Audition and Vision Flashcards
Define what sound is and how amplitude, frequency, and complexity contribute to our perception of sound
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Define: sound
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Define: amplitude
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Define: frequency
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Define: complexity
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Given a diagram of the ear, be able to find and label: pinna, tympanic membrane, three small bones (you don’t need to memorize the names of them), oval window, cochlea
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Describe what constitutes outer vs. middle vs. inner ear
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Describe how the outer ear contributes to our ability to hear
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Describe what pinnae are and why animals may have different shapes of pinnae
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Describe what is happening at each stage in the process as sound waves come into the ear and are transduced into neural signals that are then processed in the brain
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Describe key components of the inner and the function they serve
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Explain what is meant by tonotopic organization and where we find that organization
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Describe the McGurk effect and what that tells us about how we perceive sound
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Describe what the basilar membrane is, where it is, and how it transmits sound information, including its tonotopic organization
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Describe what inner hair cells are, where they are, and how they transduce sound information
Specifically, be able to describe what happens to the stereocilia on the inner hair cells when a sound wave comes in and the series of events that that initiates, i.e., motion of stereocilia pulling on tip links, which opens mechanically-gated ion channels, which then allows K+ into the cell…. Etc. etc.
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Describe what outer hair cells contribute
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Explain what sensorineural hearing loss typically results from. (The other type of hearing
loss is conductive hearing loss, which occurs as a result of problems in the outer or
middle ear, e.g., problems with the tympanic membrane or with the little bones.)
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Explain how a cochlear implant works
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Label on a diagram the following areas involved in auditory processing: cochlea, auditory nerve, olivary nuclei, inferior colliculus, medial geniculate nucleus, and primary auditory cortex. (For something like this, we might give you an unlabeled diagram but have specific arrows pointing to certain things. This means that you don’t need to be able to spot where the inferior colliculus is in the midbrain. Instead you’d see an arrow pointing to that region and you’d need to label it as the inferior colliculus.)
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For each of the regions named above be able to broadly describe what is going on in that region, e.g., the olivary nuclei are helping you to locate the source of a sound.
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Describe where to find the primary auditory cortex
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Describe in broad strokes how we locate sound – we rushed through this at the end of
class, but the book has a nice description. You don’t need a ton of detail but know
basically how this works.
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Describe how humans can only see a small fraction of the available wavelengths of light, which illustrates an important point: we are limited by our biology. Other species can see things we can’t see.
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Be able to label a diagram of the eye and describe what happens in the following areas: pupil, iris, cornea, lens, retina, optic nerve, fovea, blind spot
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Describe in more detail what is happening in the retina, particularly the layout and how light travels to photoreceptors then to bipolar cells and on to ganglion cells and then to the rest of the brain (you won’t need to know much about horizontal or amacrine cells, just that they help facilitate communication among different parts of the retina)
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Define what phototransduction is
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Name the two major types of photoreceptors – rods and cones – and describe what they’re particularly good for and also where they tend to be located in the retina
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Describe why the fovea is special, e.g., what is found there and how light is able to get
to that region more directly, what part of the visual field projects its image onto it, how
much real estate it gets in V1, etc.
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Describe what the blind spot is and be able to provide two reasons why we don’t actually see this blind spot in our visual field
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Be able to locate the following on a diagram of the visual system:
- left visual field (be
sure you know whether you’re looking at a brain from above or from below!)
- right visual field
- foveal region of visual field
- binocular visual field
- right temporal retina
- right nasal retina
- left temporal retina
- left nasal retina
- optic discs
- optic nerves
- optic chiasm
- optic tracts
- lateral geniculate nuclei
- optic radiation
- primary visual cortex
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Be able to describe where an image in the left visual field is hitting the retinas of the two
eyes and where that information is or isn’t crossing over and how it’s being processed in
the right hemisphere. Describe why this crossing over produces those interesting results
in the split-brain patient
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Name the two types of retinal ganglion cells and describe what special types of information they carry and where they get that information from. Also, describe how the connections work to the photoreceptors, i.e., in which case is it one ganglion cell connects with only one photoreceptor
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Broadly describe how the lateral geniculate nucleus is organized in terms of the information it’s getting
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Broadly describe the functions we discussed of the pretectum, superior colliculus, and SCN (You don’t need to be able to locate them on a diagram, but do understand what this means in terms of not all visual information just going to thalamus to V1)
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Broadly define and locate the dorsal and ventral streams and explain why this is a useful way of thinking about the visual system
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Broadly describe how responses of neurons change as you progress further into ventral stream processing
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Describe what is meant by position and size invariance and where this applies and why it’s important
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Define visual agnosia
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Describe what happens in apperceptive agnosia – what behaviors do we see, where is the damage typically (very broadly speaking in terms of the hierarchy of visual processing)
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Describe what happens in associative agnosia – what behaviors do we see, where is the damage typically (very broadly speaking in terms of the hierarchy of visual processing)
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Describe what happens in these specific agnosias
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Describe the role of the FFA and be able to broadly locate it
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Describe the inversion effect – what does it broadly suggest about how we process faces?
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Describe what prosopagnosia is and its root causes
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Describe a way to test if someone is a super-recognizers
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Provide examples of ways in which perception is an active process, i.e., one that involves things like prediction, expectation, interpretation, learning, etc. and explain how these examples illustrate this broader point
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Explain how sound information goes from being these pressure waves into the world to be understood by our brains as a particular sound, i.e., really be able to trace the steps in the process. So you might begin by explaining how our pinnae help to gather these waves and focus them into the ear canal and then how these waves cause vibrations in the tympanic membrane, which causes these bones to move… and so on… all the way through to the secondary/tertiary auditory cortices
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Explain how the pitch of sound is coded starting from the basilar membrane vibrating in only specific areas, meaning it activates only specific inner hair cells and so on, and how this tonotopic mapping is preserved in the primary auditory cortex
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Explain broadly what is meant by topographical organization and name the specific
types of this organization in the auditory system (tonotopic) and the visual system (retinotopic)
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Explain what is meant by labeled line coding and how this is in contrast to pattern encoding. Be able to describe which sensory modalities use which type of coding
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Provide examples of the hierarchical organization of perception, e.g, how the primary sensory cortex might process basic components and how secondary and tertiary cortices may process more complex things
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Describe what might happen if someone had damage not to their ears or primary auditory cortices but rather to secondary or tertiary auditory cortices
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Explain what was happening when one of your colleagues had a little trouble identifying the color of the pen in his periphery and how moving the pen helped him to see it even when it had initially seemed to have disappeared
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Have a brief understanding – as described in the video – of what is happening in the photoreceptors, e.g., what channels are opening, what happens when light comes in, and what type of polarization (hyper- or de-) occurs.
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Explain the significance of the Hubel & Wiesel experiments. I’ll post the video online in the relevant module, but the book also does a nice job explaining this
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Explain the difference between sparse vs. population coding and explain when one might be used or when the other might be used
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Provide examples showing how face processing is somehow special
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