Chapter 15 Flashcards
Psychological construct
idea that results from a set of impressions
not tangible
Cognition
Act of knowing or coming to know
Thought processes
3 reasons why language gives humans an edge in thinking
It provides a means of categorizing information
It provides a means of organizing time to plan behaviour
Human language has syntax for meaning
Neural circuits- cell assemblies
Concept that cell assemblies represent objects or ideas, the interplay among the networks results in complex neural circuits
Cell assemblies provide the basis for cognition
Experiment of monkeys identifying movement
If individual neurons failed to respond the monkeys behaved as if they did not perceive motion
Found the sensitivity of individual neurons is similar to the perceptual sensitivity of monkeys to apparent motion
Association cortex
Neocortex outside the primary sensory and motor areas
Functions to produce cognition
Inputs to the association area
Highly processed information
Comes from thalamic areas that receive inputs from other cortical regions
Temporal association regions
Cognition related to visual and auditory processing
Parietal association regions
Cognition about somatosensation and movement
Frontal association regions
Coordinates information from parietal and temporal association regions with information from subcortical areas
Knowledge about what an object is is represented in the_____
Temporal association cortex
Knowledge of what to do with objects is represented in the_____-
Parietal association cortex
Multisensory integration
Combining systems to create a unified conscious experience
Binding problem
How the brain ties its single and varied sensory and motor events into a unified perception or behaviour
Solution to the binding problem
Multimodal regions of the association cortex combine characteristics of stimuli across different senses
Neurons respond to information from more than one sensory modality
Spatial cognition
Knowledge about the environment that allows us to determine where we are, how to go from one place to another, how to interpret our spatial world, and how to communicate about space
Dorsal stream in parietal lobes
Evolution of skill in mental manipulation
Closely tied to the evolution of physical movements
Topographic disorientation
Inability to find one’s way in relationship to salient environmental cues
Posterior parietal damage
Egocentric disorientation
Difficulty perceiving relative locations of objects to the self
Egocentric disorientation
Difficulty perceiving relative locations of objects to the selfA
Attention
Selective narrowing or focusing of awareness to part of the sensory environment or to a class of stimuli
Selective attention studies
Train animals to attend to stimuli presented in one particular area of the visual field and ignore other stimuli
Found that attending to specific parts of the sensory world is a property of single neurons
Frontal lobe damage and attention
Overly focused on environmental stimuli
Suggests that the frontal association cortex controls the ability to shift attention
Parietal lobe damage and attention
Leads to neglect: ignoring sensory information that should be important
Contralateral neglect
Failing to pay attention to one side of the physical world and one side of the world represented in their mind
Parietal lobe damage
Amygdala’s role in attention
Directing attention to the eyes to identify facial expressions
3 parts of planning
Must select from many options
Must ignore irrelevant stimuli
Keep track of what you have done already
Temporal planning
Planning what you need to do and when you need to do it
Frontal lobes and planning
Planning to organize behaviour in space and time
Occipital and temporal lobes and planning
Recognizing objects
Parietal lobes and planning
Making the appropriate movements with respect to objects
Perseveration
Tendency to emit repeatedly the same verbal or motor response to varied stimuli
Frontal lobe damage
Mirror neurons
Cells in the parietal cortex that fire when an individual observes an action
Representation of one’s own or others actions
Basis of understanding actions
Cognition and the Cerebellum
Cerebellum critical in fine movements and perception
May be associated with working memory, attention, language, music, decision making
Extensive connections with the neocortex
Social Neuroscience
Understanding how the brain mediates social interaction
Theory of mind
Attributing mental states to others
Understanding others may have different feeling or beliefs
Brain area associated with theory of mind
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
Brain activity when we recognize our face
Activity increases in the right lateral prefrontal cortex and the lateral parietal cortex (what the body feels like)
Brain area associated with beliefs about personal traits
medial prefrontal cortex
Self-regulation
Ability to control emotions and impulses to achieve long-term goals
Brain area of self-regulation
Prefrontal regions are critical
Why are children poor self-regulators?
Because the prefrontal cortex develops slow
Brain activity when we express attitudes toward ideas or people
Activation in the prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate, lateral parietal regions
Neuroeconomics
Combines economics, psychology, and neuroscience to understand how the brain makes decisions
Reflective system for decisions making
Deliberate, slow, rule-drive, emotionally neutral decisions
Brain activity of the reflective decision making system
Activity in the lateral prefrontal cortex, medial temporal cortex, posterior parietal cortex
Reflexive system for decision making
Fast, automatic, emotionally biased
Brain activity of the reflexive decision making system
Activity in the dopaminergic reward system- mesolimbic system
Brain activity of th
Right Parietal Damage (Patient G.H)
Damage in copying drawings, assembling puzzles, finding his way around familiar places
Right parietal thus involved in spatial skills
Left parietal damage (patient M.M.)
