1. Brain, Memory and Language Learning Insights from Psycholinguistics
Based on Prof. John Williams’s lecture
delivered in
Beijing Foreign Studies University, October 2015

3. What is MEMORY?

4. Two kinds of knowledge Knowledge ‘how’ Knowledge ‘that’
The distinction between knowledge how and that is attributed to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949).

5. Two kinds of knowledge Riding a bike Where you parked your bike today
Knowledge ‘how’
Knowledge ‘that’
Riding a bike
Where you parked your bike today
The distinction between knowledge how and that is attributed to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949).

6. Two kinds of knowledge Knowledge ‘how’ Knowledge ‘that’
Motor skills: riding a bike, playing tennis, catching a ball
Cognitive skills: cooking, musical improvisation
Perceptual skills: Recognising an original painting by Leonardo da Vinci, recognising Chinese characters
Episodic memories: what you had for breakfast, where you left your bike
Factual / “Semantic” memory: capital of France is Paris, whales are mammals
Autobiographical memory (episodic + semantic): I used to be slim! (facts about yourself)
The distinction between knowledge how and that is attributed to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949).
implicit / unconscious /
tacit knowledge
explicit / conscious knowledge

7. Where does the first language fit in?
Knowledge ‘how’
Knowledge ‘that’
Motor skills: riding a bike, playing tennis, catching a ball
Cognitive skills: cooking, musical improvisation
Perceptual skills: Recognising an original painting by Leonardo da Vinci, recognising Chinese characters
Episodic memories: what you had for breakfast, where you left your bike
Factual / “Semantic” memory: capital of France is Paris, whales are mammals
Autobiographical memory (episodic + semantic): I used to be slim! (facts about yourself)
The distinction between knowledge how and that is attributed to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949).
implicit / unconscious /
tacit knowledge
explicit / conscious knowledge

8. Where does the second language fit in?
Knowledge ‘how’
Knowledge ‘that’
Motor skills: riding a bike, playing tennis, catching a ball
Cognitive skills: cooking, musical improvisation
Perceptual skills: Recognising an original painting by Leonardo da Vinci, recognising Chinese characters
Episodic memories: what you had for breakfast, where you left your bike
Factual / “Semantic” memory: capital of France is Paris, whales are mammals
Autobiographical memory (episodic + semantic): I used to be slim! (facts about yourself)
The distinction between knowledge how and that is attributed to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1949).
implicit / unconscious /
tacit knowledge
explicit / conscious knowledge

9. Cerebrum (前脑和中脑) & Hippocampus (海马体) = Declarative system
Basal Ganglia (基底节) and Cerebellum (小脑) = Procedural system

10. Dissociations between implicit and explicit knowledge: Amnesia
Retrograde amnesia (逆行性遗忘) = loss of memories for events prior to injury
Anterograde amnesia (顺行性遗忘) = inability to form new long-term memories
Amnesia is an impairment of the declarative memory system (medial temporal lobe (内侧颞叶) / hippocampus)

11. Watch ‘Memory loss: A case study’

12. Recall of episodic memories in retrograde amnesia
(MacKinnon & Squire, 1989)

13. A simple framework for thinking about explicit and implicit memory:
Encoding
Time (mid-afternoon)
Place: in the lab
stimuli:
cat
neocortex:
MTL / hippocampus:
binding
See for example Squire (1992)

14. A simple framework for thinking about explicit and implicit memory:
Recall
Time (mid-afternoon)
Place: in the lab
Stimuli (recall cues):
neocortex:
enables episodic recall
‘recollection circuit’
MTL / hippocampus:
binding
See for example Squire (1992)

15. Recall of episodic memories in retrograde amnesia
(MacKinnon & Squire, 1989)

16. A simple framework for thinking about explicit and implicit memory:
Consolidation
stimuli:
neocortex:
MTL / hippocampus:
See for example Squire (1992)

17. A simple framework for thinking about explicit and implicit memory:
Delayed recall
Time (mid-afternoon)
Place: in the lab
Stimuli (recall cues):
neocortex:
MTL / hippocampus:
See for example Squire (1992)

18. Hyperspecific learning in amnesia
Saunders & Weiskrantz (1989) demonstration
Monkeys trained to select the right or left display (rewarded with food if correct)
There are four objects: A,B,C & D, which can be presented in pairs with left-right ordering randomized: AB/BA, CD/DC, AC/CA, BD/DB. In the first phase the monkeys are rewarded only if they choose AB/BA or CD/DC (they are given displays like AB DB and rewarded only for choosing AB). That is, they learn that only when A and B occur together and when C and D occur together are they rewarded. Both the monkeys with the hippocampal lesions and the normal monkeys learn this discrimination equally well. In the next phase, the monkeys are given a display like B - A - C and have to choose either the extreme left or right object. They are rewarded only for choosing the object that was rewarded with the central object during the first phase (i.e. B in this case). The control monkeys learn this task very rapidly, presumably because they can take the knowledge about which objects go together from Phase I and apply it in this new situation as a kind of elementary rule. In contrast the monkeys with hippocampal lesions were at chance in the second phase. They had learned that certain pairings were associated with reward, but this knowledge would not transfer to a situation where the objects appeared in a new configuration.

