Chapter 2

Question 1

Who was Lashley and what was he known for?

Answer 1

Student of Franz and studied the effects of ablation is the frontal lobes in rats.
Lashely lesioned the cortex of rats in different places and to different degrees and studied rats abilities to learn or remember mazes. He found little to no reduction in performance with small brain damage and/or simple mazes, but more reduction in performance as the amount of damage increased.

He suggested that learning was directly proportional to the extent of brain damage rather than to the location of the damage

Question 2

What were Lashley’s results formulated as?

Answer 2

The law of mass action: learning and memory depend on the total mass of brain and tissue remaining rather than the properties of the individual cells

The law of equipotentiality: although some area of the cortex maybe become specialized for certain tasks, any part of an area can (within limits) do the job of any other part of that area

Question 3

Distinguish between consciousness and mind.

Answer 3

Consciousness: narrower concept; what we are aware of at any point in time

Mind: broader concept; includes consciousness, but also encompasses processes that may take place outside our awareness

Question 4

What are the 4 classic approaches to understanding how the mind and brain are integrated?

Answer 4

1) interactionism (Descartes)
2) epiphenominalism
3) parallelism
4) isomorphism

Question 5

Define Interactionism and who is it associated with?

Answer 5

• Mind and brain are separate entities that interact and influence each other.
• Descartes
• speculated that the pineal gland is where the mind & brain interacts
• this view was not widely adopted by subsequent researchers, with the exception of Roger Sperry

Question 6

Define Epiphenomenalism

Answer 6

Mind is simple a by-product of brain processes & has no causal role in determining behaviour

Mind is a by-product of the brain

Question 7

Define Parallelism

Answer 7

Mind and brain are two aspects of the same reality, and they operate in parallel. Every event in the mind has a corresponding event in the brain

Question 8

Define Isomorphism

Answer 8

Gesalt Psychologists (Wolfgang) argued that consciousness tends to be organized into a coherent whole. Experience and it’s corresponding brain pattern share the same pattern in all their structural characteristics

Question 9

What’s the difference between parallelism & isomorphism?

Answer 9

Isomorphism sees more than a simple point-for-point correspondence between mental events and brain events

“Psychological facts & underlying events in the brain resemble each other in all their structural characteristics”

Question 10

Necker’s Cube

Answer 10

Illustrates isomorphism because “the same external stimulus can produce different internal experiences”. Therefore, there must be a corresponding change in the underlying brain processes.
The area in the brain that is responsible for processing & creating a representation of the figure becomes fatigued, or only weakly capable of supporting electrical fields and so another part of the cortex begins to take over the task

Question 11

Define sensory system

Answer 11

A system that links the physical and perceptual worlds via the nervous system; composed of sensory receptors, neural pathways, and distinct regions of the brain preferentially dedicated to the perception of information that translates physical world into perceptual experiences.

Question 12

What are the 6 main sensory systems?

Answer 12

1) vision
2) audition
3) taste
4) smell
5) somatosensory (touch as well as other perceptions, such as muscle and joint movement)
6) vestibular (balance and spatial orientation)

Question 13

Define Broca’s aphasia

Answer 13

A deficit in the ability to produce speech as a result of damage to Broca’s area.

Language comprehension remains intact, but ability to produce speech is severely compromised.

Question 14

Define Broca’s area

Answer 14

The area of the brain’s left hemisphere that is responsible for how works are spoken

Question 15

Define Wernickie’s area

Answer 15

Area of the brain’s left hemisphere that is responsible for processing the meaning of words

Question 16

Define Wernickie’s aphasia

Answer 16

A deficit in the ability to comprehend speech as a result of damage to Wernickie’s area

Language comprehension is compromised, and the affected individual produces incoherent speech.

Question 17

Define interhemispheric transfer and who is it associated with?

Answer 17

Communication between the brain’s hemispheres, enabled in part by the corpus callosum.

Done by Roger Sperry

Question 18

What work did Roger Sperry do involving interhemispheric transfer?

Answer 18

Severed optic chiasm and corpus callosum in cats.

Result: information coming from right eye, processed in right hemisphere and vice versa

Severing the corpus callosum showed that it plays a dominant role in the inter-hemispheric interaction

Question 19

Define split brain

Answer 19

A condition created by severing the corpus callosum

Question 20

According to Sperry, which hemisphere of the brain managed what type of tasks?

Answer 20

Left hemisphere - analytic tasks
Right hemisphere - holistic tasks

Holistic: non-verbal, intuitive

Question 21

Describe Sperry’s work on consciousness.

Answer 21

He argued that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, meaning that it is neither reducible to nor a product of other features of the brain. Once consciousness emerges then it can have an influence on lower-level functions, a process that maybe termed emergent causation.
Thus, the mind is supervenient: mental states are determined by constituent neuronal events while they are exerting control over them

Question 22

Define emergent property and who was it associated with?

