Cog Neuro Exam 2

agraphia

when the inability to write is due to brain damage

dichotic listening

- Auditory process that involves listening with both ears; describes the situation in which two messages are presented simultaneously to an individual, with one message in each ear. Basically a dual listening task

inferior temporal cortex

- the highest level of the ventral stream of the visual association cortex; involved in the perception of objects, including people's bodies and faces - implicated in object, face, and scene perception

reference frame

- the idea that we can understand the spatial location of an object with respect to different/ multiple reference points - important for visual and large-scale space - allocentric v egocentric representations

optic ataxia

- the inability to accurately reach for something that you are looking at

ocular apraxia

- the inability to intentionally move your eyes towards an object

visual simultanagnosia

- the inability to see the whole picture

superior temporal gyrus

- the large gyrus of the temporal lobe adjacent to the lateral fissure; the location of auditory cortex - region of the brain that processes and parses phonemes

Sign language is truly a language; syntax, grammar, etc. Think about the evidence we talked about in class and in your book relating to deaf people who understand sign language. Do you think sign language differs from other sorts of language expression in how it's interpreted in the brain? What brain regions are likely to be involved and which might have different roles in hearing and non-hearing people?

1) APHASIA IS PRESENT IN SIGN LANGUAGE: - left anterior damage: agrammatic signing with lack of fluency but signs are semantically correct - Broca's area cortical stimulation caused errors in sign production - anterior and posterior damage: signing and writing were fluent but didn't have much meaning (similar to wernicke's aphasia) 2) DISTINCTION BETWEEN SEMANTIC AND SYNTACTIC PROCESSING: P600 observed in response to sentences with syntactic errors and N400 observed in response to sentences with semantic errors 3) LEFT HEMISPHERE: for language processing is highly similar for ASL and spoken language 4) DIFFERENCES: ASL vs. Spoken language - supra marginal gyrus may reflect phonological aspects of processing in ASL (selection of distinctive features) - left superior parietal lobe may reflect proprioceptive monitoring of the motoric output that is being produced

caudate nucleus

one of the major nuclei that make up the basal ganglia

prosopagnosia

inability to recognize faces; face blindness

retrosplenial complex

internal compass; what way are you facing?

amusia

loss or impairment of musical abilities, produced by hereditary factors or brain damage

hierarchical coding

low level visual areas project to higher cells to combine features, then make full shapes, then objects at gnostic cell

visual scene regions

PPA, OPA, and RSC (retrosplenial cortex) are responsive to visual scenes like landscapes and cityscapes

voxel

Small cube-shaped areas in the brain used in the analysis of data from brain scanning experiments.

How do results from behavioral studies support the claim that the mental processes involved in face recognition are different from the mental processes involved in non-face recognition?

Thatcher Illusion - suggests that we process faces in a more holistic manner, we do not just process features but also the positions and relationships between those features

hemispace

The area to either the right of the left side of the body

neologism

- made-up words that follow the rules for combining sounds in language yet are not real words

elevated plus maze

- maze type that involves a cross-shaped maze that has two open arms, two enclosed arms, and has been raised 50 cm off the floor - used to test rodents level of anxiety - based on the general aversion of rodents to open spaces

procedural memory

- memory of "how" things should be done, allowing for the acquisition and expression of skill - learning in this system is probabilistic, integrating information across events rather than storing each event separately - independent of the hippocampal system, not affected by amnesia - ex: how to ride a bike - linked to the implicit memory system

serial position curve

- "U"-shaped learning curve that is normally obtained while recalling a list of words due to the greater accuracy of recall of words from the beginning and end of the list than words from the middle of the list. - primacy effect and recency effect. - differentiation of effects can be seen in behavioral modification that result in double dissociation

sign language

- "spoken" language systems that are not aurally based but are instead completely visual - American Sign Language (ASL) typically used by deaf individuals in the US

optic ataxia

- A deficit in the ability to guide movements visually - part of Balint's syndrome - condition in which some or all aspects of visual guidance are lost - patient can see that the object is there but can not directly perceive the objects affordance - vision for action - overreaching of the hand/ arm

hippocampus

- A neural center located in the limbic system that helps process explicit memories for storage. - responsible for the majority of the memory system

retrosplenial cortex

- A part of the posterior cingulate cortex that is closely connected to the hippocampus and is important for episodic memory and spatial navigation. - Lesions to this area result in retrograde amnesia.

shadowing

- A shadowing task is when the listener in a dichotic listening task is told to pay attention to the phrase heard in one of the ears and then repeat what they heard.

spotlight metaphor

- According to this metaphor of visual-spatial attention, the focus of attention is analogous to the beam of a spotlight. - The spotlight is directed at one location and everything within its beam is attended and processed preferentially, while information outside of the beam is unattended. - Suggests that visual attention is limited by spatial size and moves to process other areas of the visual field.

extrastriate body area (EBA)

- An area in the temporal cortex that is activated by pictures of bodies and parts of bodies, but not by faces or other objects. - responds preferentially to human bodies and body parts

parahippocampal place area (PPA)

- An area in the temporal lobe that contains neurons that are selectively activated by pictures of indoor and outdoor scenes. - cares about large-scale geometric properties (layout) in a scene - big receptive field - scene identity in familiarity with internal and external building - lesions in this area still allow for landmark recognition

visual word form area

- An area of the left posterior temporal cortex that responds preferentially to words and other strings of letters - response selectivity for words over pictures

Describe the difference between Broca's aphasia, conduction aphasia, and Wernicke's aphasia. Be sure to relate the behavioral deficits we see in each condition with brain regions involved and what their role in language more generally might be. The book goes into more detail than we did in class, so be sure to consult the reading.

- BROCA'S APHASIA: (non-fluent aphasia/ expressive aphasia/ agrammatic aphasia) loss of language-processing ability after brain damage; disruption of speech output with relatively spared comprehension caused by a lesion typically in the frontal region anterior to the motor strip responsible for control of the face. telegraphic speech - CONDUCTION APHASIA: a disconnection syndrome characterized by the inability to repeat what was just heard, although language comprehension and speech production are intact; caused by damage that severs the connection between Broca's area and Wernicke's area (arcuate fasciculus). People are unable to repair speech errors, have issues repeating, and experience spontaneous speech errors - WERNICKES APHASIA: (fluent aphasia) speech output occurs without hesitation, sounds are well formed, and all parts of speech are present but the speech is word salad (jumbled words that make little sense) caused by a lesion to the junction of the temporal love with the parietal and occipital regions (paraphasias: semantic and phonetic), neologisms, trouble understanding language

telegraphic speech

- Broca's aphasia - words produced tend to be only content words such as nouns and verbs - function words (such as conjunctions and prepositions) and word endings are missing

What are some of the challenges with speech comprehension? How do these differ from the challenges for reading? What are some ways that the brain seems to have solved these problems differently (i.e., dedicated brain regions for particular functions?)

- CHALLENGES WITH SPEECH COMPREHENSION: 1) word segmentation: no clear boundaries between words, already need to know words to segment the "speech stream", complicated artificial sound gaps between words ("what-doyoumean?") 2) phonemes: can be constructed in a lot of different ways (vowels, consonants, etc.) and understanding these phonemes is multi-sensory. Electrocorticography in superior temporal gyrus show different representations of phenomes depending on where specifically the electrode you record from is looked at - CHALLENGES WITH READING: 1) vision 2) parsing words is easy due to spaces but learning individual letters ( and diff fonts) is difficult; the visual word form area is the region responsible for processing visual words

allocentric reference frame

- Category of reference frames that specify an object's location in relation to other objects, independent of one's own location. - ex: the bowl is on top of the table

Broca's area

- Controls language expression - an area of the frontal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, that directs the muscle movements involved in speech. - related to grammar - damage to Broca's area results in impaired speaking ability

What is the difference between episodic and semantic memory? How do data from amnesic patients support the idea that semantic memories may become consolidated outside of the medial temporal lobe, but episodic memories require an intact hippocampus for recall?

