Exam

Question 1

Thalamus

Answer 1

A large mass of gray matter in the dorsal part of the diencephalon of the brain. Several functions such as relaying of sensory signals, including motor signals to the cerebral cortex, and the regulation of consciousness, sleep, and alertness.

Question 2

Hippocampus

Answer 2

Plays important roles in the connecting of information from short-term memory to long-term memory, and in spatial memory that enables navigation. The hippocampus is located under the cerebral cortex in the medial temporal lobe.

Question 3

Fusiform face area

Answer 3

A part of the visual system that is specialized for facial recognition. It is located in the Inferior temporal cortex, in the fusiform gyrus.

Question 4

Lateral geniculate nucleus

Answer 4

A relay center in the thalamus for the visual pathway. It receives a major sensory input from the retina. The LGN is the main central connection for the optic nerve to the occipital lobe, particularly the primary visual cortex. In humans, each LGN has six layers of neurons (grey matter) alternating with optic fibers (white matter).

Question 5

Holistic processing

Answer 5

Instead of processing the features (eyes, nose etc) you process the whole target as one (face).

Question 6

Basic level (semantic) processing

Answer 6

When asked What are you sitting on?, most subjects prefer to say chair rather than a subordinate such as kitchen chair or a superordinate such as furniture. Basic categories are relatively homogeneous in terms of sensory-motor affordances — a chair is associated with bending of one’s knees, a fruit with picking it up and putting it in your mouth, etc

Rosch (1978) defines the basic level as that level that has the highest degree of cue validity. Thus, a category like [animal] may have a prototypical member, but no cognitive visual representation. On the other hand, basic categories in [animal], i.e. [dog], [bird], [fish], are full of informational content and can easily be categorized in terms of Gestalt and semantic features.

Question 7

(Semantic) priming

Answer 7

Priming is a technique whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention. For example, the word NURSE is recognized more quickly following the word DOCTOR than following the word BREAD. Priming can be perceptual, semantic, or conceptual.

Question 8

Schema

Answer 8

A pattern of thought or behavior that organizes categories of information and the relationships among them.

In other words: Mental frameworks or concepts we form to organize and understand the world and its causal connections.

Question 9

Preconcscious processing

Answer 9

Information is processed outside the concious awareness. One of the most common forms of preconscious processing is priming. Other common forms of preconscious processing are tip of the tongue phenomenon and blindsight.

Question 10

Proactive interference

Answer 10

The interference of older memories with the retrieval of newer memories.

Question 11

Retroactive interference

Answer 11

The interference of newer memories with the retrieval of older memories. In other words, subsequently learned of memories directly contributes to the forgetting of previously learned memories. The effect of retroactive interference takes place when any type of skill has not been rehearsed over long periods of time

Question 12

Familiarity judgement

Answer 12

Related to how memories are initially learned or encoded in the brain. This encoding process is an important aspect of recognition memory because it determines not only whether or not a previously introduced item is recognized, but how that item is retrieved through memory. Depending on the strength of the memory, the item may either be ‘remembered’ (i.e. a recollection judgment) or simply ‘known’ (i.e. a familiarity judgment).

When subjects are distracted during the memory-encoding process, only the right prefrontal cortex and left parahippocampal gyrus are activated. These regions are associated with “a sense of knowing” or familiarity.

Question 13

Availability heuristic

Answer 13

A mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic, concept, method or decision. The availability heuristic operates on the notion that if something can be recalled, it must be important, or at least more important than alternative solutions which are not as readily recalled.

Question 14

Method of loci

Answer 14

The method of loci (loci being Latin for “places”) is a method of memory enhancement which uses visualizations with the use of spatial memory, familiar information about one’s environment, to quickly and efficiently recall information. The method of loci is also known as the memory journey, memory palace, or mind palace technique.

Question 15

State depended memory

Answer 15

The phenomenon through which memory retrieval is most efficient when an individual is in the same state of consciousness as they were when the memory was formed. The term is often used to describe memory retrieval while in states of consciousness produced by psychoactive drugs – most commonly, alcohol, but has implications for mood or non-substance induced states of consciousness as well.

Question 16

Blindsight

Answer 16

The ability of people who are cortically blind due to lesions in their primary visual cortex (aka V1), to respond to visual stimuli that they do not consciously see.

