Cognitive Nuroscience

Question 1

What is visual neuroscience

Answer 1

how does the brain process colour, how do we implement perception

Question 2

What is the N400

Answer 2

the N400 shows a violation of expectation, typically occurring at 400 milliseconds

Question 3

Classical neuropsychology

Answer 3

• mapping brain areas to cognitive functions
• typically preformed at group level
• good at answering clinical questions eg. knowing patients with any specific damage with deal with what issues and therefor know how to support

Question 4

Cognitive neuropsychology

Answer 4

• determine single from double dissociations
• often rely on case studies
• focus on cognitive process eg. don’t need to see where brain damage is, just that people with different symptoms cannot have same part of brain damaged

Question 5

What are single cell recordings used for

Answer 5

Animal studies as is invasive, seeing what cells fire for what purpose
- provides information of how and where different classed of stimuli are coded

Question 6

What is used to study human brain activity

Answer 6

Typically EEG, MEG, MRI

Question 7

Hunel and Weisels cat experiment found two key features…

Answer 7

Selectivity - specific neurons respond to particular types of visual stimuli
Hierarchical organisation - higher level neurons respond to increasingly complex stimuli

Question 8

Grandmother cell hypothesis

Answer 8

The continuation of the hierarchical model is that neurons at the top of the hierarchy only respond to one specific stimuli.
this could be called sparse coding as opposed to distributed coding

Question 9

What is EEG most useful for

Answer 9

An EEG is useful for learning about WHEN neural activity occurs rather than WHERE.

Question 10

Event-related potentials (ERPs)

Answer 10

Different types of stimuli tend to produce characteristic ERPs at different point in time eg. n400