Week 8: Attention, Working memory and consciousness

Question 1

What are executive functions? (aka. executive control/cognitive control)

Answer 1

Refers to a family of mental processes needed to concentrate and pay attention, when going automatic or relying on instinct of intuition would be ill-advised, insufficient, or impossible.

Question 2

What are the 3 core executive functions?

Answer 2

1) Inhibition (inhibitory control)
2) Working memory
3) Cognitive flexibility

Question 3

What are the 2 types of inhibition/inhibitory control?

Answer 3

1) Behaviour inhibition (self-control)
- controlling impulsive decisions
2) Interference control (selective attention)
- ability to block distracting stimuli

Question 4

The 3 core executive functions interact to generate higher order executive functions such as _____. (3)

Answer 4

• reasoning
• problem-solving
• planning

Question 5

Which part of the brain is important for executive functions?

Answer 5

Frontal lobe.

Case Study – Phineas Gage

Question 6

What is the difference between general attention and selective attention?

Answer 6

General attention – a state of the organism that determines how much information can be processed and how fast it can be processed.
Selective attention – the process of selecting some information for further processing

Question 7

The state of our general attention can change with ____.

Answer 7

• sleepiness
• fatigue
• drugs
• ascending modulatory systems (norepinephrine, acetylecholine)

Question 8

Why do we need selective attention? Why can’t we just pay attention to everything?

Answer 8

Our brains are limited in size, and hence processing capacity. There’s just too much information coming in from our senses to process everything in high detail. we basically select a small fraction of this information and devote a large proportion of our brain processing power to processing it.

Question 9

What are the 2 types of selective attention?

Answer 9

Bottom-up/stimulus driven/exogenous attention

Top-down/internally-generated/endogenous attention

Question 10

Describe bottom-up/stimulus driven/exogenous attention.

Answer 10

Stimulus triggered – something about the stimulus automatically attracts your attention
Occurs without conscious control (reflexive almost)
Attentional signals originate from the bottom of brain hierarchy (ie. closer to retina)

Question 11

Describe top-down/internally generated/endogenous attention.

Answer 11

Nothing about the stimulus stands out. Where you chose to pay attention is under conscious control.
Control signals originate in higher areas (eg. frontal lobe)
Internally generated – generate the command to pay attention voluntarily, rather than triggered by stimulus.

Question 12

What are the 3 different forms of endogenous selective attention?

Answer 12

Could be directed to:

1) Spatial locations (spatial attention)
2) Particular features (eg. colour, orientation, direction of motion) (feature attention)
3) Specific object (object attention)

Question 13

What is the difference between overt and covert attention?

Answer 13

Overt attention is reflected by an action (eg. eye movement) but covert attention is not reflected in an action.

Question 14

The _______ conveys attentional signals to posterior visual areas of the brain.

Answer 14

dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Question 15

What is evidence to show that attention is directed to specific locations in the visual cortex?

Answer 15

Even in the absence of visual stimulation, there is activation of areas in the visual cortex. This activation reflects paying attention to specific locations.

Question 16

If a person is shown 2 visual stimuli next to each other (one moving up and other moving down). What happens to the activity of MT neurons when the person starts paying attention to the stimulus moving up?

Answer 16

Not enough information to know.
Not all cells in MT are selected to upward movement!!! Activity will go down for downward movement cell if you pay attention to stimulus moving up! Need to know which cell you’re referring to, activity differs for each cell.
Cell selective to upward movement → answer will be C → neurons with receptive fields that encompass both stimuli will respond more strongly than if no attention was paid.
Even though they specified receptive field, but since they didn’t specify cell selectivity, we don’t know.

Question 17

If a person is shown 2 visual stimuli next to each other (one moving up and the other moving down). What happens to activity of prefrontal neurons when the person starts paying attention to the stimulus moving up?

Answer 17

Neurons with receptive fields that encompass the attended stimulus will respond more strongly than if no attention was paid. As long as the stimuli is in the receptive field, it will become more activated.

