Chapter 1 and 2 Flashcards
What is the thalamus’s job?
-relay station processes sensory info and sends to other structures (except smell)
What is the hypothalamus’s job?
-responsible for drivers, think of it as a thermostat, so temperature, hunger, sex drive etc
What is the pituitary gland’s job?
-releasing messages to other endocrine systems
What does the corpus callous do?
-it is a bundle of fibres connecting the right and left hemisphere
What does the hippocampus do?
-important for memory and learning
What does the amygdala do?
-processing emotions
What does the pons do?
-its a bridge and it carries information between brain stem and brain
What does the medulla oblongata do?
-control autonomic functions like heart rate, respiration
What does the cerebellum do?
-large motor movements and balance
What are the bumps on the brain called?
-gyrus
What are the valleys on the brain called?
-sulci
What is dissociation logic?
-a method to examine the function of a particular brain region
What are the two types of dissociation logic? (2)
-single
-double
What is single dissociation?
-we are looking at one person who have some function that has been lost and where the damage is in the brain
What is double dissociation? What is an example? (2)
-observing two individuals with different brain damage and opposite deficits
-comparing one person with damage to Broca’s area whose lost the ability to generate language and another with damage to Wernickis area and struggles with language comprehension (they are showing opposite deficits)
What happens when Broca’s area is damaged?
-they struggle with generation of language (Walk dog yesterday)
What is Wernickis area responsible for?
-language or speech comprehension
What is the localization of function?
-finding a specific area of the brain responsible for a function, which means if you damage that area of the brain that you lose that function (Broca and Wernicki)
What is aphasia?
-language disorder that affects either expression or comprehension
What is distributed processing?
-multiple areas of the brain involved in a single function (facial processing)
What is Capgras delusions?
-when the connection between the basic face processing area (FFA) and the amygdala have been severed so the person feels no emotional connection to the faces they love or hate
What is choice reaction time?
-refers to the amount of time it takes for a person to respond to a stimulus when there are multiple possible responses, and they must choose the correct one
What was Donder’s experiment? What did he conclude? (2)
-you had to react to something like if a light goes on you press a button then you had to discriminate between left and right lights and had to press a different key dependent on which side it was on and this measured choice reaction time
-mental responses cannot be measured directly but can be inferred from behaviour
What did Wundt, one of the first cognitive psychologists, promote?
-analytic introspection
What did Ebbinghaus study?
-how we learn and forget information over time, focusing on memory retention.
What method did Ebbinghaus use?
-He used nonsense syllables (like “ZUP” or “BIJ”) to test pure memory
What is the forgetting curve
-A graph showing that memory fades quickly after learning but slows down over time.
What was the Little Albert experiment?
-experiment by Watson where a baby who was conditioned to fear a white rat through classical conditioning with a loud noise
What did Tolman do?
-trained rats in the four arm maze
What are structural models?
-representations of physical structures
What are process models?
-represents the processes that are involved in cognitive mechanisms, like a diagram
What is a confounding variable?
-when two variables are linked together in a way that makes it difficult to sort out their specific effects
