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138 Cards in this Set

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  • Back

How does signalling within neurons work?

The inside and outside of the cell membrane have a voltage difference of ~-70mV. Multiple nearby neuron signals excite or inhibit the neuron, changing the voltage. If the difference in voltage decreases to -40mV, pores in the membrane open up, allowing voltage difference to decrease even further. As a reduced difference at one point affects the points near it, a wave of depolarisation moves down the axon.

How is the usual voltage difference in a neuron restored?

The cell uses up glucose and oxygen; this is why PET scans (blood) and fMRIs (blood oxygenation) can be used to look at activation.

What are the limitations of signalling in neurons?

Action potentials travel at 1-20m/s, so take 50ms to traverse the brain. This limits reaction times. The refractive period of ~5ms (giving a maximum firing rate of 250Hz) also limits reaction times.

How long does the summations of EPSPs and IPSPs take?

10-100ms

How are EPSPs and IPSPs & action potentials recorded?

EPSPs and IPSPs are recorded using EEGs; action potentials are recorded using intracellular microelectrodes.

What happens when an action potential reaches the axon terminal?

Pores open in the terminal boutons, allowing the vesicles to fuse with the membrane and release neurotransmitter. The neurotransmitter binds with the receptors of the post-synaptic neuron, and the receptors change shape to depolarise or hyperpolarise the neuron. The autoreceptor from the pre-synaptic neuron detects that a signal was sent and causes the reuptake transporter to absorb neurotransmitters whilst enzymes in the synaptic cleft break them down.

What can pharmaceutical drugs be used for?

They can be used to make more neurotransmitter; fuse more vesicles; stick to receptors; block reuptake; block enzymes (eg MAOIs); and mimic the neurotransmitter at the autoreceptor to prevent or cause reuptake.

What is Mueller's law of specific energies?

Activating the same set of neurons in any way produces the same effect. (This led to the labelled lines system).

Rate of firing

Maximum rate of firing in a neuron is ~200 times a second. As this creates constraints, firing rate is a log scale -- this way we can see both a candle a mile away and a really bright light up close.

Line orientations

Line orientations and arm movements are coded using certain neurons for certain orientations, and the closer the orientation is to what the neuron likes, the faster it fires.

What is distributed coding?

Simultaneous activity in cells coding different properties represents a single item.

What is time coding?

The timing of an action potential carries information, and the timing is caused by the efficient or inefficient summation of IPSPs and EPSPs.

How can the brain be labelled?

How are brain scans labelled?

What are the white and grey matter of the brain made of?

White matter is axons, grey matter is cell bodies.

What sections is the brain made up of?

The hind brain (melencephalon and myelencephalon), the midbrain (mescencephalon), and the forebrain (telencephalic and diencephalic).

What parts and functions does the hind brain have?

The hindbrain contains the cerebellum, which controls precise direction, force, velocity & amplitude of movement, as well as parts of speaking, walking, eye movements & learning new actions. The reticular formation is involved in arousal, habituation, pain modulation, motor control and motor relay. The medulla oblongata is involved in cardiovascular control.

What parts and functions does the mid brain have?

It contains the reticular formation, cerebral aqueduct and substantia nigra. The superior colliculus controls eye movements but is influenced by attention. The substantia nigra is involved in action initiation. the periaqueductal grey is involved in heart rate, pain, blood pressure and mating behaviour. The mid brain also controls pupil diameter, circadian rhythm and eye-focusing.

What parts does the diencephalic forebrain have?

The thalamus, hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala and the limbic system. The hypothalamus is an interface between the CNS and endocrine system and controls hunger and satiation. The thalamus contains the pulvinar, which has the LGN which receives and sends back visual information. Animal studies show that the amygdala involves learning and remembering what things are. Hippocampal damage affects learning where things are. Taxi drivers' hippocampi increase in size.

What types of cortical blindness are there?

