Cognition Ch. 2

Front 1

modules

Back 1

the sections of the brain, each of which is responsible for particular cognitive operations

Front 2

phrenology

Back 2

study of the shape, size, and protrusions in an attempt to discover the relation of parts of the brain to various mental activities and abilities

Front 3

localization of function

Back 3

the attempt to discover correspondences between specific functions and specific parts of the brain, based on the assumption that there is a strict one-to-one correspondence between specific functions and parts of the brain

Front 4

histology

Back 4

microscopic analysis of tissue structure

Front 5

law of mass action

Back 5

learning and memory depend on the total mass of brain tissue remaining rather than the properties of individual cells

Front 6

law of equipotentiality

Back 6

even though some areas of the cortex ma become specialized for certain tasks, within limits any part of an area can do the job of any other part of that area

Front 7

interactionism

Back 7

mind and brain are separate substances that interact with and influence each other

Front 8

epipheonomenalism

Back 8

'mind' is a superfluous byproduct of bodily functioning

Front 9

parallelism

Back 9

'mind' and brain are two aspects of the same reality and flow in parallel

Front 10

isomorphism

Back 10

mental events and neural events share the same structure. Requires more than a simple point for point correspondence between mental events and brain events. Rather, 'psychological facts and the underlying events in the brain resemble each other in all their structural characteristics."

Front 11

Broca's aphasia

Back 11

a deficit in the ability to produce speech

Front 12

wernicke's aphasia

Back 12

a deficit in the ability to comprehend speech as a result of damage to wernicke's area

Front 13

interhemispheric transfer

Back 13

communication between the brain's hemispheres is enabled in large by the corpus callosum

Front 14

split brain

Back 14

a condition created by severing the corpus callosum

Front 15

emergent property

Back 15

in Sperry's sense, 'mind' comes about as a result of brain processes, but is not itself a component of the brain. This means that the mind is not reducible to or predictable from other features of the brain.

Front 16

emergent causation

Back 16

in Sperry's sense, once the 'mind' emerges from the brain, it then has to power to influence lower level processes

Front 17

supervenient

Back 17

in Sperry's sense, mental states may influence neuronal events while being influenced by them

Front 18

ERP

Back 18

electrical signals recorded from the brain that occur after the onset of the stimulus

Front 19

PET

Back 19

an imaging technique in which a participant is injected with a radioactive substance that mingles with the blood and circulates to the brain. A scanner is then used to detect the flow of blood to particular areas of the brain

Front 20

fMRI

Back 20

a non-radioactive magnetic procedure for detecting the flow of oxygenated blood to various parts of the brain

Front 21

connectionism

Back 21

the theory that cognitive processes are regulated by complex systems consisting of a large number of interconnected elements
1)
2)

Front 22

neural networks

Back 22

a system of connections between elements that models connections between neurons in the nervous system

Front 23

Hebb rule

Back 23

a connection between two neurons takes place only if both neurons are firing at approximately the same time

Front 24

parallel processing

Back 24

many neural connections can be active at the same time

Front 25

serial processing

Back 25

only one neural activity may take place at any one time