Problems with solving arithmetic, reading, calling objects by name
Difficulty coping a series of movements:apraxia
Left parietal thus involved in language, cognitive tasks related to school work, different role in controlling voluntary movement than the right
Dichotic listening findings
Presenting different auditory input to each ear simultaneously
More digits presented to the right ear were received- right ear has preferential access to the left hemisphere
More likely to recall music played to the left ear- left ear has preferential access to the right hemisphere
Visual asymmetries
Words presented briefly to the right visual field (left hemisphere) are more easily reported than the left visual field
Complex geometric patters like faces presented briefly tp the left visual field (right hemisphere) are more easily reported
Left hemisphere is biased toward processing______
Language-related information
Right hemisphere is biased toward processing_______
Non-verbal and spatial information
Functional asymmetry in the split brain when object is shown in the left visual hemisphere
Right hemisphere cannot talk so cannot respond verbally when it sees something in the left verbal hemisphere
Left hemisphere can talk but does not see the left visual field so reports seeing nothing
What happens when a split brain patient is shown a different object in each visual field?
When asked to used both hands to pick up “the object” the hands do not agree
Explanation that the left hemisphere is important for controlling fine movement
Role in language- fine motor movements of the mouth and tongue
Verbs are processed only in the left hemisphere- mental representations of actions
Speculative
Explanation that the right hemisphere is specialized for controlling movements in space
Functions of the dorsal visual stream
Producing movements in space and mental images of the movements
Speculative
Left hemisphere as the interpreter
Left hemisphere has the capability for interpretation, the right does not
Left-hemisphere language abilities allows humans to make inferences and have beliefs about sensory events
Sex differences in cognitive tasks
Females have better verbal fluency
Males have better spatial reasoning
Sex differences in patterns of intrahemsipheric connections
Women have more dispersed connections within white matter
Sex differences in grey matter concentration
Women have increased grey matter concentration in many cortical regions
Men are more uniform across the cortex
Sex differences in neuronal structure
Influenced by gonadal hormones
Cells in prefrontal regions have larger dendritic fields in males
Cells in the oribitofrontal regions have larger dendritic fields in females
Sex differences in effects of cortical injury
Equally likely to be aphasic after left-hemisphere lesions
Men are more likely to be aphasic and apraxic after damage to left posterior cortex
Women are more likely to be aphasic and apraxic after damage to left frontal cortex
Sex differences in interhemispheric connectivity
Females have greater inter hemispheric connectivity
Males have greater intrahemispheric connectivity
Evolution of sex related cognitive differences
When the sexes differ In the adaptive problems they faced
Eg men tended to range over larger territories- spatial abilities favoured
Females tended to form social groups which favoured language development
Speech representation in left-handers
75% have speech in the left hemisphere like right handers
15% have speech in the right hemisphere
15% have speech in both hemispheres
Anomalous speech representation
Speech zones are located in the right hemisphere or both hemispheres
Possibility that the connectivity of cerebral hemispheres may differ- greater colossal connections
Synesthesia
Ability to perceive a stimulus of one sense as the sensation of a different sense
Hearing colours is the most common
One directional pairing
Hypothesis about the neural basis of synesthesia
Extraordinary neural connections between the sensory regions
Increased activity in the multimodal cortex of the frontal lobe
Particular sensory inputs that elicit unusual patterns of activation
General Intelligence
Spearman
g factor
Cerebral connectivity and neuron:glia ratio seem to be important
Convergent thinking
Applying knowledge and reasoning skills to narrow the range of possible solutions to a problem and finding one correct answer
Measured by traditional intelligence test
Associated with temporal and parietal lobes
Divergent thinking
Searching for multiple unconventional solutions
Associated with frontal lobe
Intelligence A
Innate intellectual potential
Highly heritable
Intelligence B
Observed intelligence that is influenced by experience and other factors
Experiences alter observed intelligence because they alter synaptic organization
P-FIT model of intelligence
General consensus that a parieto-frontal network forms the basis of intelligence
Also includes the insular cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, subcortical structures
Neurite density and intelligence
Neurite density is negatively correlated with intelligence
Less pruning means less efficient processing
Consciousness
The mind’s level of responsiveness to impressions made by the senses
A process- emerges as information is sorted
Adaptive advantage of consciousness
Allows us to construct our sensory world and enhance selection of behaviour
Advantageous to produce a single complex representation as it is more efficient
Conscious behaviour vs unconscious behaviour
Unconscious behaviour to act quickly- dorsal visual stream is unconscious
Conscious Behaviour to correspond to the nuances of sensory input
Conditions when a person lacks conscious awareness of information even though it is processed unconsciously
Blindsight, visual form agnosia, implicit learning in amnesia
Shows that stimuli can be processed In the brain without entering consciousness
Conditions where people are consciously aware of stimuli that are not actually there
Phantom libs, hallucinations of schizophrenia
Evolutionary theory of consciousness
As organisms became more complex the nervous system developed to coordinate activities
Introception (sense of internal state) and exteroception (sense of external state) then developed
Then development of incentives and an alerting system
This led to the development of emotions to maximize survival
Number of cerebral maps of the external word expanded to maximize incentives which developed the mind
Mind leads to a sense of self- consciousness
Information integration theory of consciousness
Consciousness is the ability to integrate information
Information generated by the system as a whole is greater than the information generated by its independent parts
Semantic pointer competition theory of consciousness (3 mechanisms)
1) representation of the world by firing patterns in neural population
2) binding of representations into more complex representations called semantic pointers
3) competition among semantic pointers to capture the most salient aspects of an organism’s current state- consciousness
Semantic pointers
Neural representation that can operate as an integrator of sensory, motor, emotional, or verbal representations
