From Brain Structure to Linguistic Function Flashcards
Where is Broca’s area?
Left frontal cortex
What are dendrites?
Dendrites receive signals from other neurons.
What is the arcuate fascicle, and why is it important for language?
The arcuate fascicle is a bundle of axons that connects the temporal cortex and inferior parietal cortex to locations in the frontal lobe. One of the key roles of the arcuate fasciculus is connecting Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, which are involved in producing and understanding language.
The strongly developed articuate fascicle in humans is probably one of the reasons we have language.
What are the characteristics of pyramidal neurons in the A-system and B-system?
The A-system is cortico-cortical connection, and are thus made up of long axons and apical dendrites.
The B-system on the other hand is characterised by local axon branches and basal dendrites.
How many neurons and dendrites respectively in the human cortex?
10^10 neurons
10^14 dendrites
Curveball avoided
Are the synaptic connections between the neurons of the human cortex determined by the genetic code?
No, because the human genetic code includes much less information than is necessary to specify the connectivity matrix of human cortical neurons.
What’s this?
Voxel based lesion-symptom mapping.
Dysfluent speech is much more like for frontal lesions, whereas comprehension deficits are seen most prominently with posterior lesions.
Correlation learning
When a peanut opens a monkey and the other peanut sees it, a specific type of neuron is activated:
Mirror neuron
In Schomer’s (2017) brain constrained model of word learning which differences were introduced between human and monkey models, and what was the main finding?
The layers in the network were better connected, resembling “jumping links”, which leads to larger cell assemblies.
They found more parallel activation in the human model and activation was longer lasting (working memory).
Why are humans capable of building large vocabularies?
Verbal working memory as facilitated by “jumping links”.
Connectivity in fronto-temporal cortex enabled us to memorize communicated information.
Stronger connections allow us to build action-perception representations that serve as memory carriers of large vocabularies.
APC?
Action-perception circuit.
Represents e.g. words in the brain using a strongly connected neuron set which is distributed over wide cortical areas.
Develops by hebbian learning, that is, correlated neural activity during action performance in sensory and motor areas