Heminopia (half of the visual field is unseen), quadrantanopia (about a quarter of the visual field isn't seen) and scotoma (a small ampunt of the visual field is not seen). In macaques, lesions to the striate cortex caused blindness.

What are retinotopic maps?

Maps that link the visual field to the brain, preserving adjacency but not space.

How can you tell if areas of the cortex are functionally distinct?

If they can be retinotopically mapped.

Speech problems

Broca and Wernicke

What are different cortical specialisations?

There are sensory areas (lesions cause blindness, achromatopsia or akinetopsia); object representation areas (prosopagnosia); motor areas; action processing areas (loss of goal-directed action), attention (visual neglect) and executive planning and control areas.

How is biology involved in social cognitive neuroscience?

Gallese's study of mirror neurons in monkeys; amygdala lesions affecting social hierarchies and perception of emotional faces.

How is biology involved in development?

Newborn brains are a quarter of the size. The brain stem & spinal cord are responsible for rooting, etc. Babies' axons are unmyelinated; signalling is 16x slower. Myelination is quickest in first two years; there is no myelination in the frontal lobes until 6 months. Brain development involves the loss of unwanted neurons and dendritic growth. The primary sensory regions develop first, then the temporal and frontal lobes. Poor development can explain object permanence and sensorimotor stages, as well as poor vision.

How much of the cortex is involved in visual processing?

25% in humans and 54% in monkeys.

How does the eye work?

The cornea provides refraction and the lens provides fine focus. The pupil has a diameter of 2-8 mm. The light enters the eye, reflects of it and hits the rods and cones which send information down the optic fibres to the brain.

What types of problems with eye sight are there?

Normal eyesight is called emmetropia; far-sightedness is hypermetropia, where the eye is short. Myopia is short-sightedness, where the eye is too long. Astigmatism is where the cornea is lemon-shaped and there is short-sightedness in one axis. Presbyopia is when the near point recedes with age (from 10cm to 40cm). The retina contains the fovea, optic disk and macula.

Rod and cone cells

We have 6-7 million cones, which are concentrated in the foveal region and contain multiple pigments. We have 120 million rods, which are concentrated in the peripheral vision and contain rhodopsin.

What is the evidence for rods and cones?

The Purkinje shift (spectral sensitivity), where rods see blue light (scotopic) and cones see red (photopic).


Dark adaptation is where we adapt to darkness, with a half-life of 5 minutes. We are fully dark-adapted by 30 minutes. At 10 minutes, rods start becoming more sensitive than cones.

What does psychophysics involve?

Working out just noticeable difference and absolute thresholds.

What are Fechner's three methods?

Adjustment, limits, and constant stimuli.

What did Hecht, Schlaer and Pirenne (1942) do?

They measured absolute thresholds. They used the method of constant stimuli on 40min dark-adapted participants' right eyes, with a light at 20 degrees to the left of fixation. The lights were ten arc minutes in diameter (size of one section of 500 rods) and the light was for 1ms (temporal summation at 100ms) at 510nm.

What did Hecht, Schlaer and Pirenne (1942) find?

Only 90 photons are needed to see, but many are absorbed, reflected or miss the receptors; only 9 reach the rods, and likely only one reaches each rod, so rods are excited by one photon. They looked at the noise of photon-emitters and found that their findings mapped onto a photon count of 7, so most noise is in the stimulus not the people.

What could Gregory and Wallace's non-blind patient do?

He had functional vision within a few days and improved over time. He could recognise objects known through touch and description and learnt to see time on a clock but had poor depth perception.

How can we study infants?

Using fixation and scanning, preferential looking and forced preferential looking, as well as habituation.

Contrast sensitivity

Luminance gratings, newborns 1c/deg, 2-3m 2-5c/d, 6m 6-20c/d, 5yo 30-40c/d.

What is wrong with babies' eyes?

They are half the size of adults' (although optics are good). Accommodation is 1/3 of adult level but acuity is equal for all distances. They don't have enough cones and sparse neuronal connections. Good colour vision but insensitive to short wavelengths like blue.

