Midterm Flashcards
How are all vertebrate brains organized?
In two hemispheres
Only vertebrates have what particular nervous system components?
Both a CNS and PNS
What are the three main components of the prototypical neuron?
- Dendrites
- Cell body/soma
- Axon(s)
Neurons are far outnumbered by what kind of cell?
Glia
What is currently the most common type of structural neuroimaging in humans?
MRIs
What method of structural neuroimaging is best for visualization of groups of axons?
DTI
The DTI method of structural neuroimaging is particularly useful in what cases?
- Diffuse brain injury
- Multiple sclerosis
Explain the physical differences between rats housed in enriched environments versus those housed in laboratory environments
- Enriched environment rats have cortical neurons with more and longer dendrites
- Enriched environment rats have dendrites with more connections with other neurons
What physical difference was noted among taxi drivers in the London taxi driver study?
When compared to average Londoners, the taxi drivers had slightly larger hippocampal volumes
What are the two distinct types of nerve fibres connecting the muscles to the spinal cord?
- Sensory (PNS to spinal cord)
- Motor (spinal cord to muscles)
Most sensory inputs enter the brain through what structure?
Thalamus
Where is the A1 located?
Temporal lobe
Where is the S1 located?
Parietal lobe
Where is the V1 located?
Occipital lobe
Where is the M1 located?
Frontal lobe
The primary auditory cortex (A1) is responsible for what?
Sounds
The primary somatosensory cortex (S1) is responsible for what?
Sensations from skin and internal organs
The primary visual cortex (V1) is responsible for what?
Sight
The primary motor cortex (M1) is responsible for what?
Coordinated movement
Most synapses are formed between what?
The axon of a presynaptic neuron and the dendrite of a postsynaptic neuron
Neurotransmitters are kept where?
At the end of the presynaptic axon in vesicles
Functional neuroimaging studies typically examine what?
How blood flow in a particular brain area changes depending on what the person is doing or thinking
Which method of functional neuroimaging has better temporal precision, but worse spatial precision?
Electroencephalography (EEG)
What American psychologist spent time researching the engram?
Karl Lashley
Drugs can affect the brain in what ways?
- Neurotransmitter release
- Activation of postsynaptic receptors
- Neurotransmitter inactivation
- Neurotransmitter reuptake
Hebbian learning may also be referred to in what way?
“Neurons that fire together, wire together”
Neuroscience
The study of the brain and the rest of the nervous system
Nervous system
An organism’s system of tissues specialized for distributing and processing information
Neuron
A type of cell that is specialized for information processing
Central nervous system (CNS)
The part of the vertebrate nervous system consisting of the brain and spinal cord
Peripheral nervous system (PNS)
The part of the nervous system that carries information from sensory receptors to the central nervous system and carries commands from the central nervous system to muscles
Cerebral cortex
The brain tissue covering the top and sides of the brain in most vertebrates
The cerebral cortex is involved in what?
Storage and processing of sensory inputs and motor outputs
The parietal lobe is important for what?
Processing somatosensory information
The temporal lobe is important for what?
- Language
- Auditory processing
- Learning new facts
- Forming new memories of events
Dendrite
Extension of a neuron that is specialized to receive signals from other neurons
Cell body/soma
The central part of the neuron that contains the nucleus and integrates signals from all the dendrites
Axon
The output extension of a neuron
Glia
A type of cell that provides functional or structural support to neurons
Structural neuroimaging
Techniques for creating images of anatomical structures within the living brain
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
A method of structural neuroimaging based on recording changes in magnetic fields
Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)
A type of MRI that measures the diffusion of water in brain tissue, permitting bundles of axons throughout the brain to be imaged
Enriched environment
An environment that provides sensory stimulation and opportunities to learn and explore
Reflex
An involuntary and automatic (unlearned) response
Synapse
A narrow gap between two neurons across which chemical messages can be transmitted
Presynaptic
On the sending side of the synapse
Postsynaptic
On the receiving side of the synapse
Receptor
A specialized molecule located on the surface of a neuron, to which one or more particular neurotransmitters can bind
Neuromodulator
A neurotransmitter that acts to modulate activity in a large number of neurons rather than in a single synapse
Positron emission tomography (PET)
A method of functional neuroimaging based on detecting radiation from the emission of subatomic particles called positrons, associated with the brain’s use of glucose from the blood
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
A method of functional neuroimaging based on comparing an MRI of the brain during performance of a task with an MRI of the brain at rest
Electroencephalography (EEG)
A method for measuring electrical activity in the brain by means of electrodes placed on the scalp
Event-related potential (ERP)
Electroencephalograms from a single individual averaged over multiple repetitions of an event
Neurophysiology
The study of the activity and function of neurons
Single-cell recording
Use of an implanted electrode to detect electrical activity in a single cell
Engram
A physical change in the brian that forms the basis of a memory
Theory of equipotentiality
The theory that memories are stored globally, by the brain as a whole, rather than in one particular brain area
Synaptic plasticity
The ability of synapses to change as a result of experience
Hebbian learning
The principle that learning involves strengthening the connections of coactive neurons
Long-term potentiation (LTP)
A processing which synaptic transmission becomes more effective as a result of recent activity
Long-term depression (LTD)
A process in which synaptic transmission becomes less effective as a result of recent activity
Reflex arc
Behaviours driven by interactions of the spinal cord and sensory receptors
What are the two divisions of declarative memory?
