Lecture 1

Question 1

What is plasticity?

Answer 1

Networks of the brain cells change

Question 2

What is neurogenesis?

Answer 2

New generations of neurons in the adult brain (plasticity?)

Question 3

What is behavioral neuroscience

Answer 3

Study of behaviors that are observed in organisms, and trying to understand what role the nervous system plays.
- Has many other names too

Question 4

What is the primary function of the nervous system, perception, thinking and learning/remembering

Answer 4

• The nervous system is for controlling movement
• Perception allows you to act on the environment.
• Thinking allows you to do complex behavior.
  Remembering/learning allows you to profit from experience.

Question 5

What are generalization and reductions in scientific explanation?

Answer 5

• generalization means you explain something using general laws.
• Reduction: you explain something using simpler phenomena

Question 6

What did Hippocrates say about the brain?

Answer 6

It, rather than the heart, was where emotion and thought happened

Question 7

What did rené Descartes say about the brain?

Answer 7

• Believed in a dualism. The fluids in ventricles was controlled by the mind.

Question 8

What is the mind body question?

Answer 8

• Dualism says mind and body are separate
• Monism says mind results from neural activity.

Question 9

What did Luigi Gavalni discover?

Answer 9

• Muscles contract when electrically stimulated (without a brain).

Question 10

What did Johannes Müller experiment with? What is the doctrine of specific nerve engines

Answer 10

• he removed organs and tested their response to chemicals.
• doctrine of specific nerve engines says that nerves always send the same electric signal but their are perceived differently according to the brain area’s function. The mind only has access to to these signals and not physical stimuli.

Question 11

What is experimental ablation?

Answer 11

Removing a brain area to see what functions cannot be performed without is

Question 12

What are Purkinje Fibers?

Answer 12

Neurons that control the heart, first to be discovered

Question 13

What did Cajal Argue about the nervous system?

Answer 13

Neurons are separate instead of one flow, like blood

Question 14

What does functionalism say about parts of an organism?

Answer 14

• each part serves some function

Question 15

What are mutations?

Answer 15

Changes in chromosomes that can have a selective advantage or disadvantage.

Question 16

Wy h development of humans genetically slowed down (neoteny)

Answer 16

SO the brain can get a lot of time to grow and create neurons.

Question 17

What does neuro-ethics do?

Answer 17

It creates ethically ideal research practices for neuroscience.

Question 18

What did Wilhelm Wundt start?

Answer 18

Started experimental psychology .

Question 19

What is introspection?

Answer 19

Looking into your own mind and telling what you observe/perceive.

Question 20

What did John B. Watson criticize, and what was he in favor of?

Answer 20

• Critisized introspection due to subjectivity
• In favor of measuring detectable behavior and conditioning

Question 21

What did Skinner Create?

Answer 21

Operant conditioning

Question 22

How do behaviorists think behavior is formed and what is the downside?

Answer 22

• It thinks all behavior is formed from conditioning
• it ignores the mind

Question 23

What did Chomsky say about language?

Answer 23

He was a linguist that argued that you need creativity to make up new sentences and this cannot be conditioned.

Question 24

What did Tolman discover?

Answer 24

Rats form a mental map of a maze and don’t just act on conditioning

Question 25

What was the mental revolution

Answer 25

• The change to measuring mental processes with experiments

Question 26

What are the three steps in cognitive research?

Answer 26

1. Make an observation
2. Make an inference about underlying mental processes
3. Consider what this says about the mind

Question 27

What is the foundation of biological psychology (4)?

Answer 27

• Darwin’s evolution theory
• Ablation method
• Discovery of Punkinje Cells
• Effect of electrical stimulation

Question 28

What is electrical stimulation used for?

Answer 28

• You open the brain and stimulate brain areas to see what happens. (introspection)
• only when someone has to undergo brain surgery

Question 29

What are Wernicke’s and Broca’s area?

Answer 29

• Wernicke’s area is important for understanding speech
• Broca’s area is important for producing speech

Question 30

How fast is nerve transmission and how was it tested?

Answer 30

• 60 m/s
• Helmholtz compared the reaction time to touch on the foot to touch on the neck.

Question 31

What is Donder’s Subtraction Method? what is a criticism?

Answer 31

• You compare the reaction time when a certain mental process is performed to when this mental process is not needed.
• Like Go/No-go
• It wrongly assumes that stages of processing happen separately and chronologically

Question 32

What is the generation effect?

Answer 32

if you retrieve something, you learn it better.

Question 33

What did Sternberg study about memory set size?

Answer 33

• There was were YES and NO trials for wether or not a number that was shown was in the memory set.
• The reaction time for the answer increased linearly for both YES and NO trials.
• so you serially test each item in de memory set it seems

Question 34

What did Mishkin study with monkeys?

Answer 34

• He studies object and location memory when there were lesions in the amygdala and hippocampus
• this only impaired object recognition/memory and not location memory.