- EPISODIC MEMORY: autobiographical memories about specific episodes in our lives - SEMANTIC MEMORY: knowledge that allows us to form and retain facts, concepts, and categories about the world and the people that we know - People with damage to the medial temporal lobe lose the ability to form new memories about episodes in their lives (disruption of episodic memory) - However, after injury they are still able to learn some new semantic information; indicating that semantic memory is not dependent on the medial-temporal region

P600

- ERP response in response to syntactic anomalies - syntactic difficulty

N400

- ERP response largest over the central/ parietal area in response to semantic/ conceptual anomalies (Negative polarity with beak around 400 MS)

P300

- ERP that is over the crown of the head, in response to rare or unexpected stimuli - elicited in response to unexpectedly large fonts

grid cells

- Entorhinal (part of the cerebral cortex in the medial temporal lobe that serves as the main input to the hippocampus) neurons that have multiple, evenly spaced place fields - Have different spatial scales that sum up to give place cell representation - tile both navigational and visual space - is a type of neuron within the entorhinal cortex that fires at regular intervals as an animal navigates an open area, allowing it to understand its position in space by storing and integrating information about location, distance, and direction.

What is the evidence that prosopagnosia is a qualitatively different disorder than agnosia? What are some other possible explanations of prosopagnosia? What evidence on this issue is most convincing to you?

- Faces are considered to be special because we are able to process and detect facial features in certain objects, despite a face not actually existing - The evidence that they are special are: Functional Independence, information processing, and anatomical separation. - Functional independence - if some brain damaged patients could recognize objects but not faces, while other patients showed the reverse pattern. - Information processing differences - face and nonface recognition involves different computations. - Anatomical separation - if different regions of the brain were involved in face and nonface recognition. - The evidence that is most convincing is the functional independence because one area being impaired suggests that the area may be where face recognition is processed, which can support and provide primary insight into the steps involved in facial information processing.

ecological perception

- Gibson's approach to the study of perception, which emphasized perception while navigating in realistic environments - perception is for action and movement - link between visual system and what you can do in the world

dorsal pathway

- Pathway of visual processing. The "where" pathway. - along the parietal lobe - lesions to the parietal lobe show impaired action in cases such as neglect and optic ataxia - predominately organized retinotopically - where pathway> occipital > parietal; damage to the dorsal stream leads to optic ataxia

Greebles

- People were trained to become experts at recognizing novel objects - Greeble experts but not greeble novices activated the right FFA when viewing the greebles - The activation in the right FFA for upright compared to inverted Greebles increased with training - proved that the FFA is not specific to human faces

Although originally it seemed that amnesic patients like HM were impaired on all varieties of long-term memory, it soon became apparent that they could learn some new things. Because the patients have no explicit memory for their new knowledge, these were labeled "implicit" memories. What are the kinds of implicit memories that amnesic patients can acquire (give an example of each type, and the experimental procedures used to test it)? What are the neural substrates of these implicit memories?

- H.M. failed to show evidence of learning the definition of uncommon words even when tested with indirect, implicit tests of memory (deficit in relational learning) - spared learning for tasks that involve appreciating regularities in the environment that allow for increasingly improved performance - Memory for spatial locations: H.M. excelled in the mirror tracing task - skill learning: mirror tracing task, mirror reading task (show improvements on both new mirror- image words and practiced mirror image words- learned a new skill), word-stem completion task (report the first word that comes to mind when presented a stem after being cued with the complete words, amnesic patients are just as biased to complete the stems with items from the study as neurologically intact adults/ cued- recall condition: amnesic patients are unable to recall the word from the list in the study that started with those same three letters)

hippocampal place cells

- Hippocampal neurons that increase firing rates when the mouse walks/runs through a specific point in a previously learned maze - Each new maze/circumstance leads to a new neural representation of space - Spatial representations and sequences of activity are thought to be learned in hippocampal circuits - neurons that respond only when a subject is in a specific location; each fires in diff part of environment

word segmentation

- In language development, the ability to break the stream of speech into distinct words - when spoken, there are no clear boundaries between words - already need to know words to know how to segment the "speech stream"

We discussed evidence for sparse coding vs. population coding as a way that the brain stores information about objects. What is good evidence that each type of coding strategy exists in the brain? What are some reasons both coding strategies exist (i.e., why might the actual answer to which the brain does be that it does both?)

- It would not be logical that one particular cell or group of cells code for a particular object; that would mean that every cell in the brain is responsible for one object and remains unresponsive to others. - While, yes, one region can be more activated than the other, it does not mean that other brain regions are not involved in the processing of the stimulus as well. - If that one cell was to die, then the neural connection would cease to exist. That is why neither sparse coding nor population coding is a stand-alone concept. - The brain regions work together to process information. For example, the thalamus relays motor and sensory information signals to the cortex. - Also, when it comes to processing visual information, we must be able to link the visual representation with information elsewhere in the brain; such as linking the sight of an apple with its taste, smell, and use (biting).

Whorfian hypothesis

- Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis - Does language allow us to think? - The theory postulates that the language we learn influences how we think - strong form: language determines thinking - weak form: language shapes thinking - ex: color words interfere with color perception

Describe evidence that attention can affect processing in "high-level" ventral stream regions like the FFA. Describe evidence that attention can affect processing in "early" visual regions like LGN and V1.

- Lower Visual Areas: attentional modulation in area V1 and the LGN - Effects of contrast and attention in the LGN: Unattended versions of high and low contrast: Higher signal for higher contrast stimulus/ Attended version of high and low contrast had the exact same effects of contrast in the LGN with a slight increase with the attention - Effects of contrast and attention in V1: V1 is highly responsive to contrast but has a HUGE increase in the response of the attended category - Higher Visual Areas V4 - Effects of contrast and attention in V4: Strongest effects As we move down the visual stream, attention becomes more refined - The attended low contrast stimulus is at roughly the same level as the unattended high contrast stimulus

The parietal lobe does (at least) three things related to spatial cognition. Describe neuroimaging studies and monkey single-cell recording studies that show us what parietal lobe function might be doing.

- Main roles: visually guided reach, egocentric reference frames, manipulates visual space. - The parietal lobe supports guided reach. The superior parietal lobe (SPL) is important in controlling movements in space, whereas the inferior parietal lobe (IPL) is important in the ability to produce complex, well-learned motor acts. - Neuroanatomically, they are divided by the intraparietal sulcus (IPS). - Grasping of objects tends to rely more on anterior regions of the IPL, while reaching or moving the eyes tends to rely on overlapping areas of the SPL. - Single cell recordings of head fixed monkeys that reach for a lit up cue on the board revealed that the parietal lobe lit up during reaching act, not when the cue comes on. - As the monkey moves, the parietal lobe activates. The parietal lobe does not support the ability to move, but rather the ability to represent a visually guided reach in an area of space.

phonological route to reading

- Method of reading in which graphemes (spelling) are converted to phonemes (sounds). - Uses a phonological intermediary to reading - evidence from dyslexics (surface dyslexia and Patient KT)

Donald Hebb

- Proposed that human learning takes place by neurons forming new connections with one another or by the strengthening of connections that already exist - cells that fire together wire together

word superiority effect

- Reicher - the idea that letters are easier to identify when they are part of a word than when they are seen in isolation or in a string of letters that do not form a word - Words facilitate letter recognition (suggests that information about the word cab facilitate letter identification) - pseudoword superiority effect: easier to identify letters in a readable pseudo word rather than in an unpronounceable non word

What does the N400 do? How is it different from the P300 and P600? We talked about some experiments in class revealing its role in language. What other experiments might you want to know about before you're ready to say what the N400 does for sure?