Semantic and Episodic
What are the two divisions of long term memory?
Declarative and Non-Declarative
What are the differences between declarative and non-declarative information?
- Flexibility
- Metamemory
- Required exposures
What led H.M. to seek brain surgery treatment?
Severe, debilitating epileptic seizures
What surgery was done for H.M.?
Bilateral Medial Temporal Lobectomy, removed both medial temporal lobes, including the hippocampus
Medial temporal lobes
The medial (or inner) surface of the temporal lobes that contain the hippocampus, the amygdala, and other structures important for memory
What happened as a result of H.M.’s surgery?
He developed anterograde amnesia
Episodic memory
Memory for specific autobiographical events; it includes info about the spatial and temporal contexts in which the event occurred
Semantic memory
Memory for facts or general knowledge about the world, including general personal info
What two key features do episodic and semantic memories share?
- Flexibility - can be communicated in a format different from that in which it was acquired
- Consciously accessible
Declarative memory
A broad class of memories, both semantic and episodic, that can be communicated in some way
Non-declarative memory
A broad class of memory that includes skill memory and other types of learning
Explicit memory
A category of memory that includes semantic memory and episodic memory and consists of memories of which the person is aware
Implicit memory
Memory that occurs without the learner’s awareness
Radial arm maze
A maze with a central area from which several arms branch off like the spokes of a wheel
What is the radial arm maze used to test?
To test semantic memory in non human animals
What was the BBC Radio study?
- BBC radio changed broadcast frequencies and saturated the airwaves with announcements
- Only a quarter of listeners who heard the announcements 25+ times per day for many weeks learned the new call numbers
The effect of background info on memory is limited to what process?
Encoding
Levels of processing effect
The finding that deeper processing leads to better recall of the info than shallow processing
What was the word list study of levels of processing?
- Subjects were shown a list of words, one at a time
- For some words, participants were asked to decide whether the word described something animate or inanimate
- For other words, they were asked to decide whether the first and last letter were in alphabetical order
- Participants later recognized the animate/inanimate words better
What is the criticism for levels of processing theory?
Too vague - how do we know if someone is or isn’t processing a word “deeply”?
Transfer-appropriate processing effect
The finding that memory retrieval is best when the cues available at testing are similar to those available at encoding
Free recall
A memory test that involves simply generating requested info from memory
Cued recall
A memory test that involves some kind of prompt or cue to aid recall
Recognition
A memory test that involves picking out (or recognizing) a studied item from a set of options
What were the findings of Hermann Ebbinghaus’ study on word lists and memory?
Most forgetting occurs in the first few hours or days after learning; info that survives the critical first few days might last in memory indefinitely
Directed forgetting
A procedure in which subjects are first asked to learn info and later asked to remember or forget specific items
Interference
Reduction in the strength of a memory due to overlap with the content of other memories
Proactive interference
Disruption of new learning by previously stored info
Retroactive interference
Disruption of old info by new learning
Source monitoring error
Remembering info but being mistaken about the specific episode that is the source of that memory
False memory
Memory of an event that never happened
Consolidation period
A length of time during which new episodic and semantic memories are vulnerable and easily lost or altered; each time a memory is recalled, it may become vulnerable again until it is reconsolidated
Electroconvulsive shock
A brief pulse of electricity that is passed through the brain and can severely disrupt newly formed memories
What was the result of the electroconvulsive shock treatment on rats?
