exam bible Flashcards
Cerebral Cortex
• Part of the forebrain (outer layer)
• Largest part of the brain, separates us from animals
• Divided into four anatomical areas (lobes)
o Frontal
o Parietal
o Occipital
o Temporal
Frontal lobe
- Personality
- Higher order processes (attention, impulse, organization etc)
- Contains the following functional areas: primary motor cortex and brocas.
Frontal lobe
primary motor cortex
o Located at the back of the frontal lobe
o Different areas responsible for different body parts
• Laid out in the order of body parts
• Body parts involved in fine motor movement have more area dedicated to them
Frontal lobe
broca’s
o Located on the left side of the frontal lobe o It controls; • Muscles responsible for fluent speech • Structures that understand grammatically rules o If damaged; • Speech isn’t fluent • Grammatically incorrect • However speech usually makes sense
Temporal lobe
o Contains the primary auditory cortex and Wernicke’s areas
o Responsible for creation of new memories
Temporal lobe
Primary auditory cortex
- Left hemisphere is responsible for verbal sounds
* Right hemisphere is responsible for non verbal sounds
Temporal lobe
Wernicke area
o Left side of temporal lobe o Language comprehension center- retrieves meaning of words from memory o If damaged: • Unable to understand speech of others • Unable to produce meaningful speech • Fluent gibberish
Occipital
- Contains primary visual cortex
* Responsible for vision
Occipital
Primary vision cortex
- Receives visual information and transforms it
- Right to left side, left to right
- If damaged:
- Tumors
- Schizophrenia
Parietal lobe
o Contains primary sensory cortex
o Therefore responsible for sensations
parietal lobe
Primary somatosensory cortx
- Similar layout to the primary motor cortex
- Areas which are more sensitive (mouth, fingers etc) have more area dedicated to them
- Creates meaning from raw sensory information (ie touching something that gets translated to pain)
- Damage results in:
- Problems with co-ordination, as well as sensation
- Hemi spatial neglect
- Other issues with spatial awareness
CNS
- Also known as CNS
- Includes the brain and spinal cord
- Integrate and co-ordinate all in coming neural information and to initiate messages sent to different parts of the body.
- It does not have contact with the outside of the body and therefore relies on the PNS.
spinal cord
- Passes sensory information from the PNS to the brain
* Passes motor information from brain to PNS
peripheral nervous system
- Complete set of neurons outside the brain
- Links the central nervous system to the rest of the body
- Divided into two sections; somatic and autonomic
- Responsible for; carrying information to the CNS from the body’s muscles, organs and glands (about internal body) and from sensory organs; carry information from the CNS to the body’s muscles, organs and glands.
somatic
- Transfer sensory information from the environment to the central nervous system
- Afferent (sensory) neurons receive information from the environment and send them inwards towards the CNS
- Efferent (motor) neurons transfer information outwards from the CNS to co-ordinate movement
- Controls voluntary muscle only
autonomic nervous system
- Non voluntary body functions, glands, non skeletal muscles
- Unconsciousness
- Consists of the sympathetic nervous system and parasympathetic
sympathetic nervous system
- Involved in fight or flight response
- When activated; heart rate increases, breathing rate increases, sweat glands increases, digestion decreases and pupils dilate.
parasympathetic nervous system
- Responsible for bringing the body back to homeostasis after the sympathetic nervous system has been activated
- When activated; heart rate decreases, breathing rate decreases, sweat glands decrease and digestion increase.
neural transmission
• Chemicals in the brain, which aid in the transmission of activity between neurons.
• Serotin and dopamine
• Neurotransmitters are created in cell body and are stored in synaptic vesicles.
• An action potential occurs and transports the vesicles down the axon.
• The neurotransmitters are released into the synapse.
• Neurotransmitter cross the synaptic cleft and attach to receptor sites on the dendrite of the post synaptic neuron
• Neurotransmitters have an inhibitory or excitatory effect, and if the action potential is strong enough, the process then continues in the next neurons.
