Question

Tom was knocked unconscious briefly during a game while playing on his high school's football team. He does not remember much about the immediate circumstances leading to the injury. Why?

a.
There was insufficient time for memory storage in the cerebral cortex.
b.
He was motivated to forget the event because of its unpleasant nature.
c.
Synaptic consolidation of memories was interrupted by the head injury.
d.
There was insufficient time for memory storage in the hippocampus.

Answer 1

Tom's inability to recall the events leading up to his head injury is likely due to anterograde amnesia caused by trauma to the hippocampus, disrupting the consolidation of short-term memories into long-term storage.

Step-by-step explanation:

Tom was likely experiencing anterograde amnesia, which is a loss of memory for events that occur after brain trauma. This condition is often associated with damage to the hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in the consolidation of memories from short-term to long-term storage. As the injury to Tom's head was sudden and traumatic, it interrupted the synaptic consolidation that is necessary for creating long-term memories, thus preventing him from remembering the immediate circumstances leading to the injury.

In the context of memory models like the Atkinson-Shiffrin model, Tom's experience illustrates a disruption in the process that transfers information through sensory memory, short-term memory, and into long-term memory. The hippocampus plays a crucial role in this process, and its impairment due to trauma can prevent memories from being properly encoded and stored, which is a key function in the formation of new episodic and semantic memories, as demonstrated in the case of patient H.M.