Older memories were harder to disrupt
Reconsolidation
The process whereby each time an old memory is recalled or reactivated, it may become vulnerable to modification
Metamemory
Knowledge of, and ability to think about, our own memories
Feeling of knowing (FOK)
Our ability to predict whether or not we can retrieve a specific piece of info if asked
Judgment of learning (JOL)
A judgment during learning of whether the info has been successfully acquired
Sensory cortex
Areas of cerebral cortex involved in processing sensory info
Association cortex
Areas of cerebral cortex involved in associating info within and across sensory modalities
In humans, the medial temporal lobes contain what?
The hippocampus, amygdala, and nearby cortical areas, including the entorhinal cortex, the perirhinal cortex, and the parahippocampal cortex
Hippocampus
A brain structure located in the medial temporal lobe that is important for new memory formation
Anterograde amnesia
A severe loss of the ability to form new episodic and semantic memories
Retrograde amnesia
Loss of memories for events dating from before a brain injury or disruption; memory loss generally occurs in a time-graded manners so that more recent memories are devastated but older ones may be spared
Ribot gradient
A pattern of retrograde memory loss in which recent memories are more prone to disruption
People with bilateral medial temporal lobe damage generally present what kind of effects?
Anterograde amnesia with some retrograde amnesia
Standard consolidation theory
The theory that the hippocampus and related medial temporal lobe structures are required for storage and retrieval of recent episodic memories, but not older ones
Multiple trace theory
The theory that episodic (and possibly semantic) memories are encoded by an ensemble of hippocampal and cortical neurons and that both hippocampus and cortex are normally involved in storing and retrieving even very old memories
Frontal cortex
Those regions of the cortex that lie within the frontal lobes and that may play a role in determining which memories are stored in in producing meta memory for that info
People with frontal lobe damage are especially prone to what kind of errors?
Source monitoring errors
Basal forebrain
A collection of structures that lie at the base of the forebrain and are important in the production of acetylcholine that is distributed throughout the brain
The basal forebrain receives blood and oxygen from where?
The anterior communicating artery (ACoA)
The ACoA is a common site of what?
Aneurysm
Aneurysm
A type of stroke in which an artery wall balloons out under pressure and may even rupture
ACoA aneurysms may cause damage to what?
The basal forebrain
ACoA aneurysm survivors often develop what?
Anterograde amnesia
Diencephalon
A brain area that lies near the core of the brian, just above the brainstem, and includes the thalamus, hypothalamus, and mammillary bodies
Korsakoff’s disease
A condition caused by a deficiency in thiamine that sometimes accompanies chronic alcohol abuse
Patients with Korsakoff’s disease often show what?
Severe anterograde amnesia and engage in confabulation
Korsakoff’s disease damages what two areas of the diencephalon?
The mammillary bodies and the mediodorsal nucleus of the thalamus
Transient global amnesia
A transient, or temporary, disruption of memory typically including elements of both anterograde and retrograde amnesia
Functional amnesia
A sudden massive retrograde memory loss that seems to result from psychological causes rather than physical causes
Dissociative amnesia
A type of functional amnesia in which patients lose memory of a specific, traumatic event
Dissociative fugue
A type of functional amnesia in which patients lose all memory of their identity
Structuralism
The idea that consciousness is a really big thing that needs to be studied from many points of view
Describe Wilhelm Wundt’s physiological studies with Heimholtz
They took dead frogs, or partially dead frogs, and zapped them with electricity; they found that the tissue responded
What was the independent variable in Ebbinghaus’ study?
Delay - how much time he left between memorizing and testing
What was the dependent variable in Ebbinghaus’ study?
Savings - how much memory he seemed to have after the retention period
Who discovered the forgetting curve?
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Novel object recognition
An organism’s detection of and response to unfamiliar objects during exploratory behaviour
Neophobia
Active avoidance of novel objects
Familiarity
The perception of similarity that occurs when an event is repeated
Priming
A phenomenon in which prior exposure to a stimulus can improve the ability to recognize that stimulus later
How is priming in humans often studied?
Using a word-stem completion task
Word-stem completion task
A task in which participants are asked to fill in the blanks in a list of word stems to produce the first word that comes to mind; in a priming experiment, participants are more likely to produce a particular word if they’ve been exposed to that word previously
Perceptual learning
Learning in which experience with a set of stimuli makes it easier to distinguish those stimuli
Mere exposure learning
Learning through mere exposure to stimuli, without explicit prompts or outward responding
Spatial learning
The acquisition of info about one’s surroundings
Receptive field
The range of physical stimuli that activates a single neuron
Cortical plasticity
The capacity to change cortical organization as a result of experience
Normal development of visual cortical maps in mammals requires what?
