Cognitive Neuroscience Flashcards
Cognition
Interpretation of transformation of recently acquired or stored information
Phrenology
Proposed that activation of brain areas makes them expand, which results in changes of skull shape. According to phrenology functions (traits) are highly localised – localisationist’s view
What did Marie-Jean-Pierre Flourens do?
Lesioned various parts of pigeon brains and didn’t find evidence of specific behavioural deficits due to any of the lesions
He concluded that behavioural abilities are made by interactions of areas from the entire brain - aggregate field theory
What did John Hughlings Jackson do?
Monitored epilepsy patients and realised that seizures often resulted in ordered jerks of the muscles. This led to the idea of a topographic organisation of muscle representation in the cortex - localisationist view
The neurone doctrine
Neurones are separate units
What did Golgi and Cajal win a Nobel prize for in 1906?
Arguing that the nervous system is made up of discrete individual cells (neurone doctrine)
Glial cells
Oligodendrocytes myelinate axons in the brain and spinal cord
Schwann cells myelinate axons in the periphery of the body
There are more glial cells in the brain than there are neurons
What functions do glial cells serve?
Getting nutrients from the blood
Maintaining the blood-brain barrier
Stop toxins from entering the brain and insulator cells
Briefly summarise the role of each part of the neurone
Dendrites receive the message
The soma (cell body) converts the message
The axon sends the message
Resting membrane potential
Resting potential is -70 mV
The neurone is negatively charged on the inside because it contains a lot of proteins and most proteins are negatively charged, it also has a pump
What is the role of the sodium-potassium pump?
Potassium tries to get out and sodium tries to get in and the pump works to maintain this negative energy
Synaptic transmission
At the synapse the action potential hits the membrane of the axon terminal, and it depolarises the membrane
Makes the inside more positive, which causes channels to open so calcium ions flow into the cell
Vesicles that contain neurotransmitter, once calcium binds with them they can then bind with the cell membrane then are able to release their neurotransmitter into the synaptic cleft
Neurotransmitter binds with receptor dendrite
Channels on postsynaptic terminal open which means sodium can now enter the postsynaptic cell which could trigger an action potential which would then move to the next neurone
Central nervous system
The brain
Spinal cord
Functional neurosurgery
Altering the activity of a brain area by either using ablation (removing), electrical or pharmacological methods to establish overall more normal patient function
Single dissociation
An acquired disability that affects only one are of functioning without impairing any other area of functioning
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
Low-level currents that result in action potential under the anodes
Works to activate or inactivate parts of the brain and do this whilst subjects perform a certain task to see what the effect of this is on their functioning
Attention
The process by which the mind chooses from among the various stimuli that strike the senses at any moment
Dichotic listening
When you get one stimulus in one ear and a different one in the other and you have to ignore one of the stimuli depending on which stimuli you need to focus on
Exogenous attention
Transient, bottom-up, automatic
Endogenous attention
Sustained, top-down, voluntary
Covert attention
When you fixate somewhere and attend elsewhere
Overt attention
When you fixate and attend in the same place
Spatial attention
Attention to a specific location in space, irrespective of what is present at that location
Feature based attention
Attention to specific stimulus features irrespective of where they are in our environment
Object based attention
Attending to a whole object, even if only parts are relevant
What was Thales’ monistic perspective?
That the flesh and blood brain produces thoughts
That the conscious mind is a product of the brains physical activity and not separate from it
What is Franz Joseph Gall known for?
Believed innate functions were localised in specific brain regions in the cerebral cortex
Hypothesised that if a person used a specific faculty more then that part of the brain would grow and there would be a bump in the overlying skull so Gall believed that by carefully analysing a skull he could understand the personality of a person - he called this technique anatomical personology
This idea was later coined as phrenology
What is Flourens known for?
The first to show that certain parts of the brain were responsible for certain functions by destroying parts of pigeon and rabbit brains to observe what happened
Concluded advanced abilities like memory are more scattered throughout the brain
What is aggregate field theory?
The idea that the whole brain participates in behaviour
Who coined the localisationist view of the brain?
John Hughlings Jackson
what is the homunculus?
topographic organisation of muscle representation in the cortex
Broca’s area
language production
Wernicke’s area
language comprehension
the neuron doctrine
neuro system is made up of discrete individual cells
who won a Nobel prize in 1906 for the neuron doctrine?
Golgi and Cajal
oligodendrocytes
myelinate axons in the brain and spinal cord
schwann cells
myelinate cells in the periphery of the body
microglial cells
immune response in the brain
glial cells
more glial cells than neurons in the brain, get nutrients from the blood and maintain the blood brain barrier
soma
cell body
resting membrane potential
-70mV
where is the neuron more negative when resting?
inside the neuron, made more positive with action potential
which is the first channel to open during action potential?
sodium ion channels
which ions bind to the vesicles in the synapse?
calcium ions
coronal brain section
view from side of the brain
sagittal brain section
view from top of the brain
caudal
posterior (back of the brain)
dorsal
superior (top of the brain)
rostral
anterior (front of the brain
ventral
inferior (bottom of the brain)
gyri
wrinkles in the brain
how does MRI distinguish white and grey matter?
uses differences in the amount of water and fatty tissue in the brain
Posner’s Letter matching task
two letters on the screen and the participant has to press ‘same’ or ‘different’
findings of Posner’s letter matching task
processing time differs depending on which letters are represented, Posner argued that the different latencies represented the degree of processing required to do the letter matching task, stimulus identity representations are activated first, phonetic representations second and categorisations are last
neurology
understanding the brain based on brain damage and disorders
raster plot
plot of action potentials, recorded as time after an external event, every time an action potential is recorded you mark it on the plot
alzheimer’s disease
degenerative, tangles and plaques in limbic and temporo-parietal cortex
Parkinson’s disease
degenerative, loss of dopaminergic neurons
Electroencephalogram (EEG)
electrodes attached to the head to measure electrical activity in the brain - relatively cheap, non-invasive, fairly good signal
Event related potentials (ERP)
average of EEG recordings which may allow a pattern from a stimulus to appear
optogenetics
using light to manipulate neuronal activity
transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)
inducing a magnetic field into the brain to excite the underlying tissues - can create virtual lesions, can excite or inhibit certain areas of the brain
how does MRI work?
hydrogen are disturbed by a signal and are flipped, then this is stopped and we measure how long it takes for them to flip back, different time depending on whether it is white or grey matter, used to plot the brain
what does BOLD stand for?
blood oxygen-level dependent
Feature based attention
Ability to attend to specific features, across the visual space
Object based attention
Attention to sub parts of an object, ensures that other parts of that object are automatically better processed as well
Attention
Attention is the process by which the mind chooses from among the various stimuli that strike the senses at any given moment.
Astrocytes
Large glial cells that create the blood brain barrier
Dichotic listening task
One stream of information in one ear and another stream of information being played in the other
Evidence for early selection
- auditory cortical responses are affected by attention, e.g. the cat, when it pays attention to the mouse the response to the sound being played is not as big
- auditory brainstem responses are not affected by attention
- dichotic listening task, less response of ERP to the unattended input, modulated by attention as person is listening to the other input
otoacoustic emissions
sound that your ear reflects back out after hearing something
exogenous attention
transient, bottom-up (something in the external world), automatic
endogenous attention
sustained, top-down (willful act by ourselves), voluntary
ERP evidence for endogenous visuo-spatial attention
when the cue and the target match we get a big signal from attending to the right area that they chose to attend to - also evidence for early selection