) and it also inputs the conditioning into our memory. So, next time you are presented with the stimulus your body responds to it automatically due to the stimulus-response stored into your memory. Cerebellum is important for coordinating our nervous system and motor movements. It is responsible for our motor responses. It also has some emotional as well as cognitive functions but mainly it coordinates our motor functions and nervous system.