• Excess neurotransmitters are then re-up taken to the presynaptic neuron and recycle.
o Inhibitory effect: calm neural activity balancing mood
o Excitatory effect: stimulates brain activity
serotonin
• Regulation of mood, sleep, appetite
• Neurotransmitter
• Too little= depression,, increased appetite, sleep problems, OCD
• Too much= anorexia
• Factors influencing production:
o Antidepressants prevent the reuptake, increase the availability.
o Ecstacy increases short term decreases long term
dopamine
- Involved in the rewards pathway and motor control
- Neurotransmitter
- Create feelings of pleasure and linked to formative of addictions
- Problems associated with balance
- Too little= Parkinson’s, Anxiety, depression
- Too much= schizophrenia
- Factors influencing production
- Alcohol and drug use
physiological effect
- An effect on the body
- A change in neurotransmitters levels
- Cause psychological effects
psychological effect
o An effect on the mind
o A change in behavior
o Caused by physiological effects
hormones
- Chemical messengers created by the endocrine system
- Adrenaline and Noradrenaline
- Both produced by adrenal gland in the kidney
- Both involved in fight or flight response
adrenaline
o Physiological o Increased heart rate o Raises blood pressure o Psychological • Anxiety • Increases alertness • Fear
noradrenaline
o Physiological • Increased heart rate • Increases rate in muscles contracting o Psychological o Anxiety o Increase alterness o Fear
empirical research
o Mezzacappa
o Sample of male university students
o Control group injected with saline
o Experimental group injected with adrenaline
o Showed them a series of clips
o Overall, experimental group showed a more intense emotional response (measure by facial expressions)
o The experimental group also showed significally more fear during the ‘fear’ clips, no difference during ‘amusement’ and ‘anger’ clips
psychoactive drug
• Drugs that alter the activity of the central nervous system and cause a change in behavior, thoughts and emotion.
Depressant
• Psychoactive drugs which decrease activity of the CNS
• Example is alcohol
• Physiological effects include:
o Increased endorphins
o Long term decreases regulation of dopamine
o Decreases activity in the cerebral cortex
o Use in adolescence impairs the development of frontal lobe
• Psychological effects include:
o Relaxation
o Addiction
o Decrease inhabitation
o Impairment of working memory
• Empirical research:
o Tapert et al
o Sample of young women
o Experimental group were alchoholics
o Control groups were no drinkers
o Conducted FMRIs while participants completed memory tests
o Less activity was found in the frontal lobe and more performance in experimental group
stimulant
• Psychoactive drugs which increase activity of the CNS
• Example is Ecstasy
• Physiological effects include:
o Increased heart rate and blood pressure
o Increased production of serotonin in short term
o Long term destroys neurons which create serotonin
• Psychological
o Euphoria in short term
o Depression in long term
o Decreased attention and memory
o Hallucinations
• Empirical research
o Mc Cardle
o Experimental group was long term ecstasy users
o Control group was non ecstasy users
o Conduction of memory tests and attention tests and surveys on depression level
o It was found that ecstasy users reported higher levels of depression, poor performance on attention and memory tasks
hallucinogens
- Psychoactive drugs which cause an altered state of consciousness
- Example is ecstasy
hereditary
• The fact that genes are passed fro parents to children
• Genotype (the genes/alleles)
• Phenotype (physical expression of genes)
• Research has indicated that our genes influence the way we blame, think and feel in several ways, including:
o Intelligence (Bouchard twin study)
o Personality
o Psychological disorders
epigenetics
• How your environment effects how your genes are expressed, without changing your DNA.
• Research: Yehuda et al
o Did a series of studies on pregnant women who had been involved in 911 and had developed PTSD
o They had lower Cortisol levels and therefore children were born with lower cortisol levels
o 16 of the childrens genes were expressed differently compared to those with PTSD
memory
• The storage, organization and retrieval of information
multi model of memory
• Created by Atkinson and Schiffiren
• Includes capacity, duration and encoding.