Babies' visual discrimination

They prefer to track faces, curves, and disrciminate mother, facial expressions and depth (visual cliff).

Types of illusions

Muller-Lyer, top hat, Jastrow-Lipps, top hat, etc.

What did the Gestalt psychologists think?

We see similar objects grouped together, close objects are linked, units in contact are one thing, points that follow lines are one unit and moving together makes things one unit.

What is the Law of Pragnanz?

The simplest, most stable shape is seen.

How do we fix the figure-ground problem?

Figures are small, enclosed areas with different textures and symmetrical features.

What is Emmert's law?

When two images of identical size are perceived to be at different distances, the furthest seems larger.

What are the three dimensions of colour?

Hue (200), saturation (20) and brightness (500)

What is trichromatic theory?

We have RGB cones; two colours of different wavelengths could make one colour if varying intensities unless you had two cones, two colours vs one colour, etc. Explains why there are three dimensions of colour, how mixing and matching work, and basic types of colour blindness.

What is colour opponent theory?

We have RGYB cells in the dLGN; we never say reddish-green and yellow isn't made by RGB.

What are the different types of colour blindness?

anomalous trichromacy, dichromacy and monochromacy.

What are the depth perception cues?

Occulomotor, motion parallax, and pictorial.

How do occulomotor cues to depth work?

Eye muscles can be used to tell depths of 20cm-2m, and accommodation can be used for depths of less than 3m.

What are the pictorial cues to depth?

Shading, perspective, texture gradients, height, occlusion, relative size and blueness.

What are the different areas of stereoscopic vision?

The horopter is the plane of fixation and Panum's fusional area is the area in which the two images can be combined.

Which parts of the brain are used for spatial and object recognition?

Object recognition is in the temporal lobe, spatial information is in the parietal. (Mooney faces vs stylus maze, monkey plaques vs object).

What are the two types of perceptive agnosia?

Apperceptive agnosia, where you can describe objects but can't copy or match them, and associative agnosia, where you can match or copy but not say what it is. Apperceptive II is not recognising objects from unusual views.

How do we recognise objects?

We have an object-centred view. We look at edges, then concavities, and then segment the image so the major axes can be derived.

How good is our facial recognition?

We can recognise 2000 faces on a single presentation and are over 90% correct. When you see half a face mirrored, you tend to see the RHS as most likely to be the same as it is in the left visual field and goes to the right side of the brain.

How do split brain patients recognise faces using each side?

They describe the LHS and point at the RHS.

What is Yin's effect?

We can't recognise faces if they are inverted.

How do we process faces?

Configurally -- we can recognise others even when parts of the face are obscured, and quickest at recognising top and bottoms of faces when misaligned unless inverted.

Facial averages

We recognise caricatures quicker, and recognition for atypical faces is quicker but classification is quicker for typical faces, but other race faces take longer for everything.

What is the history of animal learning?

Darwin suggested evolution. Romanes used anecdotes and Conway Lloyd Morgan wasn't impressed, scorpion story wasn't true. Thorndike looked at trial and error.

What is Morgan's Canon?

Don't put behaviour down to a higher order form of cognition when it could be a lower one.

What is Thorndike's law of effect?

if a response leads to a satisfying outcome it will be strengthened.

What did Skinner do?

He used operant conditioning, response shaping (animals have no awareness of what they're doing), and schedules of reinforcement (variable/fixed, ratio/interval).

What did Pavlov do?

Introduced Pavlovian conditioning using buzzers. Responses can become extinct and go through spontaneous recovery. There is a generalisation gradient and decrement.

What are some ideas of animal intelligence?

Banks and Flora rated intelligence using linear progression, Anaxagoras suggested we're all equally intelligent and MacPhail said intelligence tests might mistake things for motivation or perception. Jerison used a cephalisation index with higher and lower orders.