- N400: negative polarity with a peak at around 400 ms elicited by semantic or conceptual anomalies largest over the central/ parietal area of the scalp (specific to semantics); N400 would occur when reading the sentence "she spread the bread with socks" , has ecological validity (ex: color of a train in Dutch which are usually yellow cause N400 when described as white unexpectedly in a sentence), specific to our conceptual construction of the world - differ from the P300 and P600 since semantics is different from reading and syntax; P300 elicited by rare or unexpected stimuli (ex: word in large font/ visual) and P600 is specific to syntax and occurs when a word is in violation of syntax (ex: the brain brought we to paradise and back) - Possible N400 experiments could examine what actually counts as a semantic anomaly (impossible, strange but possible, or plausible but unexpected stimuli)

What is meant by the terms "space-based attention", "object-based attention", and "feature-based attention"? Describe evidence that attention can be object-based, obtained from (i) behavioral studies of normal subjects, (ii) neuropsychological studies of brain-damaged patients.

- Object-Based Attention: dependent on the dimension/ presentation of an object. FFA is enhanced when the objects are faces. 1) behavioral studies of normal subjects: Posner 3-stage model of attention; disengage attention from invalid trial, move the attention, and re-engage to the correct stimulus. In patients with neglect there should be no impairment in invalid trials. Slight impairment in valid trials and a big impairment when disengaging from the neglected side. Main problems arise in disengaging from the "good" side and then having to engage in the neglected side. The IPL aids in this dis and re-engagement process 2) neuropsychological studies of brain- damaged patients: Inferior Parietal Lobe Damage; Region is critically important for spatial cognition and action. Bilateral damage in the IPL resulting in visuospatial neglect on the opposite side - Space-Based Attention: attention is directed on the basis of locations in space - Feature-Based Attention: enhancing the representation of image components throughout the visual field that are related to a particular feature

visuospatial neglect

- Observed principally in patients with right parietal lobe damage. - They neglect to process the contralateral (left) sides of displays to the point of reporting about them. - This despite being able to recognize objects in the left side of visual space if they are presented without something else on the right side of space. - Can be debilitating: often fail to eat food on one side of plate, shave or apply makeup to one side of face. Fortunately usually does not persist. - This is not a visual problem -- they can see objects fine. - There are clinical tests that show the effects of visual neglect - Reduction or loss of spatial awareness for the contralesional space. - Occurs in over 40% of right- and 20% of left-brain-lesioned stroke patients with lesions in the inferior parietal lobe.

dual listening task

- One auditory stream in the left ear (English) and another in the right ear (German). - People are pretty good at reporting physical characteristics of the unattended channel (male, female, static, no static) but bad at reporting any meaning related information of the unattended stream. - Poses the idea of early and late selection

Describe the phonological route and direct route to reading. What are different types of dyslexias that have been observed that suggest that the dual pathway model is correct (consult your text).

- PHONOLOGICAL (non lexical) ROUTE TO READING: sound is a mediator in the process of associating print with meaning 1) identify each letter, sound out each letter, then blend the sounds to produce a word 2) pronunciation of words leads to recognition of meaning because of the association of the sound pattern with the concept it represents 3) grapheme- to- phoneme correspondence rules: rules whereby print is associated with sound that let us know how each grapheme should sound and how they should be combined - DIRECT (lexical) ROUTE TO READING: print is directly associated with meaning, without the use of a phonological intermediary 1) irregular words don't follow grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules are are impossible to sound out correctly (ex: colonel= Kurhnel by sound) - DUAL PATHWAY MODEL: evidence from patients with brain damage show that these two routes can be used independent from each other 1) surface dyslexia: (surface alexia) occurs when there is a disruption to the direct route but NOT the phonological route, an individual is unable to link the surface information (visual form of a word) directly to meaning. cannot read irregular words correctly but rather sound them out using the phonological route and hence misread them. also often confuse homophones such as beat and beet 2) phonological dyslexia: (phonological alexia) occurs when there is a disrupted phonological route and INTACT direct route. relatively little trouble reading previously learned words, because meaning can be extracted directly from the visual form regardless of whether the words are regular or irregular. disability becomes apparent when they are asked to read non-words or unfamiliar words, related to deep dyslexia

ventral pathway

- Pathway of visual processing. The "what" pathway. - what pathway> occipital> temporal; devoted to processing visual stimuli. - Patient DF suffered from hypoxia in the ventral stream areas that led to visual agnosia.

We discussed at least two types of navigation strategies. Give examples of how the different strategy types could be used to find ways around the world, as well as experiments to test brain structure involvement in each study.

- Route-based: person's understanding is represented as a sequence of steps, often specified in terms of particular landmarks. It is like receiving directions from a friend; requires responding to a particular cue (stop sign) with the correct action (turn left). It is egocentrically oriented in the sense that that instruction "turn left" is relative to you. - cognitive map/ map based: involves allocentric understanding of all the different parts of the landscape relate to one another. Such understanding incorporates a mental map of the terrain to be traversed and one's position in that map at any given time.

categorical spatial relations

- Schema that specifies the position of one location relative to another in dichotomous categorical terms, such as above versus below; may be specialized to the left hemisphere

The multi-modal nature of language and semantics make it a challenge for many areas of cognitive neuroscience. Do you think single-cell recordings have anything to tell us about language, given that a concept or grammatical rule is unlikely to involve just one brain region (much less one neuron!)? Why or why not? How do advanced techniques in fMRI get us closer to understanding what the brain is doing as it processes conceptual information?

- Single-cell recordings do tell us something about language despite the concept that it may involve many brain regions - As we've seen there are studies mapping semantics all over the brain as well as rise in negativity or positivity in response to syntactic and semantic errors using single- cell recordings - fMRI techniques get us closer to understanding how language works at a wider scope using a different level of analysis

What evidence from neuroimaging and neurophysiology supports the claim that the fusiform face area (FFA) is a specialized module dedicated to face perception? What is an alternative theory about its function that can account for the fMRI results?

- Single-cell recordings in monkeys provide evidence for a specific neural substrate underlying face recognition. As we've learned already, cells in the inferotemporal cortex can be tuned to highly specific visual information. - In some cases, the cells in this region fire specifically in response to faces, regardless of whether the faces belong to monkeys or people. - Nancy designed an FMRI study using a block design in which they would look at nothing, a face, and then take a break. - What they found was the fusiform face area was more active for faces than it was for objects. - Another theory is that maybe the FFA is responding to low-level feature differences

feature integration theory

- Suggests that when perceiving a stimulus, features are registered early, automatically, and in parallel, while objects are identified separately and at a later stage of processing. 2 stages of processing: 1) pre-attention which is automatic and happens unconsciously, 2) focused attention when an individual takes all of the observed features and combines them to make a complete perception (occurs if the object does not stand out immediately.

How are the PPA and OPA involved in scene perception, and how do they differ from each other? How does this relate to the difference between agnosia and ataxia?

