Question

1. Damage to the diencephalon can lead to:

a)

difficulty determining what information to store.

b)

difficulty remembering one's identity.

c)

anterograde amnesia and confabulation.

d)

retrograde amnesia, but not anterograde amnesia.

2. Spreading activation has been used to explain:

	why context impacts recall but not recognition performance
	the DRM effect
	the spacing effect
	all of the above

Answer 1

• 1.Damage to the diencephalon can lead to anterograde amnesia and confabulation.
• The diencephalon is a collection of brain structures, including the thalamus, hypothalamus, and mammillary bodies. Damage to these areas can cause anterograde amnesia as seen in a condition called Korsokoff's syndrome, which occurs in people who are chronic and severe alcoholics.
• 2.Spreading activation has been used to explain why context impacts recall but not recognition performance.
• According to this theory, information is encoded in an all-or-none manner into cognitive units and the strength of these units increases with practice and decays with delay. The essential process to memory performance is the retrieval operation.
• It is proposed that the cognitive units form an interconnected network and that retrieval is performed by spreading activation throughout the network. Level of activation in the network determines rate and probability of recall.