Test 2 Flashcards
What is the human brain?
the first organ system to develop; neurogenesis proceeds at an amazing rate in utero (about 250,000 cells a minute at its peak)
What is microglia?
Dead cells eliminate
What are astrocycles?
Support cells
Peripheral Nervous system?
includes the somatic nervous system (somatomotor and somatosensory), and the autonomic nervous system
Somatic?
involved in touch, pain, temperature, movement of limbs
Autonomic?
involved in control of smooth muscles and glands; includes sympathetic (4 F’s) and parasympathetic (Rest’n’Digest) systems
What are the four F’s?
Freeze, flee, fight, fornication
Two general areas of nervous system?
Peripheral, and central (brain and spinal cord)
What is the Spinal cord and what does it do?
- extends from the medulla
- contains ascending sensory and descending motor neuron pathways, as well as interneurons that represent the circuitry of the spinal cord that produces “reflexive” behaviors
What is the brainstem?
it contains the sensory and motor pathways from/to the spinal cord
also,
-lower levels include medulla (cardio-respiratory centers) and pons (eye movements; arousal)
-reticular formation runs length of brainstem; involved in arousal and control of autonomic nervous system
What is the midbrain?
is responsible for auditory/visual orientation, reward, pain control, and movement/arousal
Cerebellum?
not part of brainstem any more, as functions are too complex
- integrates sensory input and motor info to coordinate fine movements, maintain posture; also has a role in learning and integrating emotion and language
- 50% of neurons in brain located in the cerebellum
Thalamus?
is the relay station of the brain; almost all sensory and motor info to and from cerebral hemispheres passes thru it; also role in attention and sleep
Hypothalamus?
structure that regulates body temp, hunger, thirst and sexual behavior
Cerebral hemispheres? Sulci? gyri?
- the dominant feature of the human brain
- characterized by extensive sulci (folds) and gyri (bulges) of cortex
Cortex?
can be divided into four regions
Frontal Lobe?
“human” lobe; key area for language, learning/memory, complex movement, “consciousness”, attention, affect
Parietal Lobe?
functions include processing info about touch
Temporal Lobe?
includes areas such as the hippocampus (key area for memory) and amygdala (key area in emotions) also involved in audition and visual processing
Occipital Lobe?
key role in vision
Corpus Callosum?
the two sides of cerebral hemispheres are connected by this
- it allows the right hemisphere to talk to left hemisphere, and vice versa
- study of split brain patients suggest that 2 sides of brain can function independently (one may not be conscious of what the other is doing), and have somewhat different specialties
Right hemisphere?
sensations form, and movement on, left side of bod; also involved in object/shape recognition; prosody
Left Hemisphere?
sensations from, and movement on, right side of body; also involved in language; reasoning
What is a receptor potential?
a kind of electrical signal produced by sensory neurons, caused by the presence of a particular kind of physical stimulus
what is perception?
it occurs when you have organized your sensations enough to form a representation of a particular object
Gustav Fechner?
- founded psychophysics; first person too look at how we sense and perceive
- discovered absolute thresholds and difference thresholds
What happens when you see an object?
- light passes thru the cornea and enters the eye through the pupil
- the pupil size is controlled by your iris
- once light has passed thru the pupil, it is focused onto the back of the eye by the lens
Draw and label all parts of eye
- muscles to move eye
- lens
- pupil
- iris
- cornea
- optic nerve to brain
- muscles to adjust lens
- retina
- fovea
- blind spot
What is a rod?
photoreceptors that become active under low-light conditions for night vision
What is a cone?
a type of receptor that transduces light. it is not sensitive, buy very accurate (high acuity); involved in color vision; used in the daytime, or when the lighting is good. cones are more plentiful in the middle of the eye, in an area called the fovea.
Where are the the rods/cones?
they connect to retinal ganglion cells; their axons form the optic nerve and extend out the back of the eye and into the brain
What/where is the blind spot?
at the back of the eye where the optic nerve leaves
Where is the optic nerve?
- the optic nerve runs along the ventral surface of the brain towards the back of the head
- the optic nerves meet at the optic chasm and the axons from the nasal (inner) half of each retina decussate (crosses over) and then continue to the thalamus of the opposite side of the brain.
The dorsal stream?
- primary visual cortex neurons asend axons to two different areas of the brain
- the first path is the dorsal pathway, that projects into posterior parietal cortex; involved in different high level perceptual skills, such as the perception of the spatial relationships between objects…sometimes called the “WHERE” system
The ventral stream?
- the second pathway that projects into the temporal lobe; involved in object recognition (the “WHAT” system)
- cels in this area are sensitive to complex visual stimuli (such as faces; damage here results in prosopagnosia)
Ivan Pavlov?
- digestive system
- salivation in dogs
How is the cerebellum, Hippocampus, and fear conditioning important to Pavlovian conditioning?
Cerebellum-necessary for trace and delay conditioning
Hippocampus-necessary for trace buy not delay conditioning
Fear conditioning-invovles the amygdala
Conditioned response?
a reaction that resembles n unconditioned response but is produced by a conditioned stimulus
Conditioned stimulus?
a stimulus that is initially neutral and produces no reliable response in an organism
Conditioned taste aversions?
subject learns to avoid a food that has been paired with illness. CTA’s are rapid (1 trial); trace conditioning is required (sometimes many hours between CS and UCS); should occur more often with noel food (biological preparedness)
Pavlov?
