Chapter 7 - Attention, Working Memory and Consciousness

Question 1

What do executive functions refer to?

Answer 1

A family of mental processes needed when you have to concentrate and pay attention to, when going automatic or relying on instinct or intuition would be ill-advised, insufficient or impossible

Question 2

List 3 core executive functions.

Answer 2

Inhibition
Working Memory
Cognitive Flexibility

Question 3

What do these core executive functions give rise to?

Answer 3

Higher order executive functions - reasoning, problem solving, planning etc.

Question 4

Which part of the brain appears to be essential for executive functions?

Answer 4

Frontal lobe

Question 5

What is the difference between “general attention” and “selective attention”?

Answer 5

General –> state of the organism (ie alert)
Selection –> process that selects some information (out of all the information that comes through the senses) for further processing

Question 6

What is general attention and what can it be affected by?

Answer 6

A state (behavioural, cognitive, neural) of the organism that determines how much information can be processed and/or how fast it can be processed.

Can be affected by sleepiness, fatigue, drugs
Controlled by ascending modulatory systems (norepinephrine)

Question 7

What is selective attention?

Answer 7

The process (BCN) of selecting some information (and/or not-selecting some information) for further BCN processing.

Question 8

Why can’t we pay attention to everything?

Answer 8

1. Brains too small and hence limited in processing capacity
2. “Too much” information coming in from our senses to process everything in high detail

Question 9

List traits related to bottom-up/stimulus-driven/exogenous attention.

Answer 9

1. bottom-up: attention signals originate from the bottom of the brain hierarchy (eg LGN)
2. exogenous attention: attention originated outside
   eg: seeing a red button among a sea of blue ones –> occurs without your will or control
3. occurs automatically –> lack of conscious control

Question 10

List traits related to top-down/internally-generated/endogenous attention.

Answer 10

1. top-down: control areas originate in higher areas (eg frontal lobe)
2. internally-generated: because you generated that command to pay attention voluntarily (can choose not to do so even with instructions given)
3. endogenous attention: attention originates inside you, not triggered by stimulus

Question 11

What are 3 types of endogenous attention?

Answer 11

Spatial attention - attention is given to a particular area of space
Feature attention - attention is given to a particular feature, such as colour, orientation, direction of motion
Object attention - attention is given to a particular object

Question 12

What is the difference between overt and covert attention?

Answer 12

Overt: reflected in an action (usually eye movement), such as looking at the attended object.

Covert: not reflected in an action

Question 13

The _________ conveys attentional signals to the posterior visual areas of the brain

Answer 13

dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Question 14

What is evidence to show that attention is directed to specific locations in the visual cortex?

Answer 14

Even in the absence of visual stimulation, there is activation of areas in the visual cortex. This activation reflects paying attention to specific locations.

Question 15

If a person is shown 2 visual stimuli next to each other (one moving up and other moving down). What happens to the activity of MT neurons when the person starts paying attention to the stimulus moving up?

Answer 15

Not enough information to know.
Not all cells in MT are selected to upward movement!!! Activity will go down for downward movement cell if you pay attention to stimulus moving up! Need to know which cell you’re referring to, activity differs for each cell.
Cell selective to upward movement → answer will be C → neurons with receptive fields that encompass both stimuli will respond more strongly than if no attention was paid.
Even though they specified receptive field, but since they didn’t specify cell selectivity, we don’t know.

Question 16

If a person is shown 2 visual stimuli next to each other (one moving up and the other moving down). What happens to activity of prefrontal neurons when the person starts paying attention to the stimulus moving up?

Answer 16

Neurons with receptive fields that encompass the attended stimulus will respond more strongly than if no attention was paid. As long as the stimuli is in the receptive field, it will become more activated.

Question 17

The neural mechanism of attention involves _____________.

Answer 17

The activity of prefrontal cortex + the activity of sensory cortices + the interaction between prefrontal and sensory cortices

Question 18

What is working memory?

