Essays for Final: your source for the answer to these questions is your lecture notes and assigned textbooks. Note that you may want to roam outside of your assigned chapters or bring in information from your bibliography or presentations.

1. Adenylate cyclase is said to be of paramount importance for the induction of  activity dependent synaptic modifications.  Cite with a brief discussion (1 sentence) as many studies as possible that support this claim (use only your two assigned textbooks as resources).

2. Diagram the idea of segregation of inputs to a single cell.  Use an actual example and label where the inputs are coming from and what type of information is carried by each pathway.  What effect might this phenomenon have on signal processing and memory encoding?

3. What was concluded about learning and memory from the following studies/preparations:
Classical conditioning of the nictitating membrane response in rabbits.
Manipulation of the vestibular ocular reflex
Limb flexion in spinal cats
8-arm radial maze
Delayed non-matching to sample in monkeys
Wisconsin Card Sorting Task
In vitro hippocampal slices

4. Describe the mechanisms for the induction of  LTD in CA1 and in the cerebellum.   Why might there be different means for producing changes in synaptic efficacy?

5. Studies of long-term habituation in a reduced preparation used repeated stimulation of a single input to induce habituation.  Mechanisms for memory storage in the hippocampus (particularly LTP) were studied using repeated stimulation of the Schaffer collaterals in a reduced in vitro slice preparation. 1) What patterns of activity were used to induce the respective modifications? 2) What were the critical or necessary receptors/biochemical processes that were responsible for the induction of the respective synaptic modifications? 3) What were the hypothesized mechanisms by which changes in synaptic efficacy were expressed -e.g. pre/post synaptic, changes in structural/enzymatic proteins?  4) What are the implications of these findings for the understanding of how memories are formed in the brain?

6. If you were now going to explore some aspect of learning and memory what would that be, what background information from class would be relevant, and what type of experimental design/protocols would you use?

7. "Implicit and Explicit memory formation probably share the same mechanism.  The main difference is 1. Where the storage takes place and 2) what factors lead to the induction of the changes."  What evidence supports this statement? What evidence argues against this statement?
 
 8. Discuss the ideas of primary Confabulation, priming  and source amnesia.  What do these phenomenon tell us about the role of different areas of the brain in memory and what do they tell us about memory itself?  Can it be said if the conclusions reached from the studies on confabulation are specifically applicable to the memory encoding, consolidation and/or retrieval process?  Explain.