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Introduction. Memory And Its Functions Have Always Fascinated

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Introduction Memory and its functions have always fascinated psychologists. As the first psychological laboratory was being opened in 1879, the first experiments on memory were being conducted by Hermann Ebbinghaus. Ebbinghaus developed the theory of the forgetting curve, a very early theory on the factors that influence memory and information retention (Schneider, 2015). Even since Ebbinghaus’ work at the dawn of psychology, countless studies have been conducted with the goal of understanding memory and the numerous factors that influence it. From these studies, two factors in particular seem to have garnered a significant amount of attention: motivation (in the form of rewards) and learning methods. Each has been researched separately …show more content…

It also displayed that activations in certain areas of the brain, the hippocampus and the parahippocampal cortex, predicted successful source memory recollection. Furthermore, activations in the ventral tegmental area, substantia nigra, and nucleus accumbens were linked to the processes of reward and punishment. This research extends that of Li and colleagues (2016) by mapping the brain functions. This allows for research into the specific functions of the brain and allows this experiment to be visualized and, potentially, expanded to recreate these results.
Additionally, research has also found that the presence of reward-predicting cues prior to a participant 's completion of a task led to faster correct responses to that task than those without reward-predicting cues (Wittmann, Dolan, & Duzel, 2011). In this experiment, subjects were given predicting cues that were meant to either suggest the presence of a large reward, a small reward, or no reward. Participants that received a stimuli predicting the largest reward performed best on the subsequent task and those receiving a predicting stimuli of no reward performed the worst. This suggests that a rewards effect is strong and significant enough that it does not even need to be present to have an effect on performance of certain tasks. In this experiment the reward was actually given to the participants at the end but they were not told for certain that the reward existed until they received it. Furthermore, the same

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