Week 13 Flashcards
What is priming?
Enhancement of certain task performance as a a result of prior exposure. No conscious awareness.
Describe priming ability of amnesiac patients
Amnesiac patients demonstrated some memory for ‘forgotten’ words in a word completion/word recall task, indicating that even though they couldn’t explicitly recall the task, they demonstrated some memory for the word. Enhanced performance explained by non-declarative - priming!
Describe conditioning?
Learning of associations between neural stimuli, and other stimuli that has some meaning.
What is classical conditioning?
Response is elicited by some preceding experience e.g. Pavlov
Wat is operant conditioning?
Involves some voluntary behaviour, e.g. pressing a bar, get some food. Voluntary changes processing of conditioning.
Name the two types of non associative learning and describe?
Habituation - gradual weakening of stimuli e.g. feeling of a shirt. Sensitization - progressive amplification of the same stimuli. e.g. tight pants.
What does psychophysics measure and describe?
Absolute threshold (can hear, cant hear) and difference threshold (differences between two sounds)
If a correct rejection rate is 7/10, what is the false alarm rate?
3/10
Where are the photoreceptors located?
Retina
What are the characteristics of rods and cones
Cones - high acuity, fast/weak dark adapt, colour, fovea and periphery, Rods - low acuity, slow/strong dark, peripheral, black and white.
What is the purpose of lateral and vertical connections.
Connections allow events at one location to influence events at another location.
What are neurons in the primary visual cortex responding to?
Changes in retinal images? Edges
How are complex sounds processed?
The auditory system breaks down the sound into individual sine waves. The basilar membrane identifies the frequencies evident in each sine wave and performs fourier analysis.
How are information from two ears processed?
Choclear splits sounds and sends to superior olivary nucleus, beyond which has inputs from both hemispheres.
Describe how visual and auditory receptive fields are defined.
Visual - spatial location, Auditory - frequency
Describe early and late selection theories for attention
Early - attention claims certain information is selected for further processing, Late - information is selected after processing for meaning.
How are voluntary and reflexive attention different?
Voluntary - top down, goal directed, Reflexive - bottom up, stimulus driven
What are the functions of the two visual streams in the brain/ (Ventral/ Dorsal)
Ventral - object recognition and form identification, Dorsal - object location and motion
What are the four components of Baddeley’s Working memory model? Describe them, and why are they assumed (on what basis?)
Central Executive, visuospatial sketchpad (maintenance and manipulation of visual information), phonological loop (rehearsal of auditory information), episodic buffer (links information across domains) with visual, auditory, timing e.t.c.).
Which area of the brain is most critically involved with working memory?
Frontal cortex
What are the power laws of learning and forgetting?
Learning - diminishing returns in terms of reaction times and accuracy, Forgetting - same power function - loose most early.
What are the three main parts of the ear and their general function?
Outer - protection and amplification, Middle - transmission of vibration plus protection, Inner - converts vibrations into neural signals.
