b&b exam 4 - study guide
Why LTM can become unstable and susceptible to alteration?
- a lot happening before and after - where false memories can happen - push for having better protocols in eye witnessing testimony
Patient H.M. (Henry Molaison)
- having multiple seizures a day - one source was right in the medial temporal lobe area around the hippocampus - doctor removed the hippocampus - successfully treated epilepsy, but left him with anterograde amnesia and minor retrograde amnesia
LTM has a vast capacity but is subject to distortion...
- not always an exact record of what happened - memory trace - doesn't degrade overtime, certain details can get mixed up and interfere with retrieval processes
Clive Wearing
- viral encephalitis - damage to the right and left temporal lobes - repeated moment of awakening --> doesn't remember writing in his journal - lost episodic memory --> can't put himself in the past or future - has semantic memory, but no conscious memory
What are the three processes involved in executive function?
1) smooth task switching between different cognitive operations 2) continual updating of the cognitive plan based on new information of the contents of working memory 3) timely inhibition of responses that would comprise the plan
voluntary attention
Attention that is consciously directed toward a stimulus.
Reflexive attention
Bottom-up - the involuntary reorienting of attention toward a sudden or important event.
What is the role of the hippocampus in memory?
Bridge between STM and LTM - an intact hippocampus is required to consolidate declarative STM into LTM's.
What may explain why H.M. still had retrograde episodic memory intact, but Clive Wearing does not?
Clive had hippocampus AND frontal lobe damage, it appears that episodic memory is stored in frontal lobe.
choice system
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex + parietal regions - what to do after the evaluation of the situation
why does the right ear advantage occur?
Due to contralateral control --> when sounds are heard in the right ear, it is passed over to the left hemisphere which is where it is processed and sent to speech systems in the same hemisphere whereas sounds in the left ear are processed by auditory cortex in the right hemisphere and is passed back to the speech systems in the left hemisphere
What is the neural mechanism in which strong emotions enhance memory formation?
Emotional event --> adrenal glands --> epinephrine/norepinephrine --> amygdala
What evidence is there that the frontal cortex is involved in executive function?
Frontal lesions may cause impaired executive function. For example: a person with executive dysfunction due to frontal lesions who is given a simple set of errands may be unable to complete them without numerous false starts, backtracking, and confusion.
What neural network is involved in consciousness?
Frontal/Parietal Network
Which region of cortex is crucial for face recognition?
Fusiform gyrus
What is the P3 effect of auditory processing?
It occurs later in the ERP and may reflect higher-order processing - late attentional selection - filtering out other information, extracting information --> using your working memory (what is being said/by who) - people with schizophrenia do not have normal P3 wave.
What does the button-pressing experiment relate to free will?
Makes people question if they actually have free will or if the brain decides for someone.
mirror tracing task
Milner: patient HM and other subjects had to trace a star in a mirror identical implicit learning: muscle memory no explicit learning: no conscious recollection of doing it, all got better with practice - evidence of motor memory
In ERP studies of normal subjects, it has been found that a semantically incorrect sentence provokes a _______ wave from _______ cortex.
N400; temporoparietal
Describe the experiment that suggests that conscious experience of intention may be felt much later than the activity of making a decision.
Participants were told to push a button while looking at letters on a screen, whenever they want to. - told to remember the letter on the screen - the fMRI showed that the participants felt the intention to press the button 5-10 seconds before they actually did.
Describe how sensory information can become a long term memory.
Sensory information is encoded into short term memory, information may be consolidated into long-term storage
What happens when a split brain patient is shown an object in their left visual field? Right visual field?
Stuff shown in our left visual field is sent to our right hemisphere, but if you have a split-brain, information cannot be sent → stuck in the right hemisphere (not production of language) It is being processed but the right hemisphere can't talk. - will be able to draw it
late selection model
Suggests that bottleneck occurs later, after substantial unconscious processing has occurred.
What is the connectionist model of aphasia?
The Wernicke's area decodes sounds and transmits info to Broca's area via the arcuate fasciculus - speaking a written word: PVC--> angular gyrus --> Wernicke's area --> Broca's area --> motor cortex - speaking a heard word: Primary auditory cortex --> Wernicke's --> Broca's --> motor cortex
What are some ways that learning and memory change synapses?
