Cognitive Neuroscience Flashcards
What is cognitive neuroscience?
The study of the neural physiology of cognition
Define Levels of Analysis
the idea that a topic can be studied in a number of different ways
What are neurons?
cells that are specialized to receive and transmit information in the Nervous System
How were neurons discovered?
By viewing stained brain tissue under a microscope.
Who invented the staining technique?
Camillo Golgi
Who built on Golgi’s work by using his technique?
Ramon Cajal
What did Cajal discover?
That the nerve net was non- continuous and was made up of individual units
What are the basic parts of a neuron?
Cell Body
Dendrite
Axon
What is a synapse?
The gap between the end of neuron’s axon and the dendrites or cell body of another
T/F? Neurons connect to all other neurons?
False. They only connect those in their Neural Circuit
receptors are…
Specialized neural structures that respond to environmental stimuli such as light, mechanical stimulation, or chemical stimuli.
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What is Edgar Adrians famous for?
recording electrical signals from one single sensory neuron.
How did Adrians record the single neuronal activity?
He used microelectrodes
What the resting potential of an axon at rest?
-70mv
What happens to the charge inside an axon when an action potential travels through it?
It rises to +40mv
How long does an action potential last?
1 millisecond
T/F: action potentials change in shape and height as they travel?
False
T/F- action potentials are always the same rate?
False. They vary based on the intensity of the stimulus
The principle of neural representation states…
Everything a person experiences is based on representations in the person’s nervous system.
How did Hubel and Wiesel study neuronal firing?
They recorded the neural activity of a cat while presenting it with specific stimuli.
What did Hubel and Wiesel discover?
That the brain has neurons called Feature Detectors that respond to specific stimuli.
experience-dependent plasticity is
the mechanisms that causes an organisms neurons to develop best the to the types of stimuli they are exposed to
What did Blakemore and Cooper do?
They raised a kitten presented with only vertical black and white stripes to see if it would ignore horizontal objects.
Where is the visual cortex?
The occipital lobe at the rear of the brain
Where is the motor cortex?
Parietal lobe on top of brain
What mechanisms is the temporal lobe responsible for?
language, memory, hearing, vision
hierarchical processing
is
the process in which neurons for simple stimuli send signals to increasingly higher levels.
sensory code
How neural firing represents various characteristics of the environment.
specificity coding
The representation of a specific stimulus by the firing of neurons that ONLY respond to that stimulus.
Neural representation of a stimulus by the pattern of firing of a large number of neurons.
Population coding
Where and what is Broca’s area?
Frontal lobe
Production of language
Where and what is Wernicke’s area?
Temporal lobe
Understanding language
Where and what is the Somatosensory Cortex?
Parietal Lobe
Receives signals from the skin. Touch, pressure, pain
What is prosopagnosia?
An inability to recognize faces.
What are single and double associations in neuroscience?
A single association : a lesion to brain structure A disrupts function X but not function Y
A Double: a lesion in brain structure A impairs function X but not Y, and further demonstrate that a lesion to brain structure B impairs function Y but spares function X,
What is fMRI?
A brain imaging technique that measures blood oxygen levels changes in response to cognitive activity in those areas.
