lecture 31 Flashcards
What else does our big brain do?
much of our conscious mental activity relates to abstraction
- analysis - how things work
- calculation and estimation
- planning
How can we break prefrontal cortex down anatomically?
- dorsolateral region
- orbital
- medial
- medial and orbital more associated with social cognition
What is the function of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex?
working memory:
- remembering a phone number
- remembering and applying rules (count backwards from 100 in steps of 7)
memory of the future
- delayed gratification, plans, goals
- temporal structuring of behaviour
- dorsolateral pfc damage: distractability, impulsiveness, perseverative errors
Is language controlled by prefrontal cortex?
- no
- language is the servant of intellect
- auditory cortex
- motor cortex
- wernicke’s area
- angular gyrus
- broca’s area
all of these are not prefrontal
What is the border between prefrontal and complex motor association areas?
- kind of frontal eye fields
What do we attend to mostly when looking at faces?
- sharp angles of eyes and mouth
- this is where we get a lot of nonverbal communication from
What does prefrontal cortex examine?
- what’s important immediately and in the future
- salience of our environment
What are higher order inferences?
- categorisation, multiple regression, principle components (huge numbers of variables, what’s actually going on?)
- the meaning of proverbs
- word similiarity, word meaning (definition)
- estimates
- list words beginning with…
- females tend to be better at this sort of thing
- males tend to be better and spatial recognition - are these two shapes the same?
What is the standard stroop task?
- read words - colours, but they are coloured differently
- blue written in green
- red written in brown wtc
- task: ‘name the ink colour as fast as possible’
stard result
- incongruent slows compared with congruent condition (because word meaning interferes with colour naming on incongruent trials)
emotional stroop task
- emotion condition vs neutral condition
- anxious participants: emotion condition slowed cf neutral condition
- non-axious participants: no difference
- not necessarily prefrontal test
What is the wisconsin card sort?
- measures the ability to change categorisation strategy
- not told what the rule is - have to figure it out over time
- categorisation rule is changed without telling you
- tests ability of prefrontal cortex to restrategise when the strategy you’ve been using hasn’t been working
- need flexibility to solve problems
What is the Tower of London/Hanoi task?
- first becomes possible between 3 and 6
- BA 10 is strongly activated during this type of task
- this region is most conspicuously enlarged in humans compared to apes
- as is our ability to plan into the future
Has the evolution of advanced social competencies - such as conceptualising the motivations of others - given rise to uniquely human functions?
- no compelling evidence of “theory of mind”
- the capicity of us to know what someone else knows
- not yet seen in other species
How do we think?
- what do we think about - getting what we want, understanding the way things work
- predicition and control
- curiosity is a defining characterstic of complex animals, seen to an extraordinary degree in humans
Why do we think so much? why do we explore? why not just “stay home”?
- control
- often we go beyond what’s required
- drive to explore and to explain
What drives exploration and innoviation?
- is it the need to find an advantage in the grim struggle for survival, or is it the bounty of excess?
- in contrast to the commonly held assumption that competition drives innovation, the reverse may be trueL competition produces stasis. Only complacency drives change.
“relaxed selection” prof. terrance deacon - the metabolically regulated enzyme sirtuin 1 (SIRT1) modulates monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) levels to link mood and behavoir to energy consumption
- variability in the SIRT1 gene contributes to human susceptibility to anxiety disorders