- The PPA is a subregion of the parahippocampal cortex that is particularly involved in recognizing landmarks that are used in navigation. The PPA is the ventral scene region; it allows us to understand what a particular scene is. Objects associated with such decision points were more likely to activate parahippocampal regions. Damage to the PPA may result in a specific kind of visual recognition deficit, landmark agnosia. The PPA uses visual information to recognize specific objects. - OPA does not care about scene identity, but allows you to calculate navigable paths through the scene. OPA involves the dorsal stream region. - This relates to agnosia and ataxia, because in landmark agnosia which is due to damage to the PPA, individuals experience difficulties recognizing a certain landmark. This reveals a deficit in object recognition more than in true spatial navigation. Damage to the OPA can cause the inability to calculate routes within a scene, therefore, they experience a deficit in coordination which is relative to ataxia.

feature-based attention

- The ability to enhance the representation of image components throughout the visual field that are related to a particular feature

form-cue invariance

- The direction and rate at which an object moves are normally not correlated with the manifold of physical cues (for example, brightness and texture) that enable it to be seen - the perception of shape/ recognition of an object is consistent regardless of the form or cue that defines it. - such as if an object is moving, if it is a drawing, painting, etc...

engram

- The physical changes in the brain associated with a memory. - It is also known as the memory trace. - Lashley's idea of the engram was that it serves as a unit of information in the brain that stores memories

category specific deficit

- deficit involves inability in recognizing any object within the whole category - although ability to recognize objects outside of the category is preserved - person might have difficulty recognizing fruits or vegetables but not in identifying pictures of human-made objects

Occipital Place Area (OPA)

- dorsal stream scene region - codes information about where you can go and pathways - fMRI studies have revealed this region to be selectively engaged in visual stream processing

Morris water maze

- The rats are placed in a circular pool near the perimeter. Submerged in the pool is a platform on which the animal can rest, but which is hidden from view because the liquid in the pool is opaque. - The position of this platform is constant relative to various objects around the room, but the animal is placed into the pool at various start locations across the different training trials. - Good performance on the task requires the animal to learn to associate the spatial relations between different landmarks and the platform. The path from a specific starting point to the escape platform for each of 10 normal rats who had only sham lesions. Over a series of trials, normal animals can learn the location of the escape platform, which permits them to swim short, direct paths to the platforms. - The paths for seven animals with hippocampal-system damage. Because these animals fail to learn the location of the escape platform, they spend much time swimming around the pool.

What is the biased-competition theory of attention? Describe the neurophysiological and neuroimaging results that are consistent with this theory.

- Theory that states that objects compete with each other for neural representations - attention biases the competition so that the attended object "wins". - Attention enhances responses to some stimuli relative to others and modulates neural activity throughout the visual system from the LGN to the FFA/PPA - In high level regions (FFA/PPA) attention can operate on objects, even when they are spatially overlapping - Idea that attention can tune out some information (simultaneous vs. sequential stimuli)

biased competition theory

- Theory that states that objects compete with each other for neural representations - attention biases the competition so that the attended object "wins" - attention enhances responses to some stimuli relative to others and modulates neural activity throughout the visual system from the LGN to the FFA/PPA - in high level regions (FFA/PPA) attention can operate on objects, even when they are spatially overlapping

emergentism

- Tomasello argued that language is not innate but rather a by-product of our extensive cognitive abilities, including general abilities of learning and memory - predicts that language is inextricably linked to other aspects of cognition

cocktail party effect

- Two ways of describing the cocktail party effect. - 1) In a loud area or crowd, when someone calls your name they are able to catch your attention with the salient stimulus. - 2) If you are in a loud crowd at a party and are engaging in conversation with one person, you have the ability to tune out the excess background noise and focus in on the conversation - auditory attention - tested using a dual-listening task

The variability of the visual world presents challenges for any object recognition system. What are these various challenges? Describe neuroimaging evidence that suggests that the human visual system performs both viewpoint-dependent and viewpoint-invariant recognition.

- Under myriad conditions, we are still able to recognize objects because of object constancy - The challenges are that the object may be oriented differently, seen from different angles, at different positions, sizes, occlusion, or illuminations. - However, the brain's categorization is constant regardless of the form of the cue that represents the object - Evidence for both is the FMRI study that shows an initial object then a different object, then the original object several times in the same viewpoint, and then the original with different viewpoints; what it shows is that the left fusiform is going to treat the same and different views as the same visual object, but the right fusiform is going to treat is as a novel viewpoint - This indicates that the left ventral stream is responsible for analyzing parts of the object and the right ventral stream analyze whole forms. - Single-cell recording studies indicate that the brain uses both viewpoint- independent and viewpoint-dependent codes in different subsets of cells. - Some ventral stream cells respond to a favored object in a way that remains unchanged regardless of the viewpoint, whereas other cells' responses to an object change quite a lot depending on the orientation of the object.

space-based attention

- Viewpoint of attention that postulates that attention is directed on the basis of locations in space

The visual word form area lies very close to the fusiform face area. Are their roles similar for visual function? How so? How are they different?

- Visual Word Form Area: region for processing visual words when reading - Fusiform Face Area: responds selectively to faces (facial recognition) - Literacy (Alexia: inability to read entirely): VWFA does not help illiterates identify individual words but helps visually (activation to faces, houses, tools), illiterates don't have a developed version of the VWFA to attach meaning, As the sensitivity of this region to words increases with exposure to language the sensitivity of the region to faces decreases

What are some ways we defined language? Give examples of things that almost certainly involve language and things that are definitely not. How might things that are and are not language involve the brain differently? Are there brain structures involved in, for example, reading a book that might not be involved while reading math problems? Or during instrumental music?

- We defined language as a system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance, and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do so. (examples: written language, spoken language, sign language, body language, gesture, math) - We also used Chomsky's definition which is "a finite number of phonemes (or letters in its alphabet) and each sentence is representable as a finite sequence of these phonemes (letters) +grammar." (examples: written language, spoken language, and sign language (NOT the rest bc of lack of grammar)) - Since amusia (acquired disorders of music perception, performance, and reading or writing following brain damage) can occur without the loss of language abilities and aphasias can occur without amusia, music and language may be separable. - PET studies show that different regions of the ventral visual processing stream process words and musical notation. - "experience with musical notation appears to shift the brain regions processing words. While the region processing musical notation is similar in musicians and nonmusicians, the brain region processing words is more distant in musicians, suggesting perhaps that the processing of musical notation encroaches on brain regions that normally would process words"

hub view of semantics

- semantics are computed in a specific area of cortex - amodal computations might be essential for concept boundaries (ex. knowledge of differentiation of animals into groups such as lion in the group "cats") - thought to be the anterior temporal lobe (ATL)

componential view of semantics

- semantics are distributed across the brain (anything we can think about has semantics, semantics is not one thing)

How does evidence from the spatial cueing paradigm and the visual search paradigm support the idea that visual attention acts like a spotlight?

- William James (1950) proposed that visual attention acts like a spotlight, selecting a single contiguous region of visual space, largely neglecting the rest of the visual field. - The attentional spotlight acts on a particular spatial segment of the scene and can be moved around voluntarily, or automatically drawn to salient stimuli. - It also enhances the visual processing on the spotlight part of the scene. - Neural correlates of the (single) attentional spotlight have been observed in striate and extrastriate visual cortical areas - the retinotopic representations of the attended regions exhibit increased fMRI activation in humans and increased neural firing in primate single-unit recordings

Are there other categories of objects or other stimuli besides faces that you think might have specialized processors dedicated to them?

