Chapter 12-The biology of learning and memory Flashcards
- Pavlov presented a sound followed by meat in his experiments. Gradually the sound came to elicit salivation. The sound in this experiment would be considered the ____.
conditioned stimulus
- Pavlov presented a sound followed by meat in his experiments. Gradually the sound came to elicit salivation. The salivation to the meat in this experiment was the ____.
unconditioned response
- Pavlov presented a sound followed by meat in his experiments. Gradually the sound came to elicit salivation. The salivation to the sound in this experiment was the ____.
conditioned respons
- What should be the usual relationship between the conditioned stimulus and the unconditioned stimulus in classical conditioning?
The conditioned stimulus should be presented first.
- In operant conditioning, reinforcement is ____.
an event that increases the future probability of a response
- In operant conditioning, punishment is a(n) ____.
event that decreases the future probability of a response
- Which action is most difficult to classify as classical or operant conditioning?
song learning by male birds
- Operant conditioning is to ____ as classical conditioning is to ____.
consequences; association
- Lashley’s term “engram” refers to ____.
the physical representation of learning
- Lashley trained rats on a variety of mazes, then made deep cuts in their cortexes. He found that the cuts produced ____.
little apparent effect
- Lashley found that a deep cut in a rat’s cerebral cortex completely eliminated the effects of learning under what circumstances, if any?
under none of the circumstances he studied
- Lashley found that when he removed parts of the brain ____.
the amount of tissue removed was more important than its location
- What does the phrase “all parts of the cortex contribute equally to complex behaviors such as learning” define?
equipotentiality
- The cortex works as a whole, and the more cortex the better, defines ____.
mass action
- What is one explanation for why Lashley failed at finding the engram?
Some memories do not depend on the cortex.
- What is one explanation for why Lashley failed at finding the engram?
Not all memories are physiologically the same.
- In studies that paired a tone with an air puff to the cornea of rabbits, learning was found to depend on one nucleus of the ____.
cerebellum
- In studies of eyelid conditioning in rabbits, Thompson and his colleagues have demonstrated that learning for this conditioned response takes place in the ____.
lateral interpositus nucleus of the cerebellum
- Research indicates that the red nucleus is necessary for ____.
the performance of a conditioned response
- Preventing learning is to ____ as suppressing a response is to ____.
the lateral interpositus nucleus; the red nucleus
- A person with damage to their cerebellum may experience several problems, including ____.
weakened conditioned eye blinks
- Donald Hebb (1949) distinguished between two types of memory that he called
short-term and long-term
- Hebb believed that short-term memory ____.
was a temporary holding station on the way to long-term memory
- The general function of working memory is to ____.
attend to and operate on current information
- In learning, the basal ganglia ____.
integrates information over many trials
- The delayed response task requires responding to something that you saw or heard ____.
a short while ago
- Compared to young adults, aging humans with poor working memory have ____ activity in the prefrontal cortex and aging humans with intact working memory have ____ activity in the prefrontal cortex.
decreased; increased
- Studies on ____ help clarify the distinctions among different kinds of memory and enable us to explore the mechanisms of memory.
amnesia
- The patient H.M. suffered severe memory disorders following a surgical operation that removed the ____.
hippocampus
- Retrograde amnesia is to ____ as anterograde amnesia is to ____.
loss of memory for old events; inability to form new memories
- The inability to form memories for events that happened after brain damage is a characteristic of ____ amnesia.
anterograde
- Forgetting events prior to the time of brain damage is a characteristic of ____ amnesia.
retrograde
- After his surgery, H.M. had the most difficulty with ____.
being able to define new English words
- H.M. was able to learn and remember ____.
skills like mazes and puzzles
- Deliberate recall of information that one recognizes as a memory is termed ____.
explicit memory
- ____ is an influence of recent experience on behavior, even if one does not recognize that influence.
Implicit memory
- The memory for the development of motor skills is termed ____.
Procedural memory
- Which type of memory is MOST impaired by damage to the hippocampus?
episodic memory
- Which of the following accurately describes H.M.’s memory problems?
impaired explicit memory, but not implicit memory
- One ironic but interesting finding is that people with amnesia will improve on ____ tasks, but have no ____ memory with respect to the task.
procedural; explicit
- Procedural memory is to ____ as declarative memory is to ____.
juggling; explaining the sequence of moves in juggling
- Damage to the ____ impairs performance on the delayed matching-to-sample and delayed nonmatching-to-sample tasks.
hippocampus
- Hippocampal damage has the greatest effect on ____.
the delayed match-to-sample task when the two objects are continuously changed
- What area of the brain is particularly important for coding spatial information?
hippocampus
- A study with London taxi drivers found that answering ____ activated their hippocampus more than answering ____.
spatial questions; nonspatial questions
- A rat is placed in a radial maze in which it has already been trained for many trials. As compared to rats without damage to their hippocampus, rats with damage are more likely to ____.
enter one of the correct alleys repeatedly
- A rat must swim through murky water to find a rest platform that is just under the surface in the ____.