Neural activity from both eyes
Describe the difference between rodents and humans regarding the hippocampus
The hippocampus makes up a much larger proportion of the brain in rodents
Place cell
A neuron that fire maximally when the organism enters a particular location within an environment
John O’Keefe won a Nobel Prize for research on what?
Place cells
Sensory prosthesis
A mechanical device designed to supplement or substitute for a faulty sensory modality; the device’s sensory detectors interface with brain areas that normally process those sensory inputs
What is the most extensively developed and successful sensory prosthetic technology?
The cochlear implant
Cochlear implant
A sensory prosthesis that directly stimulates auditory nerves to produce hearing sensations in deaf individuals
Who pioneered the Montreal procedure?
Wilder Penfield
Montreal procedure
A method of electrically stimulating the cortex to see what areas are stimulated
Agnosia
Selective semantic memory impairment due to association cortex damage
Auditory agnosia
The inability to recognize auditory stimuli
Tactile agnosia
The inability to recognize an object by touch
Prosopagnosia
The inability to recognize individual faces
Associative visual agnosia
The inability to name things that you are looking at
What kind of memories are modality specific?
Semantic memories
Patient Beth had what kind of impairment?
No episodic memory
What did neurologists discover about Beth?
She had almost no amygdala or hippocampus, but did have the surrounding medial temporal lobe structures
What kind of declarative memory is not improved by repetition?
Episodic memory
What did Tolman and Honzik study?
Latent learning
Describe the Tolman and Honzik study
- Tested the ability of rats to spatially learn about their environment based on the presence or absence or rewards
- Three groups:
1 - Food reward always; learned fast
2 - No food reward
3 - No food reward for first 10 days; performed same or better as constant reward group
What did the Tolman and Honzik study show?
That the rats were learning about their environment even without reinforcement (latent learning)
What types of skills do humans use most?
BOTH perceptual-motor and cognitive skills
What are the important messages from the Stillcraft study?
- Across levels of expertise, variable importance is dynamic, not static
- Big Data offers researchers powerful solutions to existing challenges
Talent
An innate ability to master a skill
What are the three components of a skill?
- The ability to execute the skill
- Knowing that you know
- When and where you learned the skill
What are the three levels of Fitt’s model?
- Cognitive
- Associative
- Autonomous
Explain the key points of the cognitive level of Fitt’s model
- Conscious control
- Verbal rehearsal
Explain the key points of the associative level of Fitt’s model
- Conscious monitoring
- Implementation of subtasks
Explain the key points of the autonomous level of Fitt’s model
- Unconscious and effortless
- Verbalization may be detrimental
What does the basal ganglia calibrate?
Amplitude, velocity, and direction of voluntary movement
What are the specific nuclei within the basal ganglia and what do they do?
- Globus pallidus and nucleus accumbens
- They project to the motor cortex through the thalamus and inhibit activity at the motor cortex
What are the structures of the dorsal striatum?
- Putamen
- Caudate nucleus
What is the dorsal striatum involved in?
- Receive input from everywhere, largely sensory information
- Projects downwards to the other ventral nuclei (globus pallidus and nucleus accumbens) and inhibits them
Substantia nigra
- Separate but considered part of the basal ganglia
- The only portion of the basal ganglia that has an excitatory output
- Outputs dopamine to the striatum and activates the dorsal striatum (which turns off the ventral nuclei of the basal ganglia)
How is the substantia nigra related to Parkinson’s disease?
Gradual deterioration of your substantia nigra and associated with gradual loss of ability to perform skills
Explain the animal research of basal ganglia vs hippocampus
- Uncued search - relies on episodic memory which is hippocampus dependent
- Cued search - relies on application of rules/strategy which is basal ganglia dependent
Describe the t-maze study focusing on the basal ganglia
- One goal point with food one with nothing
- Halfway through a tone plays to indicate with arm to go to
- Early on in the training, the basal ganglia fires right when you perform the critical action (turning down the arm)
- Later in training, instead of basal ganglia firing after the tone, there is basal ganglia activity right away but not at the tone
What are the components of working memory?
