Lecture 3 Q &A Flashcards
What is Santiago Ramon y Cajal known for and what did he propose?
He is known to be the “father of connection” and he helped come up with the idea of making and breaking synaptic connections. He came up with ideas and set the foundation of what we now call the synapse.
What does it mean to be dynamically polarized?
This means that the flow of energy travels in one direction and not the other. The terminal faces the world while the dendrite faces the body.
What were the two schools of thought at the time?
1) Electrical
2) Chemical
Describe the chemical school of thought.
This was the idea that chemicals rather than electricity affected neural processes. This was supported by the fact that a drop of nicotine on prepared setup led to the frog legs twitching.
What did Otto Loewi discover?
Nerves communicate via chemical transmission (neurotransmitters) (1920s).
What was Otto Loewi’s experimental setup?
There were two frog hearts: the donor heart and recipient heart. The vagus nerve of a the donor heart was stimulated with electricity which led to the slowing down of the heart rate. Then the fluid sample was removed from the donor heart and this fluid was added to the recipient heart. This caused the recipient heart rate to slow down. This helped support the chemical heart idea.
What did Ricardo Miledi discover?
He helped discover that for the neurotransmitters to be released from the presynaptic terminal calcium has to enter the cell. This was the key for the neurotransmitters to come out.
What is non-associative learning?
This is a form of learning that does not require the learning of a specific association between two things (unlike S-R learning for example).
Habituation: Organism slowly stops responding (behavior changed in response to a stimulus)
Sensitization: (hyper response such as in a scary situation)
Define habituation
A gradual decrease in the response to a repeatedly presented non-noxious stimulus.
Ex. Frog jumping in response to a tone. Or rat jumping in response to a tone.
How is habituation proved?
This is proved by dishabituation which is when a different stimulus is presented to see if response returns. If it does the reduction you saw before was not due to fatigue and therefore was true habituation.
What habituation isn’t
Sensory adaptation or fatigue.
What is the learning/performance distinction?
A change in behavior may or may NOT be due to learning. Before you can be sure it is due to learning you must be sure it is not due to other factors that can affect behavioral performance.
Describe the baby study that presented them with different types of images and measured heartbeat.
Habituation: baby’s response will decrease to new stimuli over time.
Can use a variety of stimuli types and use baby’s ability to discriminate to infer learning/perception.
Dishabituation: recovery in responses.
Infant can discriminate between old and new stimuli.
What does “reducing the problem” mean?
It means starting with a simpler nervous system. In this case, an aplyssia (sea slug) was used and habituation was done in a relatively simple nervous system.
What is the gil withrawal reflex?
It is when the sea slug withdraws its gills in response to a paint brush touching it.