The strength of synapses in response to biochemical signals - formation of new synapse or birth of new neurons
decalrative memory
Things you know that you can tell others (facts and information acquired through learning) --> semantic and episodic
Peripheral Spatial Cueing Task
Uses a simple sensory stimulus such as light in the location to which the attention is to be drawn after a time interval - reaction time: reflexive --> flash of light - valid trial: fixation point --> unexpected stimulus --> delay --> target - invalid trial: longer reaction time --> takes longer to process
A patient speaks in a fluent manner, although her speech contains many paraphasias that make it unintelligible. She also demonstrates poor comprehension of verbal material. This patient is most likely suffering from _______ aphasia.
Wernicke's
What role may the claustrum play in consciousness?
When the claustrum was activated, it switched off consciousness - remarkable reciprocal connections with virtually every area of cortex.
How are the basal ganglia involved in learning?
When there is damage to the basal ganglia, it impairs all of the three learning skills such as sensorimotor skills, perceptual skills, and cognitive skills - involved in skill learning through repetition
auditory N1 effect
a negative deflection of the event-related potential, occurring about 100 milliseconds after stimulus presentation, that is enhanced for selectively attended auditory input compared with ignored input
delayed non-matching-to-sample task
a test of object recognition memory that requires monkeys to declare what they remember - pick up object over a well that provides a treat - has to pick up new objects that they haven't seen before. Conclusion: the severe disruption of new declarative memories in H.M. is due to both the hippocampus and nearby cortex.
brain activation when speaking and generating a word:
activations more on the left --> language areas of the brain
Wernicke's aphasia
also known as fluent aphasia - can produce language and speak, but does not make sense - is not comprehendible
Broca's aphasia
also known as non-fluent aphasia - difficulty producing speech, but can understand speech well.
Patient N.A.
amnesia due to accidental damage to the dorsomedial thalamus and mammillary bodies - has short term memory but cannot form declarative long term memories
The most striking impairment suffered by Henry Molaison (patient H.M.) was
anterograde amnesia
In early-selection models of attention, when is information filtered out?
at the level of sensory input
place cells
become active when in, or moving toward, a particular location
Auditory attention
being able to focus on a single sound in the presence of many other sounds - produces a unique pattern of electrical activity - an initial positive-going wave (P1) --> immediately followed by a larger negative- going wave (N1).
A large frontal lesion in the left hemisphere can produce _______ aphasia.
broca's
In most split-brain patients, words presented to the left visual field
cannot be repeatedly verbally
operant conditioning
change behavior by offering a reward or a punishment -- no brain region has been pinpointed
default mode network
circuit of brain regions that is active when we are reflective and inactive when we are intentionally doing something.
The _______ is an area of gray matter within the white matter of the of the forebrain, and is thought to play an important role in generating the experience of being conscious.
claustrum
Frontal/Parietal Network
consciousness depends on this network - coma patients can use mental imagery to create yes or no patterns of activity
The challenge facing researchers who seek to study the functions of the two brain hemispheres is that the hemispheres have many connections and function as one. The solution to this has been to study split-brain patients in which the _______ has been cut, thereby separating the connection between the hemispheres.
corpus callosum
Patient K.C.
could not retrieve personal memory due to damage to the cortex - unable to recall things that happened in their life - no damage to the hippocampus, but they found that it had shrunk
how does perceptual load incorporate both the early and late selection model of attention?
depending on what resources are used and when depending on the stimulus
episodic memory
detailed autobiographical memory (personal) - remembering the first day of school
perceptual load
determines how much of our resources are used
subjects can report little about the stimuli heard in the nonattended ear
dichotic presentation
subjects are asked to process two or more simultaneous stimuli
divided-attention tasks
frontal lobe injury leads to...
emotional, motor, and cognitive changes - Phineas Gage: Tamping rod went through his eye and damaged his frontal lobe - after the accident his behavior became inappropriate such as sexually, drinking, and can't hold a job
how is sign language support the motor theory?
employs the same language-related regions of the left-hemisphere
valuation system: neuroeconomics
evaluating the situation, considering what may be gained and what may be lost
The amygdala is directly involved in
fear conditioning
early selection model
filtering out occurs at the sensory level - attentional bottleneck: a filter
Patients like patient H.M. can learn to read mirror-reversed text even though they don't remember practicing it, which demonstrates that their problem is not in learning verbal material, but instead is in
form new declarative memories
Which brain area(s) is/are implicated in patient K.C.'s inability to recall autobiographical details of his life from many years before his accident?
frontal and parietal cortex
Semantic memory
generalized (factual) - knowing the capital of France
The P3 component of auditory processing is associated with
higher order cognitive processing of stimuli
Place cells, which are located in the _______, become active when an animal moves through its spatial environment or toward a particular location.