Answer 22

In Sperry’s sense, a property that ‘emerges’ as a result of brain processes, but is not itself a component of the brain.
In the case of the mind, this means that consciousness is neither reducible to, nor a property of, a particular brain structure or region

Question 23

Define emergent causation and who was it associated with?

Answer 23

In Sperry’s sense, causation brought about by an emergent property. Once the “mind” emerges from the brain, it has the power to influence lower-level processes

Question 24

Define supervenient and who was it associated with?

Answer 24

In Sperry’s sense, describes mental states that may simultaneously influence neuronal events and be influenced by them

Question 25

What does a CT and MRI do? What’s the difference between them?

Answer 25

CT: provided detailed anatomical data
MRI: provided similar images with higher spatial resolution

Question 26

Define ERP’s. What are they used for? Who are they associated with?

Answer 26

An electrical signal emitted by the brain after the onset of a stimulus.
Represented by waveforms
Rugg - his review suggests that the waveform for items that will be remembered is different from the waveform for items that will be forgotten

Question 27

What’s an EEG used for?

Answer 27

The electrical signals emitted by the brain can be recorded using electrodes places on the scalp: EEG
Non-invasive and non-precise

Question 28

What’s the assumption underlying PET scan?

Answer 28

When a specific psychological function is engaged, then only those parts of the brain are responsible for that function will also be engaged.

Question 29

Define PET scan and how does it work?

Answer 29

An imaging technique in which a participant is injected with a radioactive substance that mingles with the blood and circulated to the brain. A scanner is then used to detect the flow of blood of particular areas of brain

Question 30

What’s one limit/problem with PET methodology?

Answer 30

There’s a limit to the amount of radiation a participant can be exposed to, and therefore limits to be amount of information that can be obtained.

Question 31

What’s one limit to standard MRI?

Answer 31

Doesn’t indicate what areas of the brain are involved in any specific behaviour

Question 32

Define fMRI.

Answer 32

A non-radioactive magnetic procedure for detecting the flow of oxygenated blood to the various parts of the brain

Question 33

2 advantages of fMRI

Answer 33

1) doesn’t depend on radioactive signal

2) data can be acquired more rapidly using fMRI than PET

Question 34

How does a fMRI work?

Answer 34

It uses a large magnet to detect brain areas in a given cognitive task.
Oxygenated blood reacts differently in the magnetic field than de-oxygenated blood.
This information is used to create an image of brain activity.

Question 35

What was the procedure and results of Bavalier’s fMRI study?

Answer 35

Bavalier conducted a study that looked at brain activity in Broca’s and Wernickie’s area of participants while they were reading sentences and consonant strings.

The results showed that reading sentences resulted in more activation in Broca’s and Wernickie’s area than viewing consonant strings. Other areas were also activated with variation across participants

Conclusion: language processing is not localized in only a few brain areas

Question 36

Define MEG

Answer 36

A non-invasive brain imaging technique that directly measures neural activity
It combines the spatial resolution of fMRI and temporal resolution of ERP’s

Question 37

3 advantages of MEG

Answer 37

1) much better temporal resolution
2) direct measurement of neural activity
3) irregularities in the skull don’t have much affect on magnetic fields produced by neural activity

Question 38

2 limitations of MEG

Answer 38

1) decay of magnetic fields with increased distance. Therefore, MEG is only good for detecting activity near the cortical surface of the brain
2) not widely available

Question 39

Define connectionism

Answer 39

A theory that focuses on the way cognitive processes work at the physiological/neurological (as opposed to information-processing) level. It holds that the brain consists of an enormous numbers of interconnected neurons and attempts to model cognition as an emergent process of networks of simple units (eg: neurons) communicating with one another

Question 40

Define DTI

Answer 40

An MRI-based neuroimaging technique that makes it possible to visualize the white-matter tracts within the brain

Can help to show how info flows between and within brain regions

Question 41

What are the 2 basic connectionist ideas?

Answer 41

a) Information can be broke down into elementary units (neurons)
b) there are connections between these units

These connections have different strengths and a neural network learns by modifying the strength of connections between elements do that the proper output occurs in response to a particular input

Question 42

Define neural network

Answer 42

Neurons that are functionally related or connected

Question 43

State the Hebb’s rule

Answer 43

A connection between the two neurons takes place only if both neurons are firing at approximately the same time

Question 44

What’s an important connectionist assumption

Answer 44

Many connections can be active at the same time - an example of parallel processing

Question 45

Define parallel processing

Answer 45

Many neural connections maybe active at the same time - an important connectionist assumption

Question 46

Define serial processing

Answer 46

Only one neural activity may take place at the one time

Question 47

What are the 2 connectionist assumptions?

Answer 47

Hebb’s rule

parallel processing