• Capacity is how much information can be stored in your memory.
• Duration is how log information can be stored in your memory.
• Encoding is the process of transforming sensory information into a form where it can be stored in your memory. There are four types which include:
o Acoustic: encoding information verbally, for example, repeating the information you are trying to process.
o Visual: usually used for processing visual information, involves creating a mental image of the information youre trying to process.
o Sematic: adding context or meaning to the information youre trying to process, for example, chunking information into categories.
o Elaborative: relating new information to old information or past experiences.
• Therefore according the multi model of memory there are three types, sensory memory, short term memory and long term memory.
sensory memory
- Information enters through your sensory organs.
- If you pay attention to this then it goes to your short term memory.
- Two types are Iconic and echoic.
iconic memory
• The visual component of sesnort memory, allows you to hold on ‘icon’ which is an unprocessed image in your mind for a brief period of time.
• Structural features include
o Capacity: theoretically unlimited
o Duration: 0.2 seconds-0.4 seconds
• Research includes Sperling
o Showed participants a set of 12 letters for 0.2 seconds, he then asked them to verbally recall.
o Participants only recalled 3-4 letters.
echoic memory
• The verbal component of sensor memory
• Structural features include
o Capacity: Theoretically unlimited
o Duration: 3-4 seconds, longer duration allows us to hear spoken language as complete words, and not individual symbols.
• Research by Cowan:
o Got participants to read a story while numbers were read aloud.
o Participants were able to recall more of the later numbers, than the earlier numbers.
o Also better recall if participants were asked to recall straight away.
short-term memory
- The most active part of the memory, which can store a limited amount of information for a limited amount of time.
- Encoding is predominantly acoustic and some visual
- Information is transferred to long-term memory via rehearsal.
- Duration is 18-30 seconds
- Capacity: 7 pieces of information
chunking
o Capacity of STM increased if info in ‘chunked’ together
o For example remembering the phone number as
0420 706 344 instead of 0420706344.
baddeley and hitch working memory model
- central executive
- The control Centre of working memory
- Decides what information is paid attention to
- Co-ordinates the visospatial sketch pad and phonological loop
baddeley and hitch working memory model
visvospatial sketch pad
- Visual part of working memory
- Allows us to process and manipulate visual information from sensory information and long term memory.
- Involved in remembering where objects are in space- navigation.
baddeley and hitch working memory model
phonological loop
• Verbal part of working memory
• Is what allows us to store phone numbers for a short period of time
• Two parts:
1. Phonological store: involved in speech perception and stores verbal info for 1-2 seconds
2. Articulatory control process: involved in speech production and reherses info from the phonological store.
advantages of working memory model
o Identifies that short memory is an active process, hence the term working memory.
o Identifies that STM is complex and consists of several processes
disadvantages of working memory model
o Doesn’t explain how the central executive functions
o Only focuses of STM
long-term memory
• The store memory, which can hold a large amount of information for a long period of time.
• Capacity; theoretically unlimited
• Encoding; semantic
• General meaning is remembered but nit specific details
• Research; Sach
o Method; participants listened to recordings of sentences and were then showed written sentences and asked to identify which they heard exactly.
o Results; decreased dramatically after 30 seconds
procedural memory
o Remembering how to do something, i.e. tie shoe laces
o Implicit
o Relatively resistant to forgetting
declarative memory
o Remembering factual information
o Explicit
o Two types; episodic and semantic
o Episodic: remembering events such as birthdays
o Semantic: general knowledge of the world such as the things you learn at school
forgetting
- Retrieval failure- information is still stored in long-term memory, but cannot be retrieved due to lack of retrieval cues.
- Therefore retrieval cues are hints of prompts that help us recall information from long-term memory. There are two types, context (external) and dependent (internal).
- Context (external) cues: dependent on environment or situation in which you encode information.
