Current theories about human memory have been shaped by clinical observations and animal experiments. This doctrine holds that the medial temporal lobe subserves one memory system for explicit or declarative memories, while the basal ganglia subserves a separate memory system for implicit or procedural memories, including habits. Cortical areas outside the medial temporal lobe are said to function in perception, motor control, attention, or other aspects of executive function, but not in memory. 'The Evolution of Memory Systems' advances dramatically different ideas on all counts. It proposes that several memory systems arose during evolution and that they did so for the same general reason: to transcend problems and exploit opportunities encountered by specific ancestors at particular times and places in the distant past. Instead of classifying cortical areas in terms of mutually exclusive perception, executive, or memory functions, the authors show that all cortical areas contribute to memory and that they do so in their own ways-using specialized neural representations. The book also presents a proposal on the evolution of explicit memory. According to this idea, explicit (declarative) memory depends on interactions between a phylogenetically ancient navigation system and a representational system that evolved in humans to represent one's self and others. As a result, people embed representations of themselves into the events they experience and the facts they learn, which leads to the perception of participating in events and knowing facts. 'The Evolution of Memory Systems' is an important new work for students and researchers in neuroscience, psychology, and biology.

Is your memory hierarchy stopping your microprocessor from performing at the high level it should be? Memory Systems: Cache, DRAM, Disk shows you how to resolve this problem. The book tells you everything you need to know about the logical design and operation, physical design and operation, performance characteristics and resulting design trade-offs, and the energy consumption of modern memory hierarchies. You learn how to to tackle the challenging optimization problems that result from the side-effects that can appear at any point in the entire hierarchy.As a result you will be able to design and emulate the entire memory hierarchy. - Understand all levels of the system hierarchy -Xcache, DRAM, and disk. - Evaluate the system-level effects of all design choices. - Model performance and energy consumption for each component in the memory hierarchy.

Drug addiction may be viewed as a form of learning during which strong associations linking actions to drug-seeking are expressed as persistent stimulus–response habits, thereby maintaining a vulnerability to relapse. Disrupting cue–drug memory could be an efficient strategy to reduce the strength of cues in motivating drug-taking behavior. Upon reactivation, these memories undergo a reconsolidation process that can be blocked pharmacologically, providing an opportunity to prevent the powerful control of drug cues on behavior. This conceptually elegant approach still calls for more experimental data. However, an increasing body of evidence suggests that drug taking not only accelerates habit forming, but has long-lasting effects on interactions between memory systems eventually leading to a functional imbalance. The dorsal part of the striatum plays a critical role in habit/procedural learning, whereas the hippocampal memory system encodes relationships between events and their later flexible use. Both humans and rodents studies support the view that the hippocampus and the dorsal striatum interact in either a cooperative or competitive manner during learning, the prefrontal cortex being involved in the selection of an appropriate learning strategy. Chronic drug consumption biases normal interactions between these memory systems. For instance, drug-experienced rodents tend to use preferentially striatum-dependent learning strategies in navigational tasks. These persistent effects seem to occur at cellular, neurophysiological and behavioral levels to promote specific, striatal-dependent forms of learning, to the detriment of spatial/declarative, hippocampal-dependent and more flexible types of memory. Whether cue sensitive and response learners, in contrast to spatial learners, could be prone to drug addiction is an intriguing hypothesis which clearly deserves to be further explored. A loss of flexibility may be uncovered also by imposing changing rules on the subject, such as requiring an attentional shift between different perceptual features of a complex stimulus, as in the attentional set shifting task which was recently adapted to rodents. Working memory is at risk during transition phases, although it remains to be determined whether withdrawal-induced alterations are observed also during protracted abstinence. Drug-induced cognitive biases thus lead to cognitive rigidity which could play a critical, yet overlooked role in different phases of addiction (acquisition, extinction/withdrawal and relapse). They are also likely to preclude the clinical efficiency of treatments. Therefore, the aim of this research topic is to provide an overview of the current work investigating the long-term impact of drug use on learning and memory processes, how multiple memory systems modulate drug-seeking behavior, as well as how drug-induced cognitive biases could contribute to the persistence of addictive behaviors.

This informative volume presents the first comprehensive review of research and theory on dual-process models of social information processing. These models distinguish between qualitatively different modes of information processing in making decisions and solving problems (e.g., associative versus rule-based, controlled versus uncontrolled, and affective versus cognitive modes). Leading contributors review the basic assumptions of these approaches and review the ways they have been applied and tested in such areas as attitudes, stereotyping, person perception, memory, and judgment. Also examined are the relationships between different sets of processing modes, the factors that determine their utilization, and how they work in combination to affect responses to social information.

This edited volume provides an overview the state-of-the-art in the field of cognitive neuroscience of memory consolidation. In a number of sections, the editors collect contributions of leading researchers . The topical focus lies on current issues of interest such as memory consolidation including working and long-term memory. In particular, the role of sleep in relation to memory consolidation will be addressed. The target audience primarily comprises research experts in the field of cognitive neuroscience but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.

The field of autobiographical memory has made dramatic advances since the first collection of papers in the area was published in 1986. Now, over 25 years on, this book reviews and integrates the many theories, perspectives, and approaches that have evolved over the last decades. A truly eminent collection of editors and contributors appraise the basic neural systems of autobiographical memory; its underlying cognitive structures and retrieval processes; how it develops in infancy and childhood, and then breaks down in aging; its social and cultural aspects; and its relation to personality and the self. Autobiographical memory has demonstrated a strong ability to establish clear empirical generalizations, and has shown its practical relevance by deepening our understanding of several clinical disorders - as well as the induction of false memories in the legal system. It has also become an important topic for brain studies, and helped to enlarge our general understanding of the brain.

In science, a few areas particularly capture the imagination because of a combination of excitement, substantial technical progress, and implicit significance in affecting the nature and quality of life. Perhaps no area of science exhibits these characteristics more abundantly than that dealing with the brain. Once shrouded in the mystical, studies in modem brain science are dramatically enhancing our understanding of brain function and its impact on learning and memory. It is perhaps the union of pragmatic and mystical aspects that makes this such an exciting arena of science. The Office of Naval Research (ONR) began an intensive effort in 1983 on the topic of the neural basis for learning and memory. This effort was aimed at providing the scientific understanding of how learning takes place. It is the expectation that a neurological understanding of learning processes will lead to the formulation of learning strategies that will significantly enhance performance. This is important in a civilian and military population faced with serious manpower problems requiring a few individuals to be more expert with technologically intensive systems. With these motivations in mind, two of us (EJW and RN) formulated a full-day symposium at the AAAS annual meeting held in New York, May 1984.

This monograph proposes 7 principles of human memory. These principles are qualitative statements of empirical regularities that can serve as intermediary explanations and which follow from viewing memory as a function.

This cutting-edge book offers a theoretical account of the evolution of multiple memory systems of the brain. The authors conceptualize these memory systems from both behavioral and neurobiological perspectives, guided by three related principles. First, that our understanding of a wide range of memory phenomena can be advanced by breaking down memory into multiple forms with different operating characteristics. Second, that different forms of memory representation are supported by distinct brain pathways with circuitry and neural coding properties. Third, that the contributions of different brain systems can be compared and contrasted by distinguishing between dedicated (or specific) and elaborate (or general) memory systems. A primary goal of this work is to relate the neurobiological properties of dedicated and elaborate systems to their neuropsychological counterparts, and in so doing, account for the phenomenology of memory, from conditioning to conscious recollection.