Spatial Cognition and Memory Flashcards
Who suggested the hippocampus was the substrate of a cognitive map?
O’keefe and nadel (1978)
What kind of space does the hippocampus represent?
Allocentric or environment centred, large-scale space.
What do teh hippocampus’ functions include?
navigation, LTM for scenes, spatial contexts, bind items into contexts
Who studied Patient HM and what was the patient unable to do?
Scorville & Milner 1950s – unable ot form autobiographical memory
What did Lever et al (2002) do?
recorded place fields of 32 simultaneously recorded place cells – all places in environment = represented
Place cells firing together signal in a specific location in a specific spatial context – active cells form a ‘cognitive map’
Who showed hippocampal usage in rats in water?
Morris (1982) – as rats learn the maze, time and path length decrease. Hip lesioned rats = longer, inaccurate routes
What does the Morris water maze involve
milky water. Submerged platform in 1 of 4 quadrants. About 1.5m diameter
Who did a similar experiment to Morris (1982) but using PET and with humans?
Maguire et al, 1998 – PEt. PPs = familiarised with virtual town. Told to take shortest route between A and B. More hippocampabl activity (bloodflow) = more accurate path.
Better navigators use hippocampus more.
Navigational activity is positively correlated with HIP activity and inferior parietal actiivity
Who did a task involving two types of navigation and what were the two types?
Hartley et al, 2003 –
‘way-finding’ – finding novel routes in our virtual town
‘route following’ – following a well–learned route in another town
Find the shotest route to particular location
What did Hartley et al, 2003 find?
Wayfinding – when HIP = more active, more accurate route is chosen
Better navigators use HIP more for way findging (replicates Maguire et al)
Better navigators use caudate more for route following - consisten with rat based evidence that HIP = needed more for map based navigation and caudate for stimulus response journey.
What is a prominent brain wave in the HIP?
Theta
When do you find theta oscillation in rats and humans and how?
Electrodes in HIP.
Rats - exploration of environment
Humans - virtual exploration of environment
Who did an experiment using a virtual water maze for humans and what did they find?
Cornwell et al, 2008 – MEG study. HIP theta power increases durin gwater maze performance (particularly at beginning of trial)
HIP theta power at beginning of trial strongly predicts navigational accuracy
When and what was Cornwell et al’s follow-up study?
2012 – repeated earlier study but with shocks so threat and safe condition
Better navigators = stronger theta
More anxious = stronger theta
Who did an experiment involving learning London’s layout?
Woolett and Maguire, 2011 – takes about 3 years to learn ‘knowledge’ More fail than get degree.
ACquiring this knowledge increase the volume of posterior HIP. Changes = only seen in trainees who passed ‘the knowledge’