- Yes, I do believe that other categories of objects/ stimuli may have specialized, dedicated processors. - For example, the Parahippocampal place area processes visual information related to places in the local environment. - I believe that changing eras in which the environment changed dramatically caused our brain to develop a specific area that helps us navigate in various environments for survival purposes

episodic memory

- a category of long-term declarative memory - refers to autobiographical memories that are specific to our own unique experience that include context about the time, space, and circumstances under which a particular event occurred - involves the recollection of specific events, situations and experiences.

associative agnosia

- a failure to understand the meaning of objects due to a deficit at the level of semantic memory - basic visual information can be integrated to form a meaningful perceptual whole, yet the perceptual whole can not be linked to stored knowledge - people with associative agnosia can "see" objects but do not know what they are seeing - damage tends to be bilateral at the occipitotemporal border

Thatcher Illusion

- a phenomenon in which people have difficulty noticing local feature changes (upside down eyes or mouth) in an upside down face

Morris water maze

- a procedure used to test for spatial memory in nonhumans - a rodent is placed in a small round pool filled with opaque- colored water and must remember the location of a submerged platform to escape

phonological dyslexia

- a reading disorder in which a person can read familiar words but has difficulty reading unfamiliar words or pronouncing pronounceable non-words - intact direct route but impaired phonological route - thought to involve a difficulty with grapheme- phoneme conversion

surface dyslexia

- a reading disorder in which a person can read words phonetically but has difficulty reading irregularly spelled words by the whole-word method. - Intact phonological route, but impaired direct route - often in patients with semantic dementia

lateral occipital complex

- a relatively large region of the ventral stream of the visual association cortex that appears to respond to a wide variety of objects and shapes - cortical region for object recognition that processes shape, not meaning

hemineglect

- a syndrome in which attentional dysfunction most prominently and commonly occurs. - Typically it affects one hemispace (side of the body) rather than a hemifield (field of view). - Syndrome in which people ignore the side of space contralateral to their lesion. - The side of space ignored is typically defined in reference to the body's midline, but can occur with regard to spatial references and objects as well. - Typically occurs more prominently after lesions to the right side of the inferior parietal lobe. - Symptoms of neglect may vary depending on the time since brain damage. - fail to notice items on left side of the world (spatial neglect) - inability to draw the left side of objects (allocentric neglect) - inability to use the left side of the body (personal neglect)

saccade

- a type of eye movement, made both voluntarily and involuntarily, in which the eyes rapidly change fixation from one object or location to another - rapid eye movement towards a particular region of space

sensory (iconic) memory

- a very brief type of memory that stores the sensory impression of a scene - lasts only milliseconds before fading

alexia

- acquired dyslexia - when the inability to read is lost as a consequence of brain damage

short-term memory

- activated memory that holds a few items briefly - a system for temporarily storing and managing information required to carry out complex cognitive tasks such as learning, reasoning, and comprehension. - Short-term memory is involved in the selection, initiation, and termination of information-processing functions such as encoding, storing, and retrieving data

conduction aphasia

- affects the arcuate fasciculus: inability to relay information from one intact area to another intact area - main impairment is the inability to repeat words or phrases - other areas of language are less impaired (or not at all) ; a person can usually still read, write, speak, and understand language

early vs. late selection

- early selection systems suggest that attentional selection occurs at an early stage of sensory processing while late selection systems suggest that attentional selection occurs only after sensory processing is complete. - This debate is an old one in which neuropsychologists tried to pinpoint when it is that attentional selection actually occurs. - Now we know that attention may act from the time that a sensory stimulus is processed until a response to that stimulus is emitted (series of filters rather than a single filter) - Early selection allows us to focus on registration and perceptual analysis, late selection allows us to focus on semantic/ endogenous processes

JJ Gibson

- ecological approach to perception; perception is for action - good design takes advantage of our perceptual apparatus (affordances)

What are two arguments against the idea that language is modular? Give specific examples supporting each argument. Can you think of any counter-examples - maybe language is modular?

- against the idea that language is modular: 1) there is no one brain region for language; many parts of the cortex have been implicated in language processing through brain imaging and lesion studies 2) language is not independent from other cognitive functions; specific language impairment (problems with speech sounds, morphology, and syntax) show other related problems with control of articulators, visual imagery, short-term memory, and perception of rapid sequences of stimuli which show associations between language and non-linguistic cognition that is relevant to language AND Whorfian Hypothesis example: color words that we use to break up color space interfere with color perception meaning in different languages, what we consider green or blue may differ depending on the words we have for different shades - COUNTER EXAMPLES 1) there are still certain brain regions with localized language functions such as grammar, syntax, and sentence structure implicated in Broca's area 2) we can attribute deficits in language to damage of certain brain areas

implicit memory system

- allows prior experience to affect behavior without the individual consciously retrieving the memory or being aware of it

early selection

- allows us to focus on broad, sensory properties of information; suggests that attentional selection occurs at an early stage of processing

late selection

- allows us to focus on semantic processing and encoding/ analysis of information that is available much later in the processing stream - argues that selection occurs only after sensory processing is complete and items have been both identified and categorized

fusiform face area (FFA)

- an area in the temporal lobe that contains many neurons that respond selectively to faces - neural module in the ventral visual processing stream; exhibits a greater response to faces than to other objects

anterograde amnesia

- an inability to form new memories/ learn new information after the onset of amnesia - almost always occurs in association with at least some retrograde amnesia

cognitive map

- any visual representation of a person's mental model for a given process or concept - a systematic organization of knowledge

Compare and contrast apperceptive agnosia and associative agnosia. What kinds of problems are common to both types of patients? How can these disorders be distinguished?

- apperceptive agnostic individuals are unable to see the shape of the object or the percept of the object (the object is basically a formless goo); they experience difficulty matching and copying objects - Associative agnostic individuals are not able to identify the objects that are represented visually. Basic information is integrated but cannot be linked to knowledge or meaning; individuals with associative agnosia are able to match and copy objects but not able to recognize them

anterior temporal lobe

- area in the temporal lobe. Damage to the ATL has been connected with semantic deficits in dementia patients and with the savant syndrome. - semantic hub of the interior temporal lobe

probabilistic learning task

- assesses the tendency to learn from positive versus negative outcomes

morpheme

- basic unit of meaning in a language. - ex: "s" makes things plural - the meaning level of language representation

grapheme

- basic unit of written language - a graphical symbol representing a basic element of the writing system- spelling

apperceptive agnosia

- basic visual info can be integrated into a perceptual whole, yet the perceptual whole can not be linked to stored knowledge/ meaning - a form of visual agnosia marked by the inability to recognize simple shapes such as circles and triangles - a failure to understand the meaning of objects due to a deficit at the level of object perception - people with apperceptive agnosia have fine matching and copying skills but cannot recognize what an object is - in some sense, people with apperceptive agnosia have trouble "seeing" integrated objects

Patient WJ

- became prosopagnosic after a series of strokes. - took up steep farming and had no trouble distinguishing between sheets

hemianopia

- blindness experienced in half of the visual field - a person with hemianopia can only see a portion of the visual field with each eye - most commonly caused by a stroke but can be a result of any damage to the optic nerve or V1 - hemianopia is not related to attention but rather spatial cognition - affects a hemifield

abstract spatial relations

- calculating abstract egocentric spatial directions independent of the modality (visual, tactile, auditory)

modularity

- computations are impenetrable to other info - the notion that certain cognitive processes (or regions of the brain) are restricted in the type of information that they process - extreme version of local processing - Neural structures have distinct functions. Computations in one domain are insulated and independent from other domains. Only the outputs are interpretable to the rest of the brain.