Answer 18

The capacity to store and manipulate information for a short period of time

Question 19

List 2 types of working memory

Answer 19

Verbal and visuospatial

Question 20

Neurons in _________ are involved in working memory

Answer 20

dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Question 21

Which 2 parts of the brain are activated by working memory tasks?

Answer 21

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe.
Note: damage to prefrontal, but not parietal cortex, causes deficits in working memory. overlaps with area involved in selective attention

Question 22

What is the key neural marker of working memory?

Answer 22

Sustained activation during the memory delay period.

Activation of prefrontal cortex –> one of the few regions where sustained attention persists despite distraction
So, as long as you remember, prefrontal cortex will maintain this information.

Question 23

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in both working memory and attention. What does this suggest?

Answer 23

Suggests that working memory and attention are intertwined, may refer to two manifestations of the same neural mechanisms.

Question 24

Which task is used to test the responses of a neuron in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex?

Answer 24

Monkey fixation task. Cell responds throughout the trial so long as the target to remember isolated at the bottom left. So this cell selective to bottom left appears to be maintaining spatial memory information during the delay period.

Question 25

What is the mind brain problem?

Answer 25

The relationship between mental phenomena (such as sensory experiences, thoughts and emotions) and physical phenomena (such as matter and all the physical laws)

Question 26

What is substance dualism?

Answer 26

Proposes that there are two fundamentally distinct kinds of substances in this world – mental phenomena and physical phenomena. Believed that minds and bodies are two different substance, and are in causal interaction with each other. Pineal gland as the locus of direct mind-body interactions.

Question 27

What is substance?

Answer 27

Something that has the capacity of independent existence

Question 28

What is physicalism (a type of monism)?

Answer 28

The proposition that our world is fundamentally material, consisting only of bits of matter and complex structure made up of matter, all behaving in accordance with physical laws

Question 29

List 3 physicalist theories

Answer 29

Behaviourism
Identity Theory
Functionalism

Question 30

What does behaviorism propose?

Answer 30

Behaviourism takes behaviour as a constitutive of mentality. In other words, having a mind is a matter of exhibiting, or having the propensity/capacity to exhibit appropriate patterns of behaviour.

Question 31

What does psychoneural identity theory propose?

Answer 31

Advocates the identification of mental states with the physical processes in the brain. In other words, there are no mental events over and above neural processes in the brain.

Question 32

What does functionalism propose?

Answer 32

A state counts as being of a given mental type in virtue of the functional role it plays within a suitably organized system. Computationalism is the view that cognition is information processing.

Question 33

What is phenomenal consciousness or qualia?

Answer 33

Sensory mental events and states have distinctive qualitative characters (felt or sensed qualities) by means of which they are identified as sensations of a certain type

These sensory qualities of mental states are referred to as “qualia”. Conscious states with such qualitative aspects are called “phenomenal states”. They are instances of “phenomenal consciousness”

TLDR: PC/Qualia are the raw feels of our experiences. Sensory perception and some emotions are endowed with qualia. And it feels like something to be in a phenomenally-conscious mental state

Question 34

Which conscious states have qualia?

Answer 34

• All sensory perceptions –> all have qualitative character. Eg: The feelings associated with seeing the redness of red, or the acute sound of the flute –> you know what you are feeling by virtue or interpreting the feelings mentioned above itself
• some emotions have qualia (eg anger, envy). But notice, it may be hard or perhaps impossible, to categorize emotion as one of resentment, envy or jealousy based on its felt qualities alone.

Question 35

_______ doesn’t have qualia.

Answer 35

Thoughts –> there are no sensory qualities associated with believing that a triangle has 3 sides.

Question 36

What is access consciousness?

Answer 36

Another type of consciousness that is poised for direct control of thought and action
- The content carried by your conscious state, in virtue of your state being conscious, has become available to various other cognitive functions, like reasoning, decision making, and verbal reporting.

Question 37

List 3 theories associated with access consciousness.

Answer 37

Global Workspace theory

Multiple Drafts Theory

Higher Order Thought Theory

Question 38

What does global workspace theory propose?

