The History of Cognitive Neuroscience Flashcards
Define Neuroscience
The scientific study of the brain and nervous system
Cognition
Mental processes involved in knowing and thinking
What was neuroscience called prior to the 1950s?
Biology, neurobiology, pharmacology, Neuro pharmacology, physiology, psychophysiology
What did Behaviorists believe?
If you can’t observe it, you shouldn’t study it.
Psychology should study the relationship between the environment and behavior.
What did Behaviorists call the mind?
A black box
James Watson
all behavior can be understood as reactions (responses) to the events in the environment (stimuli)
Stimulus-Reponse (S-R) Psychology
B.F. Skinner
Focused on consequences of responses; behaviors that are rewarded/punished will increase/decrease in frequency
What was the Cognitive Revolution?
A time period in the 1950s, a reaction to behaviorism, that posited that it is not possible to explain complex human behavior with S-R Psychology OR there is a mind, and it can be studied
Who were the major players of the cognitive revolution?
Noam Chomsky
Jean Piaget
George Miller
Lurie Neisser
Michael Gazzaniga
Noam Chomsky
Language acquisition cannot occur with feedback alone
There are innate rules for language
Children are rewarded for saying things correctly, but this doesn’t explain how children rapidly learn language
Jean Piaget
The development of reasoning ability suggests a predictable (innate) sequence of mental constructs during childhood.
Even though children have different experiences/environments, they all seem to have the same sort of reasoning abilities in different stages of their development
George Miller
Established the Cognitive Neuroscience
One of the people to coin the term “Cognitive Neuroscience” with Michael Gazzaniga
Ulric Neisser
Published Cognitive Psychology (1967)
What is the “computer metaphor”?
Computers have input (stimuli) and output (responses), but also complex software and hardware that manipulate stimuli/information
The mind = software
What were Gazzaniga and Millers contributions to Cognitive Psychology
They coined the term “cognitive psychology”
Raised funds to seed research and training
Developed the Cognitive Neuroscience Summer School to train emerging scholars in Cognition and Neuroscience.
First summer school was in 1989.
They focused on combining these two research areas.
What did Ancient Egyptians believe about the mind
The Heart is the seat of mental processes (only organ embalmed)
Had a written term for “brain” and described its anatomy in papyrus texts
Aristotle believed the ______ is the seat of mental processes
Heart
Hippocrates and Plato believed that the ______ is the seat of the mind
Brain
Who was Herophilus of Chalcedon?
A talented anatomist in Alexandria, Egypt
Clearly associated brain with behavior and performed complicated dissections of humans and animals
Distinguished sensory vs. motor nerves
Who was Aelius Galenus?
Galen.
A Greek physician in Rome
Dissected animals, including monkeys
Believed the cerebellum controlled muscles, given its complexity and density
Who was Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyya al-Razi?
Razi
A physician-scientist in Iran and Iraq
Early proponent of experimental method
Interest in mental health and experimental studies of meningitis
Who was Hassan Ibn al-Haytham?
Alhazen
Arabic scientist from Basra working in Cairo
Published widely on optics
Argued that vision occurs in the brain
What was Da Vinci contribution to cognitive neuroscience and the brain?
He thought that perception and reasoning were due to the brain, but thought it was due to the “essence” (the substances in the chambers/ventricles of the brain) that gave rise to these behaviors
Did not think it was brain tissue itself
Thomas Willis
One of the most influential early scholars.
English Physician, Anatomist, Neurologist
Challenged the idea that ventricle were central to sensation and thought
Noted relationships between brain damage and specific behavioral deficits
Coined the term “neurology”
Published “Cerebri Anatome” (1664) with drawings by Christopher Wren (designed St. Paul’s Cathedral in London)
What were the good parts of Phenology Location of Function?
It brought direct attention to the brain as an enabler of the mind
Introduced idea that different brain regions are localized to discrete brain regions
What were the bad parts of Phrenology Location of Function?
They believed the size of an organ is a measure of its power
As the skull takes its shape from the brain, the surface of the skull can be read as an accurate index of psychological aptitudes and tendencies
Who was major in phrenology?
Franz Joseph Gaul
Ideas were debunked
Holism
The idea that the brain works in concert
Who was Pierre Flourens?
He challenged Gaul’s localizationist view for cognitive functions like memory
Believed things like memory were distributed in the brain
BUT also showed evidence that different brain regions controlled different functions such as cerebellum for balance and cortex for perception
Karl Lashley
He circumscribed lesions in rats did not produce deficits in learning, but they did affect acquisition vs. retention of memories
Argued that the whole brain works together to produce behaviors
Didn’t see deficits depending on the part of the brain he damaged, but rather how much of the brain he took out
Broca’s Aphasia
Presented by Paul Broca
Speech loss after a lesion in left frontal cortex
Showed the brain of a patient named “Tan”
Called that because he could only say “Tan”
Wernicke’s Aphasia
Found by Carl Wernicke
Comprehension loss after lesion in left temporal cortex
Wilder Penfield
A Canadian Neurosurgeon
1950s - stimulated brain tissue to find the source of epileptic seizures
Discovered that stimulating different parts of the brain elicited different response (movement, sensations, memories, etc.)
Developed a map of the motor cortex “motor homunculus”
Prior to the 1990s, much of cognitive neuroscience research relied on ____________
Rare patients with specific brain lesions
What did pharmaceutical companies reassure the medical community of in the late 1990s?
That patients would not become addicted to prescription opioid pain relievers. They ended up being prescribed with increasing frequency
What did the Department of Health declare in 2017 as a result of an increase in opioid medication addiction and deaths?
Opioid Addiction is a public health emergency
