Summary Flashcards
EEG
Measures the activity of large groups of neurons through a series of large electrodes placed on the scalp
MEG
A brain imaging method that detects activity via the magnetic fields generated by brain activity
MRI
Creates images based on how atoms in living tissue respond to a magnetic pulse delivered by the device
DTI
Measures how water molecules diffuse in tissue
fMRI
Can produce images of blood flow in the brain taken less than a second apart
PET scans
Measure brain activity, including metabolism, blood flow, and neurotransmitter activity
Sympathetic division (PNS)
- Fight-or-flight response
- Act to prepare the body for action in stressful situations, engaging all the organism’s resources to respond to a threat
Parasympathetic division (PNS)
- Maintaining normal functions
- Acts to calm the body after an emergency or stressfull situation has ended
Hindbrain
The lowest en most primitive level of the brain
Brainstem
Spans the hindbrain and midbrain, hindbrain structures in the brainstem include the medulla, and the pons; the brainstem supports a number of vital psychiological function
Medulla
Plays an important role in vital body functions such as heart rate and respiration
Pons
lies just above the medulla and relays sensory information between the cerebral cortex and the cerebellum
Cerebellum
Concerned primarily with muscular movement coordination, but also plays a role in learning and memory
Reticular formation
Acts as a kind of sentry, bot alerting higher centres of the brain that messages are coming, and then either blocking those messages or allowing them to go forward
Midbrain
contains clusters of sensory and motor neurons
Forebrain
The brain’s most recently evolved portion
Cerebrum
The most superior part of the forebrain, compromising the cerebral cortex and several more central structures
Thalamus
Sometimes likened to a switchboard that organises inputs from sensory organs and routes them to the appropriate areas of the brain
Hypothalamus
Plays a major role in many aspects of motivation and emotion, including sexual behaviour, temperature regulation, sleeping, eating, drinking, and agression
Limbic system
Helps coordinate the behaviours needed to satisfy the motivational and emotional urges that arise in the hypothalamus; it is also involved in memory
Hippocampus
Involved in forming and retrieving memories
Amygdala
Underlies emotional behaviours, particularly those linked to aggression and fear
Somato-sensory cortex
Receives sensory input that gives rise to our sensations of heat, cold, and touch, and to our senses of balance and body movement
Association cortex
Involved in many important mental functions including perception, language and thought
Prefrontal cortex
Located just behind the forehead, the seat of the so-called executive functions
Corpus callosum
A neural bridge consisting of white matter tracts that acts as a major communication link between the two hemispheres and allowes them to function together
Sensory transduction
The process whereby the characteristics of a stimulus are converted into nerve impluses
Sensort adaptation
The diminishing sensitivity to an unchanging stimulus
Feature detectors
Fire selectivity in response to visual stimuli that have specific characteristics
Decision criteria
A standard of how certain someone must be that a stimulus is present before they will say they can detect it
Signal detection theory
Concerns itself with surrounding factors that nonetheless influence sensory judgements
Weber’s law
States that the JND is directly proportional to the magnitude of the stimulus with which the comparison is being made. The law breaks down at the extremes, but holds up consitently within the most frequently encountered range of stimulus
Retina
On which the lends projects the image of the object, but turned upside down.
Rods
Black and white
Cones
Color
blindspot
An area where there’s an absence of photoreceptors
Darkness adaptation
Progressive improvement of light sensitivity over time. Your eyeballs get better in the dark with time
Color vision
The result of cones and rods translating light waves into neural impulsed with the help of photopigments
Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic Theory
says cones like red, blue and reen a lot and our experience of a particular color is constituded by the ratio of activity in the three types of cones. Otherwise recognised as the kindergarten watercolor theory
Opponent-Process Theory
Says that each of the three cones responds to two opposing colors (Y/B, R/G, B/W)
Dual-process theory
Combines both Trichromatic theory and opponent-process theory: the cones are sensitive to RGB most, opponent process begins in the ganglion cells
Visual system in the brain
Optic nerve, optic chiasm, optic track, thalamus, visual cortex in occipital lobe
Bottom-up processing
The system takes in individual elements of the stimulus and then combines them into a unified perception
Top-down processing
Sensory information is interpreted in light of exisiting knowlegde, concepts, ideas and expectations
Figure-ground relations
Our natural tendency to parse visual information into focus figure, background blurry using blurriness, size, contrast, separation to decide on this particular image decoding
Gestalt principles
Group and interpret stimuli according to the gestalt laws of perceptional organization
Evidence for unconsious information processing
1) Visual agnosia: an inability to visually recognize objects
2) Blindsight: a condition where people are blind in part of their visual field yet in special test respond to stimuli in that field despite reporting that they cannot see those stimuli
3) Priming: exposure to a stimulus influences how subsequently respond to that same or another stimulus
4) Mere exposure effect: can recognize objects but not faces, the awareness of recognition is lost
Attention
The process of concentrating on the same feature of the environment to the possible exclusion of others
Selective attention
Maintaining a focus of attention on a specific item even when faced with alternatives and distractions
4 stages of sleep
1) Light sleep
2) Sleep spindles
3) First delta waves
4) Delta waves
Beta waves
The activity shown in the brain when you are awake and alert
Alpha waves
The slower activity shown in the brain when we are feeling relaxed and drowsy
Delta waves
Very regulary, slowm and large brain waves that appear as the sleeper moves into 3 stages of sleep
Slow-wave sleep
Stage 3 and 4 together
Encoding
The process of getting information into the system by translating it into neural code
Storage/Consolidation
Process of retaining information over time
Retrieval
Process of accessing stored information
Mood-congruent recall
Tendency to recall memories that are congruent with our current mood
Eliciting stimuli
Emotions are responses to situations, people, objects, or events
Cognitive appraisal component
Cognitions are involved in virtually every aspect of emotion. Mental processes can evoke emotional responses
James-Lange somatic theory
According to James-Lange theory, our bodily reactions determine the subjective emotion we experience. We know we are afraid or in love because our body’s reaction tells us so
Cannon-Bard Theory
Proposed that the subjective experience of emotion and physiological arousal do not cause one another but instead are independent responses to an emotion-arousing situation