Intelligence as a correlate of learning

Rats are as quick as humans in a maze. Angermeier found a weird list of intelligence which might be incorrect equations due to motivation or perceptual demands. Garcia and Koelling found that rats who were shocked when a light went off didn't eat food and rats who were ill didn't eat food unless weird lights, etc.

What can animals remember?

Crows remember lots of things, Pigeons can learn up to 320 slides of squiggles. Mice can press levers for a certain length of tone, or for lights being turned off.Monkeys and chicks understand numbers, and rats can understand numbers of tones.

How do animal categories work?

Pigeons could recognise trees, Bach, people and water. These may be innate, exemplar learning, feature learning or a mix of learning and stimulus generalisation.

How has the short term memory of animals been studied?

Whitlow and Wagner looked at rabbits with plethysmographs and suggested A1, A2, and Inactive States. If they wait 60 seconds, there is a reduced response, but after 150 seconds it is the same response. Effector fatigue would mean that they bloodflow wouldn't constrict but it works for other tones, and receptor fatigue would be that the reception is tired but a distractor task gets rid of the effect.

How has the duration of animals' STM been studied?

Olton's radial maze -- duration of 4 hours, and multiple other mazes make no difference.

How has the LTM of animals been studied?

Miller and Berk looked at tadpoles who were shocked if they went into the black area of the pool. The frogs then avoided it as adults.

What are the phases of remembering?

Consolidation, retrieval and retention -- neurons need to be connected but this may be automatic, shocked rats can't retrieve. Rats running a maze are better if they're put near the maze after a long break.

What are the types of perceptual quality of UCRs?

Specific and affective (appetitive and aversive).

What is autoshaping?

Where the CS is treated like the US eg pigeons.

What is a preparative response?

Learning affective qualities and preparing for them eg shocked rats.

Drug tolerance

Siegel injected rats with morphine but new environments counteracted it, same with ethanol and heroin. MPM and MRestM, MPM lost tolerance.

What is contiguity?

Events that happen close together in time or space will be related, eg rabbits face buzz.

Can conditioning occur without contiguity?

Yes, eg rats made ill with saccharine after 6 hours, Garcia and Koelling's experiment, Rescorla's random pattern of US and CS.

What is contingency?

A regular predictive relationship between contiguous events.

What experiment did Kamin do?

The blocking experiment where rats were trained with noise then light and noise then shock, light made no response unless l+n training with big shock.

What are the three theories of animal attention?

Wagner, attention is high for novel stimuli and low for familiar.


Mackintosh, attention is high for novel stimuli and those that signal important events, and low for irrelevant stimuli.


Pearce and Hall, attention is high when learning (controlled processing) and low when this is done (automatic processing).

Which theory of animal attention works best?

Pearce and Hall -- explains why Kaye and Pearce found that light with either food or nothing meant animals attended for longest (they couldn't learn about stimuli).

What are deductive and inductive reasoning?

Deductive reasoning is where the conclusion necessarily follows from the premises. Inductive reasoning is where the conclusion is likely to follow from the premises.

What did Wehner and Srinivisan learn about ants?

Use legs and polarisation of light to work out the quickest route home.

What ways have animal cognitive maps been tested?

Gerbils use landmarks, mice find food when a alleyway is blocked (but light is above the food), rats can find platform in a water maze when sent from a different spot but go the wrong way first (just remember previous paths), and can use rectangular pools to find short ends etc.

Insight learning

Monkeys stand on boxes but have los of experience, pigeons stand on boxes but are clearly shaped for it, crows can do stuff but with experience an practice.

How do honeybees communicate?

Von Frisch, round dance (50-100m), waggled dance (100m+, length of dance = distance, orientation to sun = direction).

How do vervet monkeys communicate?

They use calls for snakes, eagles and leopards. Babies learn the calls when they are young.

What are Hockett's criteria for language?

Discrete, arbitrary units with semanticity, displacement, and productivity of syntax.

How have people tried to get animals to speak?

