Lecture 1&2 - Introduction, Methods, Neural Time Series Analysis Flashcards
What is cognition?
“the faculty of knowing”; set of processes: perceive and process stimuli from outside and inside, store and retrieve (key-) information, hold memory, decide upon and execute actions to achieve goals; often without conscious experience
mind
subjective sense of self
cognitive functions
specific sort of information processing
PLATO (Introspection)
- Nativist (all knowledge available at birth)
- Rationalist (logic/introspection leading to knowledge)
- nature
ARISTOTELE (Empiricism)
- Empiricist (knowledge stems from observation)
- data&hypothesizing (leading to new knowlegde)
- nuture
WILLIAM JAMES (Psychologist/Philosopher)
- Associationism (activation of part of memory acitvating associated elements, may spread to other memory)
HERMAN EBBINGHAUS
- towards experimental psychology; used himself as research object
learning curve; asymptotic learning
forgetting curve; exponential
-> relearning makes things stick in mind
IVAN PAVLOV
- studies on animals
- classical conditioning (pairings)
- > can be overwritten with extinction learning (gradual decrease inresponse to a conditioned stimulus that occurs when the stimulus is presented without reinforcement)
EDWARD THORNDIKE
- instrumental conditioning; learning that certain action leads to certain outcome (positive or negative); law of effect (strenghten the positive, weaken the behavior leading to negative outcomes)
- > certain actions selected (survival of the fittest principle)
Behaviorism (SKINNER)
- examining how changes in stimulus presentation shape how individuals adapt their behavior to the demands of the environement (operant conditioning)
-> everything is stimulus response
(contradictory; cognitivism also concerns the inside (what happens between stimulus and reponse), looking at internal states affecting behavior; cognitive models -> psychological constructs; explain diverse phenomena without reference to their ultimate cause in brain)
-> touches up on operationism; psychological concept only in terms of experimental manipulations that evoke them, ignoring complex mental states, making experiments easier but reduces psychological scope (cannot explainn the structural and generative properties of mental phenomena (ex. language)
Cognitive Science
- making use of computational science (“mind as computer”)
- more insights into perception, memory and motor performance
- explore the complex mental life
- experimental approach (humans, animals, computer simulations of cognitive functions)
Golgi
- silver staining method (golgy staining)
- reticular theory (all neurons in brain and spinal cord from continous information network)
Ramony Cajal
- neuron doctrine; nervous system made of discrete individual cells
- leads to localization of function; different brain regions for different cogntivie functions
Homunculus
- representational map of entire body due to somatopie, which is the relationship of the different (adjacent) parts of the body
- > measuring brain activity when performing a task; studying cognitive changes when brain has been perturbed somehow (recorded via electrodes)
Brain pertubation approach
-> measuring taks performance after brain got pertubated
pertubations = influencing cognivitve function through variety of mechanisms, coming from brain damaged (brain lesions) or get induced (temporary (reversible lesion)/virtual, with drugs effecting neurotransmitters (pharmacological manipulation)
- single lesion can have diverse effects on cognitive functions due to different durations the artery was blocked (other parts might compensate)
- Diaschisis = if one brain part is damaged, others are not normally feeded anymore and also stop functioning as they usually do (highly interconnected brain structure)
-> can lead to wrongly attributing the lost functionality to the lesioned area
- investigated with MRI or DTI (diffusion tensor imaging)
Neuromonitoring approach
-> manipulate cognitive process and measure neural vairbale (from brain)
electric recording of single units
- EEG and MEG recording, MRI and CT (X-Ray), or fMRI and PET can investigate this
electrical and magnetic field recordings
- EEG
- MEG
structural imaging
- MRI
- CT
functional imaging
- fMRI
- PET
intracranial stimulation
- microstimulation in the brain
- rTMS (repetitive, series of pulses)
- tDCS (direct, spatial coarsebess)
(magnetic field generated over a region of the scalp by passing intense, rapidly varying, electrical current through a set of coils, producing extraneous flow of current transiently interacting with local neural processing, disruptive form brain limited to underlying area)
trade-off between methods in cognitive neuroscience?
spatial vs temporal resolution
- different deepness scales (micrometers)
- different layers of the brain (from single cell to neuron to the whole brain)
- different timing scales