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year 1 - biological bases of behaviour > Decision making > Flashcards

Decision making Flashcards

1
Q

What is the association cortex?

A

A complex distributed network that supports our higher cognitive functions. Consists of temporal, parietal and frontal regions

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2
Q

What are the 3 areas of the cerebral cortex?

A

Sensory, motor and association

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3
Q

What do the temporal regions of the association cortex do?

A

Cognition related to visual and auditory processing?

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4
Q

What do the parietal regions of the association cortex do?

A

Support somato-sensation and movement control

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5
Q

What do the frontal regions of the association cortex do?

A

coordinate information from parietal and temporal association regions with information from subcortical regions

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6
Q

How much of the cerebral cortex do the frontal lobes take up?

A

about 1/3 in all mammalian species

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7
Q

What is the frontal lobe regarded as?

A

the seat of intelligence and abstract thinking

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8
Q

What is the role of the primary motor cortex?

A

movement control

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9
Q

What is the role of the premotor areas?

A

Planning/guidance of movement

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10
Q

What other functions does the frontal lobe have?

A

Executive control, attention, working memory, top-down control

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11
Q

Where is the prefrontal cortex?

A

Most anterior portion of the frontal lobe and highly interconnected with the rest of the brain

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12
Q

What did Kolb and Whishaw (2009) say about the frontal lobes?

A

All neural rods eventually lead to the frontal lobes

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13
Q

What is the essential role of the prefrontal cortex?

A

organization and control of goal-directed thought and behaviour

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14
Q

What contributed to early understandings of prefrontal cortex functions?

A

Lesion observations (patients/animals) eg. Phineas Gage

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15
Q

How did Harlow (1868) describe “frontal lobe syndrome”?

A

profound behavioural and personality changes following frontal lobe damage

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16
Q

What happened to Phineas Gage?

A

Metal rod caused dramatic prefrontal damage to both frontal lobes - mainly orbitofrontal regions

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17
Q

What was Gage like before the injury?

A

average intelligence
very industrious and dependable
“energetic and persistent in executing all of his plans of operation.”

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18
Q

What was Gage like after the injury?

A

“Gage was no longer Gage”
No obvious motor or memory impairments
Mainly affected ‘personality’
Impaired concentration
Rude and aimless

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19
Q

How was Gage described after his injury by Blumer & Benson (1975)?

A

“…indulging at times in the grossest profanity…” “…devising many plans of operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned in turn for others appearing more feasible.”
“A child in his intellectual capacity and manifestations, he has the animal passions of a strong man”.

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20
Q

What is a frontal lobotomy?

A

Surgical separation of portion of frontal lobes from rest of brain as a
‘treatment’ for mental disorders until the 1950s.
Early reports: ‘miraculous recoveries’
But severe negative effects on a patient’s personality and ability to function independently:
- marked reduction in initiative and inhibition
- decreased cognition
- detachment from society

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21
Q

What does modern evidence about lesions in PFC suggest?

A

various unusual emotional, motor, and cognitive changes
such as:
Persistent strange apathy, broken by bouts of euphoria
Ordinary social conventions are readily cast aside by impulsive behaviour
Forgetfulness in tasks requiring sustained attention (even forget their own warnings to “remember”)
No major changes in standard IQ test performance
Suggesting that subtlety and complexity of behaviour is controlled by frontal lobes

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22
Q

How is the PFC organised?

A

The lateral, medial and orbital surface

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23
Q

What is the lateral surface of PFC?

A

Closest to the skull. Anterior to the premotor areas (BA 6) and the frontal eye fields (BA 8).

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24
Q

What is the medial surface of PFC?

A

lies between the two hemispheres and to the front of the corpus callosum and anterior cingulate cortex.

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25
Q

What is the orbital surface of the PFC?

A

above the orbits of the eyes and the nasal cavity. The orbitofrontal cortex is closely (functionally and anatomically) related to the ventral medial surface (termed ventromedial prefrontal cortex)

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26
Q

What is the most interconnected cortical region?

A

Prefrontal cortex
Interconnects motor, perceptual and limbic regions as well as parietal and temporal cortex

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27
Q

Where do Subcortical structures (e.g., brainstem, basal ganglia, cerebellum) project to PFC through?

A

Thalamus
In a perfect position to coordinate and implicated in complex funcions

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28
Q

What are executive functions?