arcuate fasciculus

- connects Wernicke's and Broca's - connects posterior temporal regions to the frontal lobe and aids in language processing - likely allows for executive processes to be exerted on linguistic material and aids in the processing of complex syntactic structure, such as when a sentence contains many clauses that must be integrated with one another

Wernicke's area

- controls language reception - a brain area involved in language comprehension and expression - usually in the left temporal lobe - damage to Wernicke's area leads to impairment in understanding - speech output occurs without hesitation, sounds are well formed, and all parts of speech are present but speech is word salad (jumbled words that make little sense) caused by lesion to junction of temporal lobe with parietal and occipital regions - paraphasias (semantic and phonetic) - neologisms

Patient DF

- damage to ventral/"what" pathway; though the dorsal stream is preserved - CANNOT recognize faces or objects by sight, determine orientation of grating, identify simple geometric forms, copy drawings - apperceptive agnosia - CAN detect light targets, discriminate between colors, tell you whether grating is present, discriminate between people from faces and objects by touch, draw fairly accurately from memory

Spatial reference frames are critical for acting in the world. What are some ways that we divide up spatial reference frame types? How does the brain represent different reference frame types?

- egocentric reference frames: specify an object's location in relation to some aspect of the self (ex: retinotopy) - allocentric reference frame: spatial relations of objects relative to one another and independent of your location. allocentric representations appear to be coded in different subregions of the parietal lobe than egocentric representations - Cells within one subregion, the lateral intraparietal region, are sensitive to spatial location in egocentric coordinates but not sensitive to spatial location in allocentric coordinates.

medial temporal lobe

- encodes and transfers new explicit/ declarative memories to long-term memory - contains the hippocampus - important to place learning - the prefrontal cortex is the second brain region that plays a large role in encoding new memories

London taxi drivers

- expert navigators - enlarged hippocampus by memorizing all of the intricate streets

Patient HM

- extensive damage to the hippocampus and perirhinal cortex and the complete removal of the entorhinal cortex - Normal IQ and perception - critical in demonstrating the existence of at least two separable systems that support our ability to remember - post surgery he developed severe anterograde amnesia: although his working memory and procedural memory were intact, he could not commit new events to his explicit memory (retro

multi-voxel pattern analysis

- fMRI analysis method in which distributed patterns of activity are linked to cognitive processes - involves searching for highly reproducible spatial patterns of activity that differentiate across experimental conditions - analyzes patterns of activation across voxels in a particular brain region that consistently correspond to certain stimulus of event types, rather than an overall increase or decrease in activation of the entire region

face inversion effect

- faces are much harder to recognize when they are upside down - shows us that configural coding is especially important for recognizing faces - when faces are turned upside down the configural relationship is disrupted

default mode network

- group of brain regions that seem to show lower levels of activity when we are engaged in a particular task like paying attention, but higher levels of activity when we are awake and not involved in any specific mental exercise

aphasia

- impairment of language, usually caused by left hemisphere damage either to Broca's area (impairing speaking) or to Wernicke's area (impairing understanding). - the loss of language processing abilities after brain damage

mirror tracing task

- implicit memory task in which errors are tracked over time. - The mirror-tracing activity is a visual and motor test that involves learning a new motor skill. - The task requires you to move a pencil to trace the diagram of a star while looking at your hand only as a reflection in a mirror. - The act of drawing is a learned skill that requires visual and proprioceptive feedback to control muscle movement. - Patient HM improved in his ability to do this task over a few days, even though he claims to have never tried it before.

grammar

- in a language, a system of rules that enables us to communicate with and understand others - Chomsky believed that this is what constitutes unique human language - ex: written language, spoken language, and sign language - non ex: body language, gesture, music, and animal language

What happens to visual information that is "neglected"? What evidence is there that neglected objects are processed up to the level of meaning?

- in object-based neglect, subjects neglect the appearance of the opposite side of objects. - eg. Left hemi neglect loses right hemi-space of the object. - Semantic priming from neglected stimuli shows that the response is faster when words are preceded by semantically related objects in the neglected field - Neglect is thought to be an issue with attention: engaging and disengaging (though moving seems fine).

retrograde amnesia

- inability to recall events that occurred before the development of the amnesia - even though they may be able to encode and memorize new things that occur after the onset. - temporal extent can vary greatly among individuals from minutes to decades

visual agnosia

- inability to recognize objects - object knowledge is intact but cannot recognize objects by sight - usually caused by damage to the ventral stream - patient DF; patient is not blind, object knowledge is intact, patient can not recognize objects by sight

recency effect

- is a cognitive bias in which those items, ideas, or arguments that came last are remembered more clearly than those coming first. - The more recently heard, the clearer something may exist in memory. - Holding these items in STM as they come in

covert attention

- is defined as paying attention without moving the eyes

specific language impairment

- language disorder in spite of intact hearing, normal IQ etc. - Thought to be genetic, no known cause. - Problems with speech sounds, morphology, and syntax. - It also tends to have problems with control of articulators, visual imagery, STM, and perception of rapid sequences of stimuli

place learning

- learning how to get from one place to another by developing a cognitive map rather than learning a specific set of responses. - linked to the hippocampus

response learning

- learning of specific responses that are effective in solving a problem and thereby providing reinforcement - form of learning which links together chains of stimuli and responses - related to the caudate nucleus

classical conditioning

- learning through association - discovered by Pavlov, a Russian physiologist. - Two stimuli are linked together to produce a new learned response in a person or animal.

fMRI adaptation

- lower brain activity in response to anything that the region considers to be the same as what it saw before - One way of using repetition suppression within an fMRI paradigm that uses pairs of similar stimuli. - If the second stimulus induces less activity than the first stimulus (or prime) in a particular brain area, then it can be inferred that the region in some way supports a process common to the two stimuli.

direct route to reading

- method of reading in which print is directly associated with meaning, without use of a phonological intermediary - ventral - representations of familiar words are stored in an orthographic input lexicon- meaning is activated - phonological dyslexia: Particular problems reading unfamiliar words and nonwords​; Thought to involve a difficulty with grapheme-phoneme conversion - Patient RG: Could only read 10% of nonwords - Patient WB: Couldn't produce the sound of any single letter, Maintained ability to read real words with 85% accuracy​

The hippocampus is involved in several aspects of navigation behavior. What has neuroanatomy (structure), as well as behavior, neuroimaging, and neurophysiology (function) told about what the hippocampus might be doing for navigators.