- Visuospatial sketchpad
- Phonological loop
- Central executive
Cognitive control
Deliberate and intentional manipulation of the information going in and out of working memory
Describe Sperling’s partial report paradigm
- In whole report - have participants stare at screen with fixation point; show letters, recall as many as could; typically can report 2 or 3 letters
- In Sperling’s partial report - play a tone indicating which row of letters to report from, performance increases
- Performance increased about the same even when cue played AFTER
What was Sperling trying to determine?
How much people could rapidly encode from their environment
Atkinson-Shiffrin model
Model of how info enters consciousness and long term memory through two transient stages
What did the Atkinson-Shiffrin model argue about sensory memory?
- It is modality specific; we have specific memory categories for sight, sound, touch, taste, smell
- It has rapid decay
What is the digit span?
7 +/- 2
For how long can we hold info in the phonological loop?
About two seconds
How can we observe the visuospatial sketchpad in nonhuman animals?
- Delayed nonmatch-to-sample task
- Delayed response eye-gaze task
Delayed nonmatch-to-sample task
- Memory of object held in mind for short delay (seconds or less)
- 3 phases:
1. Novel object with food reward under it
What are the phases of the delayed nonmatch-to-sample task?
- Novel object with food reward under it
- Animal’s view to stimulus is blocked
- See stimuli again, plus novel object, and only novel object will have food
What are the phases of the delayed response eye-gaze task?
- Display with cue off toward the side in the stimulus display
- Delay where cue taken away
- Time to respond - do they shift their eyes to where the stimuli was previously?
What are the four key functions of the central executive?
- Controlled updating of working memory and working memory buffers
- Goal setting and planning
- Task switching
- Stimulus selection and response inhibition
What is a task we can use to study the controlled updating of working memory?
- Self ordered task
- N-back task
N-back task
- Memorizing huge list of items and constantly updating those items
- N refers to how many items you need to recall back
What is a task we can use to study goal setting and planning?
Tower of Hanoi
What is a task we can use to study task switching?
Wisconsin card sorting task
What is a task we can use to study stimulus selection and response inhibition?
Stroop task
Intelligence
The capacity to learn, reason, and understand
Dysexecutive syndrome
Decrease in central executive functions following frontal lobe lesions
In mammals, what is correlated with better working memory?
Prefrontal cortex proportional size and complexity
How are the lateral prefrontal cortices involved in working memory?
Updating and maintanance or working memory buffers
How are the orbital frontal and medial prefrontal cortices involved in working memory?
- Goal setting and planning
- Task switching
- Response selection and inhibition
What is the role of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in the traditional view?
Central executive
What is the role of the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex in the traditional view?
Phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad
What is the emerging view of the prefrontal cortex in working memory?
The posterior and sensory cortices are involved in holding the information
Explain the Goldman-Rakic research
- Delayed response eye-gaze task
- Activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex neurons when cue location maintained in working memory
- During delay the neurons are highly active
- Location specific encoding performed by these neurons
- Predicts successful eye gazes
Explain the Vogel and Machizawa methods
- It was an EEG study
- Every trial have cue phase where arrow tells where to focus on the screen, memory array briefly presented
- Asked to focus on stimuli to left or right of fixation point, followed by retention interval where nothing is on the screen
- Test array where stimuli reappears but sometimes with a small change
- Identify if there was a change
- The more stimuli there is, the harder it is
What were the findings of the Vogel and Machizawa research?
- After 100-200msec you can see differentiation between contralateral and ipsilateral electrodes
- During retention interval still differentiated activity on the contralateral side at occipital scalp
- Retention of visual information (strength of difference correlated with how well did on visual memory task)
- Occipital cortex activity driving ability to recognize when stimuli changed
- Ongoing activity at sensory posterior locations is responsible for holding visuospatial sketchpad activity
- Dorsal PFC and ventral PFC maintaining activity at regions that actual process stimuli when viewing
- Posterior regions active when holding visual info in place
Based on these two studies (Vogel/Machizawa and Goldman-Rakic), how do the Baddely & Hitch (1974) working memory buffers and central executive seem to relate to the lateral prefrontal cortex and sensory cortex regions (i.e. how might they be “mapped onto” these areas, or controlled by them)?
- The lateral prefrontal cortices are related to the updating and maintenance of working memory buffers
- The orbital frontal and medial prefrontal cortices are related to goal Setting and planning, task switching, and response selection and inhibition