A

Suite of high-level cognitive processes that control & organise lower-level cognitive functions in line with thoughts & feelings - a supervisory system also known as executive or cognitive control

29
Q

What are the 3 main executive functions/cognitive capabilities?

A

Inhibition
Updating/WM
Shifting/cognitive flexibility

30
Q

What is inhibition?

A

Overcoming a prepotent response

31
Q

What is updating/WM?

A

Maintenance, monitoring updating, manipulation of STM contents

32
Q

What is shifting/cognitive flexibility?

A

Flexibly switching between tasks/behaviours

33
Q

What did Luria (1966) and Teuber, 1972) say about the structure of the frontal lobes?

A

Success on executive (or “higher cognitive”) tasks has been attributed to activity and structural integrity of the frontal lobes

34
Q

What did Yuan & Raz find in their 2014 meta-analysis of executive function in healthy individuals? (N>3000)

A

larger PFC volume and greater PFC thickness associated with better executive task performance

35
Q

What is top-down control?

A

when goals or plans are involved in actions
PFC as gating/filtering/biasing mechanism of neural activity

36
Q

What is an example of top-down control?

A

e.g., Integrative Theory of Prefrontal Cortex Function (Miller & Cohen, 2001): “cognitive control stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represents goals and means to achieve them.”

37
Q

What is the stroop task?

A

Measures ability to inhibit a prepotent response (prepotent response is to say the word rather than the print colour)

When the name of the colour is displayed in an incongruent colour, you have to inhibit say the colour that is written and instead process and say the colour of the print

38
Q

How do people with frontal impairments perform in the Stroop task?

A

Patients with frontal impairment have difficulty with this task
(e.g. Perrett 1974, Cohen & Servan-Schreiber 1992, Vendrell et al 1995)

39
Q

how is response inhibition tested?

A

Tasks which require subjects to make speeded responses to stimuli on a majority of trials and to withhold their responses on a minority of trials often used to study inhibition or control of motor responses:
Go/No-Go task – Respond to ‘go’ trials presented majority of time
Stop-Signal Reaction Time (SSRT) – Stop signal presented after go; measure stop action delay

40
Q

What is implicated in response inhibition?

A

Lateral PFC implicated, particularly inferior frontal region (VLPFC)

41
Q

What did Aron et al (2003) find when testing response inhibition?

A

Patients with right inferior frontal lesions slower to stop when performing the SSRT task than age-matched controls; volume of damage to BA 44 and BA 45 predicts time to initiate a stop

42
Q

What did Konishi et al., 1999; Picton et al., 2007 find when testing response inhibition?

A

fMRI: activation in the right inferior prefrontal and mediofrontal areas related to response inhibition in Go/No- Go

43
Q

What task measures planning and problem solving and what is it used for?

A

Tower of London task (Shallice, 1982) - task difficulty (number of moves) depends on start and goal positions. Used for diagnosis of executive impairment

44
Q

What did Shallice (1982) find in the tower of london task?

A

Patients with lateral PFC damage: slower + more moves to solve

45
Q

What is the Wisconsin card sorting test?

A

Measures how well people adapt to the changing rules
3 different ways to classify each card:
Colour
Shape
Number
Rule changes e.g., every 10 cards

Measures:
Focused attention
Updating/Working memory
Processing speed
Shifting
Inhibitory control

46
Q

How would patients with frontal lobe damage perform on the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test?

A

make more errors
can’t keep track of the rule changes
longer reaction times

47
Q

What are 5 issues with the assessment of frontal lobes?

A
  • Most complex aspect of neuropsychological assessment
  • Few sensitive tests available
  • Isolated cognitive functions may be unimpaired
  • Ecological validity ?
  • Lack of insight
48
Q

Why is it hard to detect executive function impairments?