- neuroimaging: reveals that expert navigators have a larger hippocampus (London taxi drivers) - neurophysiology: damage to the hippocampal complex in rodents produces several problems in environmental navigation - neuroanatomy: studies have also demonstrated the existence of place cells within the hippocampus that are active no matter what way the animal is facing or what route it took to get there - Different hippocampal place cells respond preferentially to different locations. - The entorhinal cortex contains grid cells that respond to multiple spatial locations that are organized in a grid like fashion. - The hippocampal complex also contains head-direction cells, which form when the animal is near a border within its environment. - Hippocampal cells respond best to specific spatial locations. One study found that when college students viewed pictures of campus landmarks that differed in distances from one another, the response of the left hippocampus was correlated with the metric distance between landmarks

place cells

- neurons that respond when an animal is in a particular location in allocentric space (normally found in the hippocampus)

affordances

- opportunities for interaction offered by objects that fit within our capabilities to perform functional activities (a chair affords sitting) - ex: Norman Doors that are designed poorly but labeled with the proper action to open them; their affordances can not be directly perceived by the design of them, a concept developed by JJ Gibson

spatial cueing paradigm

- otherwise known as the Posner cueing task - a common paradigm for studying visual attention. - The participant is asked to detect when a target stimulus is presented and to respond as quickly as possible. - The participants are cued before the stimulus appears (exogenous or endogenous cues). - Cues can be invalid or valid. - This paradigm relates to the idea of "attentional spotlight". - For valid cues we respond faster because attention has been directed to the cued location; for invalid cues we respond slower because attention has been shifted away from the target and we must shift back.

parahippocampal cortex

- part of the medial temporal lobe that processes spatial information memory

perceptual constancy

- perceiving objects as unchanging (having consistent lightness, color, shape, and size) even as illumination and retinal images change - people can recognize objects regardless of size, position, angle, illumination, etc.

explicit memory system

- permits the conscious recollection of prior experiences and facts

consolidation

- process by which memories are strengthened to allow for long-term retention - may be ongoing from minutes to days after a memory is laid down - the notion that memories may undergo consolidation comes from clinical observations of retrograde amnesia

Balint's syndrome

- rare neurological condition which causes ocular apraxia, optic ataxia, and visual simultanagnosia - a result of damage to the inferior parietal lobe

The name given to a deficit in object recognition, agnosia, comes from the Greek word gnostic meaning "to know". Is recognition the same as knowing? What cognitive neuroscience evidence is there for this philosophical question?

- recognition is not the same thing as knowing - an individual may be able to identify/ breakdown the parts of an object, but that does not mean that they can holistically name the object itself - for ex: associative agnostics are not able to link meaning to the object despite being able to see and name the different components that the object consists of

semantic memory

- refers to knowledge that allows us to form and retain facts, concepts, and categories, both about the world and about the people we know such as where they live, their occupations and interests, and their personality characteristics - not linked to a specific episode, but rather LTM that pertains across many different episodes and contexts - Semantic memory includes things that are common knowledge, such as the names of colors, the sounds of letters, the capitals of countries and other basic facts acquired over a lifetime. - semantic memory ab a kiss is that you touch lips to an object and use it to show love and affection that are commonly given as greetings or departures

Exogenous cueing system

- reflexive attention - automatically shifts attention depending on where the cue occurs - centrally presented arrow that points to the location of the upcoming stimulus - Involved when uninformative peripheral cues are presented - Highlights the idea that stimuli that are salient and differ from other stimuli are most likely to be attended to

hippocampus

- region of the brain that is primarily associated with memory - damage to the hippocampus causes amnesia - fundamental aspect of amnesia caused by damage to the hippocampus is that it is global with regard to modality and material

deep dyslexia

- related to phonological dyslexia - shows deficits in reading non-words, make semantic paralexias (reading errors in which a word is misread as a word with a related meaning ex. reads forest as woods), difficulty reading small functional words that serve as grammatical markers, difficulty reading abstract words (sympathy, faith) rather than concrete words (refrigerator)

Lashley

- searched for an engram by cutting portions of the cortex in rodents to see if it would disrupt association learning in learning in a maze - His idea of the engram is a unit of information in the brain that stores memories - concluded that memories are distributed across the brain - problems to his approach: only lesioned the cortex, assuming that all memory would be held there

overt attention

- selectively processing one location over others by moving the eyes to point at that location

dual pathway model

- since their are two potential routes, the way that reading is accomplished can vary based on the task demands and the nature of the language (whether most words follow standard symbol to symbol translations or not), and a person's degree of literacy

phoneme

- smallest distinctive unit of sound - a category of language sounds that are treated as the same sound, despite any physical difference among category members - A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound in a word that makes a difference in its pronunciation, as well as its meaning, from another word. - ex: the C sound in the word car

amnesia

- some brain injury has rendered the patient incapable of retaining new experiences, but leaves other cognitive functions relatively intact. - the memory system that is lost in amnesia is the explicit memory system but the implicit memory system remains intact - because amnesic patients are unable to consciously engage in introspection about the contents of their knowledge, they are said to have "memory without awareness" - deficit in LTM

bottom- up attentional selection

- some intrinsic aspect of the stimulus itself causes it to be attended/ receive priority during processing - ex: an item may grab attention because it is brighter or has an emotional significance - bottom-up attentional selection may influence visual search tasks if the object being searched for intrinsically causes it to be attended to by the participant

nativism

- specific linguistic knowledge is innate and universal - Chomsky believed that humans are born with an innate capacity for grammar, and this capacity is the same among all people. - Predicts that language and syntax are modular (written words -> language)

syntax

- specific rules of how ideas combine and relate to meaning - rules of grammar - P600

egocentric reference frame

- specify an object's location relative to some aspect of the self such as the head, body, eyes, etc. - retinotopy is an example of an egocentric representation of space (relative to the central point of your retina)

coordinate spatial relations

- specify the distance between two locations (ex: two inches beyond grasp)

paraphasias

- speech disturbance resulting from brain damage in which words are jumbled and sentences meaningless - people with Wernicke's aphasia have difficulty producing these - semantic paraphasia and phonemic paraphasia

configural coding of objects

- suggests that we are solving the problem of perceptual constancy with both viewpoint- dependent and viewpoint- invariant solutions - the left ventral stream analyzes parts of the object while the right ventral stream analyzes the whole form

parietal lobes

- support visually guided reach/ egocentric reference frames - damage to the parietal lobe preserves the ability to recognize shape but loses the ability to act appropriately in the world

relational learning

- supported by the hippocampal system of memory - occurs in tasks or situations in which performance depends on acquiring memory for the relations among items, especially items associated only arbitrarily or accidentally - ex: people's names associated with their faces- arbitrary bc names are not derived from a person's appearance

What is the Lateral Occipital complex? How is it identified, and what are its response properties? What is the evidence that this region processes information about object shape?

- the LOC is the cortical region for object recognition that processes shape (not meaning) - the LOC is located at the section of the ventral stream anteriorly to V2 and V4 areas - the LOC is more responsive to shape than textures, it is not selective to a particular category of objects but rather responds to many kinds of visual stimuli - This suggests that the LOC represents a stage in visual processing in which retinotopic representations are transformed into relatively abstract shape representations that support recognition across variation in size, precise form, and location. - One of the earliest studies was an FMRI study in 1995 by Molokai with different images such as a teddy bear and visual textures. - What they found was that doing this contrast identified the LOC. - Also imaging revealed that patient DF had lesions in this area and the damage may have impaired the LOC from computing object recognition, which may cause apperceptive agnosia.

working memory

- the ability that allows us to retain limited amounts of information for a short time while we are actively working on that information - a deficit in working memory does not cause a deficit in long term memory - content can be maintained by active rehearsal - contrastingly, hippocampal damage that affects LTM leaved working memory intact

priming

- the activation, often unconsciously, of certain associations, thus predisposing one's perception, memory, or response

fear conditioning

- the best studied example of emotional memory involves the brain system that mediates Pavlovian fear conditioning - a stimulus comes to invoke fear because it is paired with an aversive event -

declarative memory

- the cognitive information retrieved from explicit memory - memory system supported by the hippocampus - knowledge that can be declared consciously - ex: being asked to describe what you did on a particular date or during a particular class

What are the functions of the dorsal and ventral visual streams under the what-where hypothesis? What is the evidence from neuroimaging and neuropsychology studies to support this distinction?