hippocampus
One of the revealing finds of neuroeconomics is that
humans are risk-averse
In infants, the left planum temporale is larger than the right, suggesting that
humans have an inborn neural mechanism for language
In the delayed non-matching-to-sample task in monkeys, the subject
identifies an unfamiliar object in a pair of objects
A viewer closely focused on a complex task, such as being asked to count how many times a group of people throw a ball back and forth, may miss other nonattended stimuli such as dancers moving through the group of people. This is due to an attentional phenomenon called
inattentional blindness
The _______ likely evolved because it prevents reflexive attention from settling on unimportant stimuli for more than an instant, a reaction that would be adaptive in animals foraging for food and/or scanning for predators.
inhibition of return
PET scans of brain activation during progressively more complex language processing tasks showed _______ in Broca's area as compared to activation during simple word repetition or reading aloud.
marked activation
brain activation when listening to words:
more left activation in the temporal lobes (auditory cortex)
brain activation when speaking words (repetition):
mostly involves motor cortices and even the cerebellum
Diminished social insight, distractibility, and emotional lability are associated with injuries to the _______ cortex.
orbitofrontal
Criticism of Connectionist Model
oversimplifies the neural mechanisms of language and furthermore modern fMRI confirms that left-hemisphere language zones are not as rigidly modular as previously believed.
Attention in which the focus coincides with the individual's sensory orientation is called
overt attention
A change in the processing of a stimulus due to prior exposure to the same (or similar) stimuli is referred to as
priming
People with conduction aphasia are unable to
repeat words or sentences
ERP (event-related potential)
reveal the time base for language processing - Semantic mistake (using incorrect word) --> N400 - Grammatical errors --> P600 - shows that it takes us longer to process grammatical errors
Brain activation when looking at words:
see most of the activation in the left occipital lobe
Knowing the meaning of word, without knowing where or when you learned it, describes _______ memory.
semantic
Radial Arm Maze
spatial location recognition Study: Rat goes in the middle, goes through the arm, gets a treat, comes out and goes into a different one - should not go into one they have already gone into -- hippocampus plays a huge role
measures reaction time to a specific target that is preceded by a cue telling the subject where it will appear
symbolic cueing task
hierarchical cognitive control
the ability to direct shorter-term actions while simultaneously keeping longer-term goals in mind - frontal cortex in executive functions
The visual P1 effect
the appearance of an enhanced, positive wave of the ERP that occurs when the stimulus is a valid cue, but not when it is invalid - huge reduction in the P1 - selectively attended visual input
associative learning
the association between two stimuli, or between a stimulus and a response
Describe the study that questions our current definition of consciousness
the coma patients that could use mental imagery to provide yes and no answers to questions.
Compared to animals placed in impoverished conditions, animals kept in enriched conditions have been found to have heavier brains, due primarily to increased thickness of
the cortex
right ear advantage
the fact that humans typically hear speech sounds more readily via the right ear
anterograde amnesia
the inability to for new memories AFTER onset of amnesia
retrograde amnesia
the loss of memories BEFORE onset of amnesia
The "hard problem of consciousness" refers to understanding
the neural processes that result in a person's unique subjective experience.
What is inhibition of return?
the relative difficulty in getting attention to move back to a recently attended location - prevented reflexive attention from settling on unimportant stimuli for more than an instant
Consistent with the motor theory of speech perception, deaf people who use American Sign Language use _______ language-related regions of the left hemisphere as hearing people who use spoken language do.
the same
neuroeconomics
the study of brain mechanisms during economic decision making --> occurs in the frontal cortex
what is the motor theory of language?
the theory that speech is perceived using the same left-hemisphere mechanisms that are used to produce complex movements that go into speech.
non-declarative memory
things you know that you can show doing (shown by performance, indicated motor response)
hard problem of consciousness
understanding brain processes that produce people's subjective experiences of consciousness - explain what sour tastes like or what the color red looks like? - impossible to do
easy problem of consciousness
understanding how particular patterns of neural activity create specific conscious experiences by reading brain activity directly from people's brains as they're having particular experiences - pattern identification/visual reconstruction
In a symbolic cuing task, _______ attention is shown to enhance processing, reducing reaction time to the stimulus, and _______ cues decrease reaction time the most.
voluntary; valid
what are some possible behavioral consequences of damage to the right hemisphere in humans?
- Facial recognition - emotional perception of language - read faces - perception of music
classical conditioning
- Pavlov dog study unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned response Study: Rabbits --> play a tone --> puff of air in eye Eventually when the rabbits hear the tone, they blink which is a conditioned response --- cerebellum is involved