Using actual speech but not very good, Washoe used ASL and seemed to show displacement and productivity of syntax and taught her baby words. Sarah the monkey used 130 cards to speak, Rumbaugh's monkeys used lexigrams. Terrace's monkey never got past basic utterances. Dophins can understand 'hoop pipe fetch', Kanzi could do what he was asked, and Alex the parrot could speak.

What is the difference between wakefulness and awareness?

Wakefulness is the level of consciousness; awareness is the content of consciousness.

What are the three characteristics of consciousness?

Unity (eg dual task designs with 8x error rate when doing both); selection; and transience (eg Necker cubes, binocular rivalry).

How has capacity of consciousness been tested?

Change detection paradigm (changing boxes) -- capacity of 3-4 but may be memory rather than consciousness; Sperling's tone and letters with high capacity sensory memory.

How has inattentional blindness been tested?

If you flash a grey screen or change things slowly, changes aren't noticed. If asked to say what line in a cross is longest, 30% of people fail to see extra stimuli.

What are attention cues?

Where processing of a target is improved eg flashing light and asking about colour, or Posner's cueing task (two areas for the colour to appear and a flash of light).

What are the two types of attention?

Exogenous (cued, bottom up, involuntary, inhibition of return) and endogenous (voluntary, top down, slow and long-lasting).

What was Remington and Folk's cueing experiment?

Identity and orientation task with cue, only the processing of relevant dimensions are aided by attention.

What was Carasco et al's study on attention?

Peripheral cue on left or right, lines of different contrast -- if lighter cued, seem the same.

What was Eagly's experiment on attention?

Cues and boxes -- attention is top-down.

What experiment shows that attentional resources are deployed temporally?

Flashing red target letters, miss the second if it is too close after the first.

What was Baars' theory of attention?

There is a conscious spotlight in working memory. The function of consciousness is to broadcast information to separate brain modules. Unconscious contexts shape the content of consciousness with a top-down approach.

What are dichotic listening tasks?

Hearing two things in different ears, can switch between but not know what they say otherwise.

What is Broadbent's bottleneck model?

There is a sensory buffer, a filter based on physical characteristics, and then semantic processing and STM.

What experiments criticise Broadbent's model?

Norman found that participants could repeat last few words of the unattended stimuli, 30% noticed their own name in the unattended ear, and there is difficulty shadowing when the semantic meaning is similar.

What is the attenuation model?

Attentuation filter doesn't exclude information, only attenuates what is being attended to. The semantic analysis filter then picks selected input for attention.

How has semantic understanding been tested indirectly?

Flanking tasks where there are three letters, quicker when the flanking letters are different.

What is Triesman's feature integration theory?

We encode features separately and combine them in the attention spotlight (suggested by visual search task).

What attention disorders are there?

Hemispatial neglect (damage to parietal, can't attend); heminopia (occipital damage; can't attend but realise that); extinction (left is visible as long as there's nothing on the right). These disorders show implicit processing of the 'blind' side, eg on fire houses and priming for word classification. We have pseudo neglect in line bisection (slightly to left) as attention is processed on the right side.

What is the McGurk effect?

'Ba' and 'va'. Auditory system processes signals quicker by 30ms. At close distances (<15m), sound is perceived first but don't notice as there is a synchrony window of a few hundred ms.

What types of multisensory integration are there?

Multimodal cells (input from different modalities) and unimodal cells that are enhanced by concurrent stimuli. There is so much emphasis on congruity that the brain can be tricked, eg the rubber hand illusion.

What is cerebral achromatopsia?

Perceptual colour blindness that is the result of brain damage in the ventro-medial occipital areas. There is no discrimination between colours of the same brightness.

What is cerebral akinetopsia?

Motion blindness caused by damage in the MT/V5 area.

What did Moutoussis and Zeki find with their moving dots?

You can't tell when colour changes occur if the colour and movement is too quick. Perception of motion is slightly delayed (by about 100ms).

What is neurosynchrony?

Where neurons fire in synchrony when they are signalling the same object eg bars. Neurosynchrony is not sufficient for binding.

