Navigating Flashcards
The meadow vole is a ____ animal
polygamous
The Evolution of Way Finding
knowing where home is, migration to better climate & food, exploring new areas to avoid depleting local resources
Since most mammalian species are _____ and are ______ in their use of space, _____ size should be ____ in most species
polygamous, sexually dimorphic, hippocampal size, dimorphic
Meadow voles have sex differences but pine voles do not (in spatial ability and hippocampal size)
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The ____ of homing pigeons is larger than that of non-homing breeds
hippocampus
The hippocampus plays an important role in ____ and _____ in birds and mammals
spatial memory and spatial cognition
Bilateral hippocampal aspiration has a negative effect on ___ for black-capped chickadees
cache recovery
The parahippocampal place area is involved with
encoding new perceptual information about the appearance and layout of scenes
VBM found that taxi drivers had higher gray matter density in the ____ but less in the _____. Both correlations increased over time.
posterior hippocampus; anterior
The taxi study concluded that the _______ stores a spatial representation of the environment
posterior hippocampus
The ability to acquire new visuo-spatial information was ____ in taxi drivers compared to bus drivers
worse
Taxi driver’s brain: hippocampus
initial route planning
Taxi Driver’s Brain: medial prefrontal cortex
tracking distance to destination
Taxi Driver’s Brain: Right lateral prefrontal cortex
seeing unexpected features (e.g. a blocked off road)
Taxi Driver’s Brain:
Anterior prefrontal cortex
spontaneous route planning (eg you have to make a detour)
Taxi Driver’s Brain: Retroslenial cortex
Seeing expected landmarks, streets and destinations
Way finding cells: place cells
LANDMARKS- located in the hippocampus, encode information on location, a specific place cell will fire when we are in a specific familiar location
Grid cells
found in the entorhinal cortex (in mice, most likely in humans too), brain’s GPS system
Head direction cells
COMPASS - Are only active when the animal’s head points in a specific direction in the environment
Properties of hippocampal place cells that imply a role in spatial cognition: highly stable firing fields in constant environment, can be established in total darkness, individual cells can have different place fields in different environments, ensemble of cells encodes map of familiar environment
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Grid cells are located in the ______
entorhinal cortex
Grid cells were discovered in 2005 by
the Mosers
The arrangement of spatial firing fields all at equal distances from their neighbors led to the hypothesis that these cells encode a _________
cognitive representation of Euclidean space
Grid cells appear to encode a type of _______ that is constructed inside the brain and imposed on the environment by the brain with no regard for the _________
abstract spatial structure; sensory features of the environment
Where do Grid cells have firing fields?
Dispersed over the entire environment, in contrast to place fields
The firing fields of grid cells are organized into a ________
hexagonal lattice
The discovery of grid cells may verify Kan’t theory that Euclidean space constitutes a ______, a structure that is not purely logical but is constructed by the mind without requiring much information from the environment
synthetic a priori
