5. Amnesia

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this lecture, we think about amnesia, a clinical condition associated with significant memory loss, focusing in particular on: (i) differentiating between two types of amnesia as anterograde amnesia, which affects a person’s ability to form new long-term memories, and retrograde amnesia, which affects memories formed in the past; (ii) the case of Henry Molaison, known as ‘H.M.’, who suffered from severe anterograde amnesia as a consequence of a surgery in which parts of his brain were removed; (iii) the case of Kent Cochrane, known as ‘K.C.’, a patient who suffered from retrograde amnesia due to brain damage caused by a motorcycle accident; (iv) the possible causes of amnesia, including surgery, traumatic accidents, Korsakoff syndrome and Alzheimer’s disease.

Course

In this course, Dr Davide Bruno (Liverpool John Moores University) explores the cognitive psychology of memory and forgetting. In the first lecture, we think about the multi-store memory model, developed by Atkinson and Shiffrin in 1968. In the second lecture, we think about the working memory model, developed by Baddeley and Hitch in 1974. In the third lecture, we look at different types of long-term memory, including episodic, semantic and procedural memory. Next, we think about the cognitive processes involved in forgetting, focusing in particular on retrieval failure and interference. In the fifth and final lecture, we conclude the course with an overview of amnesia, a clinical condition associated with significant memory loss.

Lecturer

Davide Bruno was born in Italy and graduated in Psychology from the University of Parma, then obtained a PhD from Keele University (2007). After positions at the University of Southampton, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, the Nathan Kline Institute, New York University, and Liverpool Hope University, he joined Liverpool John Moores University as a Senior Lecturer. His interests are, broadly, memory, ageing and dementia.