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30. Now choose the left or the right object

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38. Normal monkeys will generalise from the training (circle+rectangle or triangle+square) to the testing situation, even though the display looks different
Monkeys whose hippocampus has been surgically removed succeed in the training task, but will not generalise to the test.
Saunders & Weiskrantz (1989)

39. The complementary learning systems framework (O’Reilly & Norman, 2002)
O’Reilly & Norman (2002) stress the relationship between hippocampal and cortical learning in terms of the necessity to learn both the particular and the general. For example, you need to be able to remember where you last left your bike, and for this you need to form a memory on the basis of just one event, and be able to distinguish that memory from many very similar bike-parking episodes. This is the role of the hippocampus. On the other hand, you also might find it useful to make generalisations across similar bike-parking episodes (say, parking outside the Lecture Block) in order to work out an optimal bike-parking strategy (e.g. get here early on Fridays because all the spaces seem to be taken quickly). If memories are kept distinct then you can’t do this. It is the role of the cortex to slowly extract these kinds of generalisations by a learning process that is assumed to be implicit. O’Reilly & Norman argue that this division of labour between the two systems is a natural outcome of their neural architecture, with the hippocampus optimized for forming coarse, or sparse, representations of events, which tend to keep them distinct, and the cortex optimized for forming more fine-grained representations which bring out their similarities. The Dumay & Gaskell (2007) experiment could reflect this process of integration of new information (shadowk) with old (the existing lexicon) during sleep.

40. The sleep cycle and consolidation See Stickgold (1998), Marshall & Born (2007) for reviews
The notion of consolidation has gained increasing support, with the addition that this process occurs during sleep (see Stickgold, 1998, and Marshall & Born, 2007, for reviews). In behavioural studies on humans and animals it has been shown that depriving subjects of sleep disrupts retention of learned declarative information (e.g. learned associations between pairs of words) as well as non-declarative, in this case, procedural, skills (e.g. making visual discriminations in brief displays). In terms of brain activity, it has been found that during sleep the hippocampus and cortex are both active and perform a kind of cyclic dialogue which is related to the well-known phases of sleep - deep, slow wave, sleep (SWS) and a more shallow near-waking sleep in which rapid eye-movements occur (REM). These two phases of sleep alternate throughout the night in 90-minute cycles, although early on each phase is dominated by SWS, whereas later cycles are dominated by REM. The evidence suggests that during waking and REM sleep information is transmitted from the cortex to the hippocampus. During SWS information is transmitted in the reverse direction, from the hippocampus to the cortex. It has been proposed that the function of this information exchange is the consolidation or strengthening of memories in the cortex, a process which may go on for weeks or even years after the original learning took place (to account for the gradual reliance on cortical memories over time).

41. Dumay & Gaskell (2007) demonstration
Phoneme monitoring
You will hear some nonsense words
Bang the table if the nonsense word contains an /m/ sound

43. You will hear real words
2. Pause detection
You will hear real words
Click your fingers if you hear a pause within the word, and bang the table if you don’t

45. Recall as many of the nonsense words from Part 1
3. Free recall
Recall as many of the nonsense words from Part 1
as you can

46. recognition point time sh sha shad shadow shadow_ shade shambolic
Competition in the recognition of “shadow” before the experiment
recognition point
time sh
sha
shad
shadow
shadow_
shade
shambolic
shaft
shatter
shift
shin

47. recognition point time sh sha shad shadow shadow_ shade shambolic
Competition in the recognition of “shadow” after learning ‘shadowks’ (i.e. entering it into the lexicon)
recognition point
time sh
sha
shad
shadow
shadow_
shade
shambolic
shadowks
shaft
shatter
shift
shin

49. Recognition memory for the novel words is 88%-90% across all sessions.
Lexical competition only emerges after sleep. Sleep is needed for new words to ‘enter’ the lexicon and compete with other words in recognition.

50. Thank you