Answer 38

It is a theory of consciousness at the cognitive level (not neural). The central idea is that a mind is kind of a theatre, a “global workspace”, in which conscious states “broadcast” themselves so that their representational contents are available to various other cognitive functions and processes.

Question 39

What does multiple drafts theory propose?

Answer 39

Our perceptual-cognitive system is constructing multiple pictures (“drafts”) of our surroundings. The draft that gains the most prominence at a time is our conscious state at that time.

Question 40

What does higher order thought theory propose?

Answer 40

Consciousness involves some kind of inner awareness (ie awareness of one’s own mental states. so a mental state is a conscious state just in case there is a higher-order perception or thought of it, or perception of being in that state.

Question 41

Every mental state is believed to have an underlying ____________ state.

Answer 41

neural

Eg: Whenever you are in pain, there is a neural state that underlies your pain.

Question 42

The inability to reconcile why pain occurs because of neural state N is an example of _________.

Answer 42

explanatory gap - closing the apparent “gap” between phenomenal consciousness and the brain.

Question 43

What does the easy problem of consciousness deal with?

Answer 43

Understanding the relationship between our brains and our cognitive capacities.

How could a physical system be the sort of thing that could remember?

Question 44

What does the hard problem of consciousness deal with?

Answer 44

How could a physical system be the sort of thing that experiences pain?

The possibly intractable problem of linking phenomenal consciousness and the brain.

Question 45

The ___________ proposes that ______________ are creatures that are physically just like us but have no consciousness. They act exactly like us but feel nothing.

Answer 45

zombie argument. philosophical zombies.

Question 46

What does the inverted qualia argument propose?

Answer 46

A world that is physically indiscernible from this world but in which people’s colour spectrum is inverted in relation to ours. People in the colour-inverted world behave exactly as we do, but their colour experiences are different.

Question 47

People with blindsight have lesions in ___.

Answer 47

V1

Question 48

People with ___________ are not conscious of objects presented to them but they are able to _____ them.

Answer 48

blindsight, detect

Question 49

Damage to the __________ produces split-brain syndrome.

Answer 49

corpus calloseum –> the part that links 2 hemispheres of the brain together.

Question 50

The neural correlates of consciousness (NCC) refers to the ______ neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any 1 specific conscious percept.

Answer 50

minimum

Question 51

Why is it that only the minimum neuronal mechanisms are being investigated?

Answer 51

the whole brain is indeed sufficient for any specific conscious percept. however, we want to separate those neural mechanisms that, if removed, will not have an effect on the conscious percept. what is left is the minimum.

Question 52

How do neural mechanisms jointly lead to a specific conscious percept?

Answer 52

It is possible that 2 different neuronal mechanisms lead to the same conscious percept. If this is the case, we would want to know all the possible mechanisms that lead to a specific conscious percept. This is important when thinking about redundancy in the nervous system. If you need to activate 100 neurons in fusiform face area to perceive a face, but you have 1000 neurons, there can be lots of combinations of these 100 neurons.

Question 53

Describe what you can do to identify NCCs.

Answer 53

Compare neural activity when a particular stimulus (eg face) is perceived vs the neural activity when it is not perceived, with the sensory stimulus and the overall state of the participant kept constant under both circumstances.

If there are differences, there could be candidate NCCs because all that changes under these conditions is perceptual state of object, since they are keeping constant the visual stimulus and other participants’ conditions.

Question 54

What do tasks similar to the motion induced blindness task prove?

Answer 54

A fronto-parietal network is activated during visual-motor tasks that contrast perceived stimuli with invisible stimuli.

However, at least part of the neural activity that co-varies with the perception of a particular conscious content reflects processes that precede or follow an experience (eg selective attention, expectation)

Question 55

What are no-report paradigms?

Answer 55

Paradigms that do not require a report by the subject. Eg: using eye movements and pupil dilation, which correlate tightly with conscious reports of perceptual tasks.

They identify a more restricted content-specific NCC, which typically includes posterior cortical areas but no prefrontal cortex.