Something to Consider • 165you keep your balance when riding a bike? What about tying your shoes? Tying shoes
is so easy for most people that they do it without even thinking about it. If you think
you are aware of how you do it, describe which lace you loop over the other one, and
then what you do next. Most people have to either tie their shoes or visualize tying their
shoes before they can answer this question.
Riding a bike and tying your shoes are both motor skills that involve movement
and muscle action. You have also developed many purely cognitive skills that qualify as
involving procedural memory. Consider, for example, your ability to read the sentences
in this book. Can you describe the rules you are following for creating sentences from
the words and creating meaningful thoughts from the sentences? Unless you’ve studied
linguistics, you probably don’t know these rules, but that doesn’t stop you from being
a skilled reader.
Finally, consider the plight of the concert pianist who, when he tried to become
conscious of how he was moving his fi ngers as he played a diffi cult passage, found that
he was no longer able to play the passage. For many skills, the best practice is to disen-
gage the mind and let implicit procedural memory take over!CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
Classical conditioning occurs when the following two stimuli are paired: (1) a neutral
stimulus that initially does not result in a response and (2) a conditioning stimulus that
does result in a response (see page 10). An example of classical conditioning from the
laboratory is presenting a tone to a person followed by a puff or air to the eye that causes
the person to blink. The tone initially does not cause an eyeblink, but after a number of
pairings with the puff of air, the tone alone causes an eyeblink. This is implicit memory
because it can occur even if the person has forgotten about the original pairing of the
tone and air puff. The example we cited for Cliff on page 157 involved a situation in
which the neutral stimulus was red cars and the conditioning stimulus was the accident
that caused an emotional reaction. Having an emotional reaction to the previous neutral
cars is an effect of classical conditioning. Conditioned emotional responses similar to
what Cliff experienced can cause people to have emotional reactions to people, places,
or events, even when they are unaware of the reasons for their reactions.
We have described a number of different types of long-term memory, ranging from
vivid memories of personal experiences (episodic, explicit) to the ability to ride a bicycle
(procedural, implicit). Each of these types of long-term memories has been the subject
of a great deal of research devoted to discovering how events can leave an imprint in the
mind that later results in an experience (a memory) or a behavior (a skill or reaction to
a specifi c stimulus). In addition to being the subject of research, which we will discuss
further in Chapters 7 and 8, memory has also been the subject of many movies over
the years, most often stories in which a main character has suffered a loss of memory.Something to Consider
Memory Loss in the Movies
Countless movies have featured a character with memory loss. The accuracy of these
depictions, compared to actual cases, ranges from depictions that resemble types of mem-
ory loss that actually occur to completely fi ctional types of memory loss that have never
occurred. Sometimes, even when the memory loss in a movie resembles actual cases, it
is described using incorrect terminology. We will describe some examples of fact-based
memory loss, fi ctional memory loss, and the use of incorrect terminology in movies.
In some movies, characters lose their memory for everything in their past, includ-
ing their identity, but are able to form new memories. This is what happened to Jason
Bourne, the character played by Matt Damon in The Bourne Identity (2002). In thisCopyright 2011 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part.