CS-US
CS is meaningless until becomes compared with the US
Cognitive learning?
learning that occurs in the absence of any obvious or immediate reward or explicit pairing or stimuli…or even an obvious change in behavior
key idea: info is often learned because it is there,,,and there might be no indication that learning has taken place until the info is retrieved if and when it is needed
Edward Tolman?
a pioneer in cognitive psychology
contemporary of Skinner and Watson
Tolman and rats?
he argued rats had all groups had formed a cognitive map of the maze; only the reinforced group displayed its learning. this is an example of latent learning; learning that occurs in the absence of obvious behavioral changes
Kohler’s “A-HA” learning
- also caled “insight learning”; “epiphany”; “light bulb”
- happens when you suddenly figure out what something means
- first studied by Kohler, a German Gestalt psy. who found the types of learning studied by Pavlov and Watson dry and uninteresting
- found that chimps could learn to use “tools” in novel ways to gain access to desired objects, in a way that the experimenter might never expect
- frontal lobes are critical for this type of learning; idea is that they allow for high order integration of into into novel solutions to problems
Draw and label brain
- frontal lobes
- nucleus accumbens
- hypothalamus
- pituitary glad
- medial forebrain bundle
- amygdala
- hippocampus
Bandura’s observational learning?
you learn by watching others, even when you do not share in their rewards or actually perform the behaviors that they engage in
vicarious reward facilitates this learning; if the observed behavior results in a positive reward the behavior is likely to be “modeled”, but it is less likely if the observed behavior results in a negative reward
Mirror neurons?
they are found in the frontal and parietal lobes
they are cells that fire when a person engages in a task or when they watch someone engage in the same task
What is memory?
a continuous, dynamic representation of info in the brain…info moves from sensation to perception to memory
- memories are constantly enhanced and altered during elaborative encoding, when new info is integrated into old info that is already in memory
- memory is enhanced by visual imagery (picturing items to be remembered, especially if you can relate different items in the list to be remembered) and by organizational encoding (grouping items into related “chunks”)
- info is remembered best if you encode in multiple modalities; this reflects depth of precessing (thinking about different aspects of what is remembered) and breadth of processing (fitting new info into what you already know)
Sensory memories?
last just a few seconds, almost like an after image…iconic memory exists for visual info while echoic memory (auditory cortex) exists for sounds
short term memory?
exists for seconds…or longer, if we rehearse. the term working memory is sometimes substituted for STM, and refers to the dynamic process of using and manipulating the info that is in short term memory
long term memory?
created fro STM by consolidation
Retrograde amnesia?
amnesia for events before a traumatic event
Antergrade amnesia?
amnesia for events occurring after the trauma
Hippocampus damaged?
this organizes all of the bits of info that come together to form a memory and if damaged, you can keep the info in STM (all the bits are together), but cannot recall it once it has left STM (no ability to pull the bits back together)
Amygdala damaged?
this gives the memory the appropriate emotional tone. and if damaged makes it impossible to remember the emotional characteristics of a memory.
LTM formation?
LTM formation in the hipppocampus depends upon a specific type of glutamate synapse
- for LTM to occur, glutamate has to bind to NMDA-type receptors on postsynaptic neurons at the same time that the postsynaptic neurons are excited enough to have action potentials
- when this happens, glutamate stimulation permanently increases the strength of the synapse…making it easier for the neurons to fire together (this change represents the “memory” for the info)
Different types of long term memory
explicitly memory- with conscious recall
implicit memory-without conscious recall
semantic memory-facts and general knowledge
episodic memory-personally experienced events
procedural memory-motot and cognitive skills
priming-enhanced identification of objects or words
Implicit memory?
unconscious, cannot be articulated; includes procedural memories (ride a bike); involve cerebellum; basal ganglia
Explicit memory?
conscious, can be articulated; 2 types
-semantic memory: general world knowledge
-episodic memory: your own personal experiences
both involve the hippocampus and frontal lobes
Francis Galton
- Darwin’s cousin
- interested in measuring individual differences in all manner of things…including intelligence
- developed first intelligence tests, based upon reflexes, sensory acuity, strength
What does the lateral geniculate nucleus in the thalamus do?
It receives visual information received from the retina, filtering it and processing it before passing it along to the visual cortex.
What does the basal ganglia do?
It communicates with motor cortex to initiate movements, and has a role in procedural/implicit learning and memory.
Where does transduction take place?
The retina
Vision is based upon the transduction of ______ by the retina of the eye
photons
A ______ decreases the likelihood that a response will be performed again.
Reinforcer
In pavlovian conditioning, the __________ response does not have to be learned
unconditioned
Visual info from the inner half of each retina crosses to the other side of the brain in the _______
optic chiasm
The process by which a photon of light becomes a neural signal is called ________
transduction
Light is focused on the retina at the back of the eye by the _______
lens
Evidence of ________ conditioning in people in a vegetative state suggests that they have some level of consciousness
trace
Mirror neurons in the frontal lobe play a key role in _____ learning
observational