Morris water maze
- A rat with hippocampal damage has difficulty with the Morris water maze because it ____.
has difficulty remembering where the platform is from trial to trial
- There is compelling evidence for the role of the hippocampus in ____ memory.
spatial
- Researchers have found that different species of birds differ in terms of how much they depend on food they have stored to get through the winter. What factor is related to depending on and finding stored food?
relative size of the hippocampus
- The hippocampus is especially important for which kind of memory?
episodic
- What type of deficiency causes Korsakoff’s syndrome?
thiamine
- Most Korsakoff’s victims have a loss or shrinkage of neurons throughout the brain, especially in the ____.
dorsomedial thalamus
- A distinctive symptom of Korsakoff’s syndrome is ____.
confabulation
- Damage to the ____ produces symptoms similar to Korsakoff’s syndrome.
prefrontal cortex
- What memory impairments are found in patients with Korsakoff’s syndrome?
anterograde and retrograde amnesia
- Individuals with Korsakoff’s syndrome are similar to people with damage to the ____.
prefrontal cortex
- When prompted with cues, Korsakoff’s victims can often produce words from lists they saw but claim to have never seen. This exemplifies what kind of memory?
implicit
- What memory task would a typical patient with Korsakoff’s syndrome be able to do without difficulty?
an implicit memory task
- What is confabulation?
confusing a made-up answer as a memory of an actual experience
- Korsakoff’s patients best remember a list of short sentences by ____.
reading and rereading them
- As with Korsakoff’s patients, Alzheimer’s patients have impairments in ____ memory, but are relatively unimpaired in ____ memory.
declarative; procedural
- Korsakoff’s patients and Alzheimer’s patients have better memory for ____.
skills than facts
- If people with Down syndrome live long enough, they almost invariably develop ___
Alzheimer’s disease
- In some cases of Alzheimer’s disease that run in families, the cause of the disease appears to involve which gene(s)?
genes on several different chromosomes
- Alzheimer’s leads to the accumulation of ____ in the brain.
amyloid deposits
- Structures formed from degenerating axons and dendrites are referred to as ____.
plaques
- The most likely cause of the brain damage typical of Alzheimer’s disease is due to a ____.
increase in amyloid-β proteins
- Alzheimer’s is associated with brain damage as a result of ____.
tangles and plaques in the cerebral cortex and hippocampus
- What is believed to be the likely cause of plaques?
amyloid deposits in the brain
- Most researchers now believe that the accumulation of amyloid and tau protein ____.
are partly the cause of Alzheimer’s disease
- Structures formed from degenerating neuronal cell bodies are called ____.
tangles
- Amyloid is to ____ as tau is to ____.
plaques; tangles
- The most common treatment for Alzheimer’s disease is to give drugs that stimulate ____.
acetylcholine receptors
- A possible treatment for Alzheimer’s is the administration of drugs that ____.
stimulate acetylcholine receptors
- A study of patients with amnesia reveals that people ____.
do not lose all aspects of memory equally
- People with damage in the anterior and inferior regions of the temporal lobe suffer ____.
semantic dementia
- Parts of the ____ are important for learning about rewards and punishments.
prefrontal cortex
- When Penfield stimulated the temporal cortex of alert and awake brain surgery patients, he found that they ____.
had a dream-like experience
- One line of research that initially appeared promising, but has since faded, was to study learning in decapitated ____.
cockroaches
- A “Hebbian” synapse is one in which ____.
activity of the synapse, paired with an action potential in the postsynaptic cell, strengthens that synapse
- It is believed that Hebbian synapses may be critical for ____.
associative learning
- What is a major advantage of Aplysia for studies on the physiology of learning?
There is great similarity of nervous system anatomy from one individual to another
- Why is the Aplysia such a popular animal for single-cell studies of learning?
Aplysia have neurons that are virtually identical from one individual to another.
- If a stimulus is presented repeatedly, followed by no other stimulus, the animal will gradually stop responding. This is known as ____.
habituation
- If you stimulate the gills of an Aplysia by squirting them with a brief jet of seawater, at first, it will ____.
withdraw its gills
- During habituation of the gill-withdrawal reflex in Aplysia, the change in the nervous system takes place at the ____.
synapse between the sensory neuron and the motor neuron
- After a series of electrical shocks, a person becomes overresponsive to lights and noises. This exemplifies ____.
sensitization
- Habituation and sensitization differ depending upon whether ____.
he response grows weaker or stronger
- Strong stimulation anywhere on the skin of an Aplysia excites axons that attach to receptors and ____.
close potassium channels in the membrane
- Following a certain kind of experience in Aplysia, a facilitating interneuron causes changes that block the potassium channels at the end of the axon of the sensory neuron, leading to ____.
sensitization
- Research on Aplysia shows us that at least one physiological basis for learning involves which of the following?
presynaptic changes
- Producing long-term potentiation of cells in the mammalian nervous system requires ____.
a burst of many stimuli within a few seconds
- A burst of intense stimulation to a dendrite by one or more axons connected to it in a rapid series can be described as the ____.
long-term potentiation of the cell’s response to stimuli
- If some of the synapses onto a cell have been highly active and others have not, only the active ones become strengthened. This is known as the property of ____.
specificity
- Nearly simultaneous stimulation by two or more axons produces LTP, whereas stimulation by just one produces it weakly, if at all. This is known as the property of ____.
cooperativity
- In addition to the neurotransmitter glutamate, in order to activate the NMDA receptors, the neuron requires ____.
removal of magnesium ions from sodium and calcium channels
- The NMDA receptor responds to its transmitters when ____.
the membrane is already at least partly depolarized
- Retrograde transmitters ____.
are released by the postsynaptic cell
- Some memory-enhancing supplements appear to act in common by ____.
enhancing LTP