- the dorsal pathway is the "where" pathway along the parietal lobe, lesions to the region result in impaired actions such as neglect and optic ataxia - the ventral pathway is the "what" pathway and it is located along the temporal lobe, lesions to the temporal lobe show impaired abject recognition such as visual agnosia

orthography

- the graphical components of language and the rule system for combining them. - a method of representing the sounds of a language by written or printed symbols (graphemes)

extinction

- the neurological disorder that impairs the ability to perceive multiple stimuli of the same type simultaneously. - Called extinction because the information from the neglected side of space is extinguished from consciousness. - Usually caused by damage resulting in lesions on the right side of the inferior parietal lobe, which causes neglect that in turn causes extinction.

phonological loop

- the part of working memory that holds and processes verbal and auditory information - component of working memory that deals with spoken and written material - subdivided into the phonological store (holds information in a speech-based form) and the articulatory process (allows us to repeat verbal information in a loop)

top-down attentional selection

- the person determines how to direct his or her attention - attention can be directed towards any number of visual features (physical attributes, spatial location, task or goal, particular objects) - top-down attentional selection may help in visual search tasks because the person may determine the specific physical attributes of the object that they are looking for

viewpoint invariance

- the recognition of an object is consistent regardless of the point from which you are viewing the object - the ability to recognize objects seen from different viewpoints

long-term memory

- the relatively permanent and limitless storehouse of the memory system. - Includes knowledge, skills, and experiences.

phonology

- the sounds of a language (phonemes) and the rule system for combining them

semantics

- the study of meaning in language, words, sentence, phrases

phonemic paraphasia

- the substituted word has a similar sound to the intended word - ex: table for fable

semantic paraphasia

- the substituted word has meaning similar to the intended word - ex: sub barn for house

primacy effect

- the tendency for individuals without neurological impairment to show enhanced memory for items presented at the beginning of a list relative to items presented in the middle of the list. - At test, items presented at the beginning of a list are retrieved from LTM or secondary memory stores.

modal model

- the three-stage memory model that divides memory into 3 areas--sensory register, short term (STM), and long term (LTM) - model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin that describes memory as a mechanism that involved processing information through a series of stages - It is called the modal model because of the great influence it has had on memory research.

sparse coding

- theory that a small and specific group of cells recognizes a given object - a small set of cells would represent a particular object in our perception - they only fire when the particular object is in the persons visual field

population coding

- theory that the pattern of activity across a large population of cells codes for individual objects - the same cells participate in the coding for different objects, but the activity across these cells dinner in some way

Grandmother Cells

- theory that there is a particular cell in the ventral processing stream whose job is to fire when you see a particular object or person - ex: one cell fires every time that you see your grandmother

tolman

- trained rodents to learn a familiar route and then tested them, blocking that route - the rodents had to use their spatial understanding of the environment to reach the food - cognitive maps

object-based attention

- viewpoint of attention that postulates that attention is directed on the basis of particular objects

medial superior temporal lobe

- visually guided flow/ solves motion problem - dorsal stream - uses information to compute things such as optic flow (apparent motion of objects, surfaces, and edges in the visual stream caused by the relative motion between an observer and a scene)

Endogenous cueing system

- voluntary attention - controlled by the individual's intentions and expectations - Involved when central cues are presented at the same location as the stimulus

object-based neglect

- when damage to the right parietal cortex produces neglect of the left half of visual space, which is called hemineglect. - This impairment can be object-based visual neglect when the neglect is with respect to each object, and NOT the visual field. - This would result in the inability to perceive the left half of objects, regardless of where the objects are located in relation to the body.

entorhinal cortex

- where information from a variety of different brain regions converges to enter the hippocampus

The hippocampal system is often contrasted with memory supported by the basal ganglia. What are the key differences in the types of memory supported by each system? Give examples of task-based behavioral differences.

1) BASAL GANGLIA: (caudate, putamen, globus pallidus) is responsible for habit/ skill learning and response learning - Damaged in Huntington's disease - Impaired in Parkinson's disease. - Patients with damage to the basal ganglia are impaired at probabilistic learning tasks. - In these kinds of tasks, cues predict outcomes probabilistically, not in a one-to-one fashion, and the tasks must be learned via trial-and-error feedback. - Patients with Parkinson's disease failed to show significant learning. 2) HIPPOCAMPAL SYSTEM: Individuals with amnesia due to damage to the hippocampal regions perform as well as neurologically intact individuals, thus indicating that learning on this task is not dependent on hippocampal regions. - Associations made by the basal ganglia are between stimuli and responses, whereas the hippocampus makes associations across a variety of diverse neocortical processors.

Cognitive psychologists developed a model of memory called the Modal/Standard Model. What are the 3 types of memory in the Modal Model? What is the evidence that these 3 types of memory are distinct from each other? Why do data from amnesic patients pose a challenge to the modal model?

1) SENSORY MEMORY: information comes in and gets temporarily stored in our sensory stores while we are analyzing the input- happens very quickly 2) SHORT TERM MEMORY: we then have the ability to pay attention to certain aspects of those sensory stores and bring them into the short term store, similar to holding the information in mind 3) LONG TERM MEMORY: Rehearsal, (frequent repetition and appearance of information) causes movement to the long term store. - SUPPORT: when participants are presented with a list of words, they tend to remember the first few and last few words and are more likely to forget those in the middle of the list, i.e. the serial position effect. This supports the existence of separate LTM and STM stores because they observed a primacy and recency effect. - CONTRADICT: The model is oversimplified, in particular when it suggests that both short-term and long-term memory each operate in a single, uniform fashion.

What are a few ways that hippocampal memory has been defined (that is, what is the hippocampus actually doing)? Describe at least 2 metaphors for what the hippocampus is doing. Why might those metaphors be true or not?

1) STORAGE SITE FOR MEMORY: difficult to reconcile with time-dependent deficits 2) LIBRARIAN FOR MEMORIES: knows where memories are stored and recalls them - does not explain selective deficit for explicit memories - "The hippocampus is like the intake librarian who classifies and shelves books. Without her, new acquisitions just bury the old ones and nothing makes it to the shelf. " 3) CONSOLIDATES MEMORIES: holds memories over the short term and recodes memories in more permanent form for storage elsewhere in the brain 4) LABELS MEMORIES: tags memories according to their context (location, time, emotions, social settings, etc) - Episodic memory is especially context-dependent

There are two main views of semantics. What are they? What is evidence for each? Why might one strategy be more evolutionarily advantageous than the other?

1) componential view of semantics: semantics are distributed across the brain; evidence: modality-specific activation peaks during language comprehension and a study where participants listened to podcasts and machine learning then mapped conceptual information onto the brain region best correlated with those ideas. May be more evolutionarily advantageous because it would allow semantic processing of language despite damage to a certain area 2) hub view of semantics: semantics are computed in a specific area of the cortex; evidence: anterior temporal lobe implicated in TMS stimulation to ATL caused impairment of the ability to find meaning in words

language

A system that consists of the development, acquisition, maintenance, and use of complex systems of communication, particularly the human ability to do

retinotopic map

Topological map that preserves spatial relationships found on Retina

cognitive map

a mental representation of the layout of one's environment

agnosia

a modality-specific deficit in recognizing objects that occurs in the absence of major deficits in basic sensory processing - loss of ability to recognize importance of sensory impressions

holistic coding

recognizing objects/ faces based on their whole; processing is done all at once

retinotopy

the mapping of visual input from the retina to neurons, particularly those neurons within the visual stream