A
  • People with impaired PFC function can be unaware of problems and deny they need help/support
  • Can appear entirely unimpaired in an office-based assessment, yet have significant functional difficulties in everyday life: ‘good in theory but poor in practice’
    = The Frontal Lobe Paradox (Walsh, 1985)
  • ‘knowing-doing disassociation’ (Teuber, 1964)
  • Not knowingly denying truth: Reflects the fact that the areas of the frontal lobes that are responsible for self-monitoring and developing insight have been affected by their brain damage
49
Q

What is the multiple errands task (Shallice & Burgess, 1991)

A

11 tasks to be completed + some rules to follow:6 were simple (e.g. buy a loaf of brown bread)
7th task: be at a certain location 15-mins into the test
7 tasks were more complex (NB. before the euro and mobile phones!):
Name the shop on X street with the most expensive items
The price of a pound of tomatoes
The name of the coldest place in Britain yesterday
Rate of exchange of the French franc yesterday

50
Q

How did frontal damage patients perform on the multiple errands task (Shallice & Burgess, 1991)?

A

All did their best to comply
Broke rules – entered irrelevant shops, talked to random people
2/3 patients failed at least four of the tasks
Failure in planning and organizing behaviour

51
Q

What did fMRI identify to be implicated in dual-task performance? (e.g., Szameitat, Schubert, Müller & von Cramon, 2002)

A

dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)

52
Q

What did Shallice and Burgess (1991) find in patients with PFC lesions when multi-tasking?

A

Tasks in isolation may be successfully performed (e.g., WCST) multi-tasking difficulties

53
Q

What is the hot versus cold control process?

A

Distinction between the control of affective or reward-related stimuli (i.e., “hot”) versus purely cognitive (i.e., “cold”) stimuli.

54
Q

What are reward-related stimuli?

A

includes money (in humans) and food (esp. studies of non-human animals)

55
Q

What are purely cognitive stimuli?

A

often based on sensory dimensions (e.g., colour or shape)
Most of the EF tests described are this latter kind (e.g. Stroop test, WCST)

56
Q

What is the orbitofrontal cortex and associated ventromedial PFC primarily involved in?

A

Hot cognitive control (reward-related)

57
Q

What is the lateral PFC primarily involved in?

A

cold cognitive control (purely cognitive)

58
Q

What is the Iowa Gambling Task?

A

Risk taking
Aim to win as much money as possible

Most healthy participants sample cards from each deck, and after about 40 or 50 selections are fairly good at sticking to the good decks

59
Q

How would patients with orbitofrontal cortex dysfunction perform on the Iowa Gambling Task?

A

Patients with orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) dysfunction continue to persevere with the bad decks, sometimes even though they know that they are losing money overall

60
Q

What is delay discounting?

A

preference for smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards (e.g. £100 now vs. £110 next week)

61
Q

How would patients with orbital frontal cortex/ ventro-medial lesions respond to reward?

A

fail to plan ahead and exhibit impulsive behaviour by opting for immediate rewards

62
Q

What did McClure et al (2004) find when studying delay discounting?

A

Mechanisms for delay discounting depends on whether an immediate reward is an option (i.e. a reward now compared with at some future time) or not (i.e. different rewards at two future points in time)
Immediate reward available
- activation in the mOFC (‘hot’ system)
No immediate reward available - more associated with LPPC (‘cold’ system)

63
Q

What is PFC crucial for?

A

using information to guide behaviour
Lateral PFC important for conscious control of attention; helps us to hold information in mind to think things through – supports working memory (Active maintenance of goal-related information in the face of distractors/interference; task-dependent)

64
Q

What has been found in delayed response tasks?

A

Requires response to stimulus that saw/heard a short while earlier
DLPFC shows increased activity during delay period: Stronger activation; better memory performance

65
Q

What have neuroimaging studied shown about the mediation of working memory?

A

working memory is mediated by frontal cortex and several posterior cortical regions
Posterior cortical regions seems to specialise in the type of information held in working memory

66
Q

What brain areas have been shown to have a special role in integrating info?

A

The frontal area
Verbal working memory tasks mainly activate left DLPFC and Visual working memory tasks mainly activate the right DLPFC

67
Q

What happens when there is injury to the orbitofrontal (OFC) region?

A

disinhibited syndrome - inhibitory control and decision making, emotion and social control are affected

68
Q

What happens when there is injury to the dorsolateral (DLPFC) region?

A

Dysexecutive syndrome -
working memory, top-down endogenous attention, rule learning and task switching, planning and problem solving, novelty detection are affected

69
Q

What happens when there is injury to the mediofrontal (MFC)/anterior cingulate (ACC) regions?

A

Apathetic syndrome - motivation and emotion, sustained/supervisory attention, emotional and social decision making are affected

year 1 - biological bases of behaviour (11 decks)

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