The Effects of Prior Knowledge on Mnemonic Discrimination in Young and Older Adults, and in Hippocampal Amnesia

Simple item page
dc.contributor.advisorRosenbaum, Shayna
dc.creatorPishdadian, Sara
dc.date.accessioned2018-11-21T13:53:31Z
dc.date.available2018-11-21T13:53:31Z
dc.date.copyright2018-08-01
dc.date.issued2018-11-21
dc.date.updated2018-11-21T13:53:31Z
dc.degree.disciplinePsychology(Functional Area: Clinical Psychology)
dc.degree.levelMaster's
dc.degree.nameMA - Master of Arts
dc.description.abstractThe hippocampus is critical to discriminating between newly learned, highly similar stimuli; less clear is its role in discriminating representations based on prior knowledge. In this study, young adults, older adults divided by performance on a cognitive screening measure, and people with hippocampal amnesia were asked to discriminate between pairs of real-world familiar landmarks and well-known animals using the metrics of geographical distance and size. Results showed all participants had lower accuracy for judgments with more similar item pairs. Low-performing older adults showed selectively worse performance on judgments with more similar item pairs. Amnesic individuals performance appeared to depend on lesion location. Only patient BL, who has selective bilateral dentate gyrus lesions, had difficulty on the landmark task when judging between highly similar distances. These results reinforce the importance of investigating representation similarity, even for well-established representations, and offer insight into mnemonic discrimination across the lifespan and within amnesia.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/35565
dc.language.isoen
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectNeurosciences
dc.subject.keywordsMemory
dc.subject.keywordsEpisodic memory
dc.subject.keywordsSpatial memory
dc.subject.keywordsPattern separation
dc.subject.keywordsMnemonic discrimination
dc.subject.keywordsHippocampus
dc.subject.keywordsAging
dc.subject.keywordsOlder adults
dc.subject.keywordsAmnesia
dc.subject.keywordsHippocampal amnesia
dc.subject.keywordsMemory loss
dc.subject.keywordsSemantic
dc.subject.keywordsSemantic memory
dc.subject.keywordsPrior knowledge
dc.subject.keywordsDentate gyrus
dc.subject.keywordsLesion
dc.subject.keywordsNeuropsychology
dc.titleThe Effects of Prior Knowledge on Mnemonic Discrimination in Young and Older Adults, and in Hippocampal Amnesia
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Pishdadian_Sara_2018_Masters.pdf
Size:
1.01 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description:
Download
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
1.87 KB
Format:
Plain Text
Description:
Download
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
YorkU_ETDlicense.txt
Size:
3.4 KB
Format:
Plain Text
Description:
Download

Collections

Psychology (Functional Area: Clinical Psychology)

All items in the YorkSpace institutional repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved except where explicitly noted.