Midterm 3 Review Flashcards
Learning
Process by which long lasting changes occur in behavioral potential as a result of experience
Long lasting: not due to transient state, not a single incident, persistent over time.
Behavioral potential: Learning can occur without it being tested yet, hence potential.
Result of experience: as opposed to other factors that can change behavior such as arousal state or physical injury
Patient HM
HM did not know he had done the task before (no new declarative memories), ut he could do the task better each day (nondeclarative)
Nondeclarative memories
knowledge which is shown through performance rather than declaration.
Three types: skill learning, classical conditioning, operant conditioning
Changing roommate behavior you don’t like
positive reinforcement immediately after the desired behavior with a variable ratio schedule. (slot machines)
Things we can do with Short term memory
- Act upon it. Such as dialing a phone number
- Transfer it to long-term memory
- Forget it
Consolidation
The transformation of the more volatile STM into more durable LTM
Sensory Buffers –(Encoding)–> STM –(Consolidation)–> LTM
LTM–(retreival)–>STM
Living conditions
Compared to mice under impoverished conditions, mice under enriched conditions have:
1.Thicker visual and somatosensory cortex
2. more cholinergic activity throughout cortex
3. Larger cortical synapses
4. Better recovery following brain damage
5. More complex dendrites
Showing what happens in the brain
Hippocampus provides a clean organization of axons
Schaffer collaterals are axons travelling from one part of the hippocampus (CA3) to another part (CA1), and they are organized into a bundle.
CA3 neurons make excitatory onto CA1 neurons.
One of the most highly studied synapses in the brain
- Remove a mouse’s brain (should remain alive)
- Take a thin slice of the brain that includes the hippocampus and put it in a petri dish.
- Electrically stimulate axons from. one population (Cell A – in this case the axons of CA3 neurons, which form the schaffer collateral) that are known to target another population (cell B – in this case CA1 neurons)
- Record the EPSPs in cell B
Stimulate pre and post tetanus stimulation and note how EPSP changed
Excitatory Synapse
PostSynaptic Side:
1. Nearby AMPA receptors move to the active site
2. Ampa receptors are modified to be even more conductive for Na+ and K+ ions
3. More AMPA receptors are produced and inserted into the synapse
Presynaptic Side:
1. Retrograde transmitters are released that go back to the presynaptic side.
2. This induces the presynaptic terminal to release more glutamate the next time an AP arrives
AMPA
Receptors that normally mediate excitatory synaptic transmission
NMDA
don’t normally function because they are blocked by magnesium, and therefore can’t let ions in to depolarize the cell
engram
Biological means by which a memory is stored in the brain.
In remembering an experience (associative learning) synapses around these neurons are strengthened. Next time we hear the same sound, these strengthened synapses will help to recreate the same neural activity pattern as the original experience.
Shining blue light on neurons will cause them to fire action potentials
Overt attention
attention in which you’re attending to the same thing you’re looking at
Covert attention
attending to something that you’re not looking at directly
Voluntary attention
guided by what we decide we want to focus on at any moment; also called top-down attention.
Reflexive Attention
when an unexpected object grabs our attention whether we want it to or not; also called bottom-up attention
Spatially cued attention
explicitly directs your attention to a position in space
Symbolically cued attention
Uses arbitrary symbols to direct your attention to a position in space
Dopamine
A neurotransmitter. Dopamine neurons live in the midbrain but send axons throughout the brain. Dopamine release is important for consolidating short term memories into long term memories.
Dopamine neurons are active when something pleasantly unexpected occurs. Scale with how big the unexpected reward is.
Core emotions
There is a core set of emotions with multiple levels of intensity.
Can be thought of as coming in opposing pairs: Joy/Sadness, Affection/Disgust, Anger/Fear, Expectation/Surprise
Fight or flight, relax and recover
Emotions are felt in parts of the body because we also experience changes in our autonomic nervous system
Incoming sensory stimuli influence our perception (our feeling of emotions) and our bodies simultaneously.
Low Road and High Road
Sensory information that drives our emotions takes two paths: One to the cortex (high road) and one to the amygdala (low road)
The amygdala drives rapid changes in the body and behavior
The cortex integrates sensations with other cognitive processes
Biological rhythms
regular functions in any living process. Nearly every physiological process has biological rhythms.
Ultradian: repeat more than once per day and last several minutes to several hours (hunger, eating)
Infradian: Take longer than a day to complete (menstrual cycle or mating seasons for animals)
Circadian Rhythms
a form of biological rhythm. A pattern of fluctuations with a 24 hr period
Superchiamastic Nucleus (SCN) : Small region of the hypothalamus located above optic chiasm. When lesioned, the SCN will eliminate circadian rhythms in rodents
Two Kinds of sleep
Rapid Eye Movement: (REM), (paradoxical sleep), A stage characterized by small amplitude, fast EEG waces, no postural tension, and rapid eye movements.
Non-REM sleep: sleep divided into stages 1-3, distinctive EEG activity that differs from REM sleep
Biological Functions of Sleep
Energy conservation: you use less energy when you’re asleep.
Niche Adaptation: Forcing animals to conform to their natural adaptations (nocturnal vs diurnal)
Body and Brain Restoration: Sleep helps to flush out your body and brain’s waste products while rebuilding other materials
Memory consolidation: SWS oversees the bulk of memory consolidation
Neural Systems that Underlie Sleep
- A forebrain system that generates SWS
- A brainstem system that activates the sleeping forebrain into wakefulness.
- A Pontine System that triggers REM sleep
- A Hypothalamic system that coordinates the other three brain regions to determine which state we are in
Brain synchronization
When two mice socially
interact, activity in their
prefrontal cortex syncs up
with each other. This level of
correlation can’t be
accounted for by the mice
doing similar things, so must
be related to socializing.
Hormones
chemicals, created by the body, that act on the brain as well as on other organs.
Three types: Peptide, amine, steroid
Endocrine glads release hormones into the bloodstream to act on distant targets
Steroid hormones
Alter gene expression.
When a steroid hormone and its receptor bind to on another, they enter the cell’s nucleus. There they bind to DNA and alter the expression of specific gener, thereby increasing or decreasing the rate of protein production. Because steroid hormones alter gene and protein expression, their effects often take longer to occur
Pituitary Gland
Link between brain and circulating hormones
Neuroendocrine cells live in the hypothalamus.
The pituitary gland, which sits below the hypothalamus, contains axons from neuroendocrine cells and dense vascularization.
Blood exits the pituitary with hormones that can circulate to the brain and to other organs