Question 18

What is working memory?

Answer 18

The capacity to store and manipulate information for a short period of time. It is critical for making sense of anything that unfolds over time.

Question 19

What are the 2 types of working memory?

Answer 19

1) verbal working memory (helps maintain verbal objects in memory. eg. remembering a name mentioned previously)
2) visuospatial working memory (allows maintenance of visual items and their locations in space eg. remembering a location of something)

Question 20

Neurons in which part of the brain is involved in working memory?

Answer 20

neurons in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.

Question 21

Which task is used to test the responses of a neuron in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex?

Answer 21

Monkey fixation task. Cell responds throughout the trial so long as the target to remember isolated at the bottom left. So this cell selective to bottom left appears to be maintaining spatial memory information during the delay period.

Question 22

Which 2 parts of the brain are activated by working memory tasks?

Answer 22

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and parietal lobe.
Note: damage to prefrontal, but not parietal cortex, causes deficits in working memory. overlaps with area involved in selective attention

Question 23

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is involved in both working memory and attention. What does this suggest?

Answer 23

Suggests that working memory and attention are intertwined, may refer to two manifestations of the same neural mechanisms.

Question 24

What is the mind brain problem?

Answer 24

Refers to the relationship between mental phenomena (eg. sensory experiences, thoughts, emotions) and physical phenomena (eg. matter, physical laws)

Question 25

What does dualism propose?

Answer 25

Proposes that there are two fundamentally distinct kinds of substances in this world – mental phenomena and physical phenomena. Believed that minds and bodies are two different substance, and are in causal interaction with each other. Pineal gland as the locus of direct mind-body interactions.

Question 26

What is a substance defined as?

Answer 26

Something that has the capacity of independent existence. (eg. computer screen is a concrete substance because it can exist on its own but the whiteness of the screen is not) ie. colour is not a substance but a property of a substance.

Question 27

What does monism propose?

Answer 27

Our world is fundamentally material, consisting only of bits of matter and complex structure made up of matter, all behaving in accordance with physical laws

Question 28

Why can’t we solve the mind-brain problem?

Answer 28

We need to explain consciousness, including phenomenal consciousness and qualia, in terms of physical processes. We have yet to achieve this.

Question 29

What is the explanatory gap?

Answer 29

the gap between phenomenal consciousness (qualia) and underlying neural properties of the brain.

Question 30

Blindsight sometimes develops in people with damage to _____.

Answer 30

Damage to primary visual cortex

Question 31

What is blindsight?

Answer 31

Ability to detect visual objects, without the ability to be consciously aware of this detection

Question 32

Describe the 2 separate pathways of vision.

Answer 32

“New” evolutionary pathway – Retina → thalamus → visual cortex. Need visual cortex for conscious vision
Older pathway – Retina → superior colliculus → thalamus → cortical activation. Concerned with reflexive behaviours.

Question 33

What is split-brain syndrome caused by?

Answer 33

Caused by damage to the corpus callosum

Question 34

What is split brain syndrome?

Answer 34

Split-Brain Syndrome may occur after callosotomy, where the left and right hemispheres control behavior independent of each other, as if two selves coexisted in the same body.
Eg. Left hemisphere processes language so when they flashed word on the right visual field, can see the word. But when they presented the word on the left visual field, it was processed by his right hemisphere. Left hand could draw what was presented to right hemisphere.

Question 35

What does Neural Correlates of Consciousness (NCCs) refer to?

Answer 35

Refer to the minimum neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any one specific conscious percept.

Question 36

What is one way we can identify NCCs?

Answer 36

Compare the neural activity when a stimulus is perceived vs not perceived
Sensory stimulus and overall state of participant must be kept constant.

Question 37

Comparing results of ‘with report’ vs ‘no-report’, what is the difference in the types of NCCs identified?

Answer 37

No-report paradigms identify a more restricted content-specific NCC, which typically includes posterior cortical areas but not the prefrontal cortex.