Question 17

Broca’s aphasia

Answer 17

A type of aphasia characterized by partial loss of the ability to produce language (spoken, manual, or written), although comprehension generally remains intact. A person will exhibit effortful speech. Speech generally includes important content words, but leaves out function words that have only grammatical significance and not real-world meaning, such as prepositions and articles.

It is caused by acquired damage to the anterior regions of the brain, such as the left posterior inferior frontal gyrus or inferior frontal operculum, also described as Broca’s area .

Question 18

Trancient global amnesia

Answer 18

A neurological disorder whose key defining characteristic is a temporary but almost total disruption of short-term memory with a range of problems accessing older memories. A person in a state of TGA exhibits no other signs of impaired cognitive functioning but recalls only the last few moments of consciousness, as well as possibly a few deeply encoded facts of the individual’s past, such as their childhood, family, or home perhaps.

A TGA episode generally lasts no more than 2 to 8 hours before the patient returns to normal with the ability to form new memories.

Question 19

Capgras delusion

Answer 19

A psychiatric disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member (or pet) has been replaced by an identical impostor. Most commonly occurs in individuals diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, but has also been seen in brain injury and dementia.

Question 20

Prosopagnosia

Answer 20

Also called face blindnes. A cognitive disorder of face perception in which the ability to recognize familiar faces, including one’s own face (self-recognition), is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning (e.g., decision-making) remain intact.

The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus, which activates specifically in response to faces.

Question 21

Inattentional blindness

Answer 21

Results from a lack of attention that is not associated with vision defects or deficits, as an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight. When it becomes impossible to attend to all the stimuli in a given situation, a temporary “blindness” effect can occur, as individuals fail to see unexpected but often salient objects or stimuli.

Question 22

Binocular rivalry

Answer 22

Binocular rivalry is a phenomenon of visual perception in which perception alternates between different images presented to each eye.

When one image is presented to one eye and a very different image is presented to the other (also known as dichoptic presentation), instead of the two images being seen superimposed, one image is seen for a few moments, then the other, then the first, and so on, randomly for as long as one cares to look.

Question 23

Wason selection task

Answer 23

One of the most famous tasks in the study of deductive reasoning. An example of the puzzle is:

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which card(s) must you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?

A response that identifies a card that need not be inverted, or that fails to identify a card that needs to be inverted, is incorrect. The original task dealt with numbers (even, odd) and letters (vowels, consonants).

The test is of special interest because people have a hard time solving it in most scenarios but can usually solve it correctly in certain contexts. In particular, researchers have found that the puzzle is readily solved when the imagined context is policing a social rule.

Question 24

Lexical decision task

Answer 24

A procedure used in many psychology and psycholinguistics experiments. The basic procedure involves measuring how quickly people classify stimuli as words or nonwords. Investigates semantic memory and lexical access in general.

Question 25

Stroop effect

Answer 25

A demonstration of interference in the reaction time of a task.

When the name of a color (e.g., “blue”, “green”, or “red”) is printed in a color which is not denoted by the name (i.e., the word “red” printed in blue ink instead of red ink), naming the color of the word takes longer and is more prone to errors than when the color of the ink matches the name of the color.

Two main areas in the brain, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, are involved in the processing of the Stroop task. Both are activated when resolving conflicts and catching errors. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex also assists in memory and other executive functions, while the anterior cingulate cortex is used to select an appropriate response and allocate attentional resources.

Question 26

Perceptual causality

Answer 26

Causality is a fundamental feature of human cognition that lets us to theorize and predict future states of the world. Episodes of the brain encode the world in terms of causality. An action produces a result (cause-effect), and with pairing we get response-effect sequence, despite the fact that there might not be a real causal relation between actions and targets.

Brain activation for causal motion: inferior prefrontal cortex (IFG), superior parietal cortex (SPG), and inferior parietal cortex (IPG).

Question 27

Distributed vs. massed repetition

Answer 27

Distributed repetition: Repetitions are distributed in several sessions over a long period of time.

Massed repetition: Fewer, longer sessions.

Distributed is more effective f.ex for learning. For example, when studying for an exam dispersing your studying more frequently over a larger period of time will result in more effective learning than intense study the night before.