What is Balint's syndrome?

An inability to bind things following damage to the parietal/occipital areas. Can't see global representations and make errors in conjunction of features eg RM, who made these errors 35% of the time.

What is the mind-body problem and how can it be solved?

How are consciousness and the brain related? look at neural correlates of consciousness.

What did binocular rivalry tests find about NCCs?

Monkeys pressed levers depending on the seen stimulus. No change in V1/V2, but extrastriate cells changed. An fMRI with houses and faces found activation changes around reporting time but not temporally sensitive.

What did TMS tests find about NCCs?

Application over V1 causes phosphenes, over V5 causes moving ones. Hebb suggested cyclic cell assemblies. When TMS is applied to V5 then V1, the phosphene stops moving.

What does word masking show?

If words are immediately masked, they aren't seen but there is still brain activity. The activity is more disparate and intense for seen words. Word matching shows that the words are still priming.

What are workspace neurons?

Neurons that allow consciousness to occur. They are long range neurons that connect the anterior and posterior of the brain.

How well does priming work?

It can last for 17 years using fill in the blanks and naming pictures.

What is the Jacoby-Whitehouse task?

Words with distractors, asked if they have seen the words before. Recognise words even if masked.

What experiment shows semantic priming?

Prime semantically linked to words in classifying task improve reaction times.

How does continuous flash suppression work?

It is like binocular rivalry but one image is masked by the other as it is so distracting. The face image isn't seen but there are small amounts of face-related neural activity. Familiar faces break through quicker, as do dominant and untrustworthy faces.

What are Domasio's three notions of the self?

Protoself (unconscious, info about body and world), core self (conscious, momentary sense of self) and extended self (sense of continuity -- seen in elephants and dolphins).

What do split brain patients say about the self?

They can draw two different images as there is no cross-lateral interference. Speech is on the left as is the self, and the right has drawing. If self faces are on the RHS they are more likely to be seen as the self, opposite for other faces; sense of self is generated by the interpreter mechanism on LHS.

What do active and passive games show about the self?

The active and first person version of the game activates the left medial PFC.

What experiments have tested free will?

Libet used EEGs for spontaneous movement decisions, a readiness potential was created 500ms before action and intention was 200ms before. Impulsive people have less time petween readiness potential and action. Johanson et al found that people make up reasons why they like faces which influence new decisions.

What are the states of awakeness?

Awake, hypnagogic (hallucinatory), sleep, hypnopompic (sleep inertia due to frontal lobe depression), awake.

What types of brain waves are there?

Beta waves, 14Hz, low amplitude, occur when excited, and alpha waves, 8-13Hz, occur when relaxed, high amplitude.

What are the stages and brain patterns of sleep?

Stage 1 (theta waves, 3-7 cps).


Stage 2 (sleep spindles and k complexes, 12-14 cps).


Stages 3 & 4 (delta sleep, 0.5-2 cps, high amplitude).


REM (beta waves with sawtooth waves).


Sleep cycles are ~90mins.

How does sleep affect consolidation?

Consolidation takes 48+ hours. On a central identity task and peripheral orientation task, performance after no sleep was rubbish. Deep sleep is best for word-pair associations and REM is best for mirror-drawing.

What happens to hippocampal place cells in rats when they are sleeping?

They fire the same way like they're running the maze but faster, high degree of synchrony.

What is the activation-synthesis model of sleep?

The brain attempts to consolidate random neural noise like when awake.

What types of global disorders of consciousness are there?

Comas (no sleep-wake cycle, no response to stimuli, damage to reticular activating system). Vegetative state (appears wakeful with sleep cycle but minimal response to stimuli; damage to thalamus or cerebral cortex but RAS is spared).

What did Owen et al find when scanning their vegetative patient?

She had different activity for speech and non-speech (some but less activity in the superior and middle temporal gyri). Ambiguous words elicited more activity. She showed the correct neural activity for both walking around her house and playing tennis, but not for just the words.