Psyc201 Test 1, Week 6 Flashcards
What is hemispatial neglect?
A disorder of attention, not vision, affecting awareness of one side of space, often due to damage in the right inferior parietal lobe.
What is the difference between DAN and VAN?
DAN (Dorsal Attention Network) is bilateral and monitors all of space, while VAN (Ventral Attention Network) is right hemisphere and handles bottom-up attention.
What are the components of the Working Memory Model by Baddeley & Hitch?
Phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer, and central executive.
The Search for the Engram (Karl Lashley)
Law of Equipotentiality
* All parts of cortex contribute equally to learning and memory
Law of Mass Action
* Learning & Memory are distributed in the cortex as a whole; more cortex = better memory, more brain is better than less brain
What are the types of long-term memory?
Declarative (explicit) memory, including semantic and episodic memory, and nondeclarative (implicit) memory, including procedural memory.
What is the role of the central executive in the Working Memory Model?
It manages and coordinates cognitive processes, holds and shifts goals, switches task sets, and keeps relevant information handy.
Instead of one thought bubble, we have three systems
Each of these connects to different part of long term memory, what central executive is doing is manipulating information as it flows in and out of different systems not just holding it
What did Bisiach et al. (1997) demonstrate about hemispatial neglect?
Patients ignore the left side of mental imagery, even when imagining different perspectives.
What brain structures are important in memory and can be affected by stroke, surgery, or injury?
Hippocampus, medial temporal lobe, striatum, cerebellum, and prefrontal cortex
What is Korsakoff Syndrome and what causes it?
Korsakoff Syndrome is a type of amnesia caused by a lack of vitamin B1, often due to chronic alcohol abuse, leading to cell death and memory problems.
What are the main characteristics of Alzheimer’s Disease?
Alzheimer’s Disease is a widespread brain disorder causing a gradual breakdown of function and deficits in various types of memory.
What is Semantic Dementia?
Semantic Dementia is a neurodegenerative disorder that specifically attacks the internal temporal lobe, leading to loss of conceptual knowledge.
How does healthy aging affect memory?
Healthy aging can lead to slower working memory, reduced capacity, and slower processing speed, but stored semantic knowledge is often preserved.
What is working memory span and how is it tested?
Working memory span is the ability to hold and manipulate information. It is tested by recalling the last word of each sentence after hearing a series of sentences.
What factors affect memory consolidation?
Time, repetition, elaboration, emotion, and sleep.
What is the Default Mode Network (DMN) and its role in memory retrieval?
The DMN is a network of brain structures active during memory retrieval and mind wandering, involving the prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate.
What is the difference between memory and imagination?
Both rely on similar brain networks, but memory involves recreating past events, while imagination involves envisioning future events.
What is the Hub-and-Spoke model in semantic memory?
The anterior temporal lobe acts as a hub binding features of concepts distributed across the cortex.
Anterior lobe keeps an index of semantic memories, computational network (vision, valence, speech, sound, function, praxis), different aspects are distributed across (hub-and-spoke model), anterior lobe keeps it all together, activate aspects depending on representation wanted, degeneration of anterior temporal lobe in dementia, world becomes very confusing, different to agnosia patients, dementia patients have lost the whole idea/concept of things
What is Classical Conditioning and who is associated with it?
Classical Conditioning is a learning process where a neutral stimulus becomes associated with a reflex response, associated with Pavlov.
What is Long-term Potentiation (LTP) and who proposed it?
LTP is the process where neurons that fire together wire together, proposed by Donald Hebb.
What is Procedural (implicit) Learning and what brain structures are involved?
Procedural learning involves slow learning of patterns and sequences, relying on the striatum, basal ganglia, and caudate.- impaired in disorders of striatum
(Parkinson’s disease), Intact in Medial Temporal Lobe/hippocampal damage
What are the deficits and intact abilities of Henry Molaison (H.M.) after his surgery?
Anterograde amnesia, partial retrograde amnesia. Intact: Working memory, semantic memory, procedural memory, language, personal identity, pre-surgical memories.
Eyeblink Conditioning in the Cerebellum and Midbrain- studied on rabbits
- Lateral interpositus nucleus (LIP)
Learns the association - Red nucleus of midbrain
Executes the motor response
What are the deficits and intact abilities of Clive Wearing?
Deficits: Anterograde amnesia, retrograde amnesia. Intact: Working memory, semantic memory, musical skills, procedural memory, language, personal identity, pre-surgical life memories.
What are the modalities of human language?
Language is an abstract set of symbols and ideas, not just speech.
What are Semantics and Syntax in language?
Semantics is the meaning of words, while Syntax is the rules for combining words into sentences.
What are the four linguistic universals proposed by Hockett (1960)?
- Semanticity
Language is made up of symbolic units that combine to express meaning. - Arbitrariness
Sounds, letters, pictographs, signs bear no relationship to meaning.
Different languages use different symbols - Displacement
We can use language to talk about here and now, but also past/future and real/imagined. - Productivity/Generativity
A fixed number of units can be combined in an infinite number of ways.
What are the capabilities and deficits of animals like Washoe, Kanzi, Koko, and Nim Chimpsky in language learning?
Capabilities include learning symbols and good comprehension, while deficits include complex syntax and displacement.
How does language experience affect babies’ brains?
Babies’ brains become specialized for the speech sounds around them.
What is Categorical Perception in infants?
The ability to discriminate between sounds, which changes with exposure to language, such as /r/ and /l/ in American and Japanese infants.
Phonological loop
system where you store language related things- can hold on to 7 things if lucky
Visuospatial sketchpad
the visual version of phonological loop- can hold on to 4 things if lucky
Episodic buffer
keeping track of the individual events that have made up the current event
