Cognitive Neuroscience Exam 3

Which of the following best describes a real-life example of the delayed-response task? - After reading and studying on Sunday afternoon, you take a cognitive neuroscience exam on Monday morning. - After looking up the phone number of a local pizza place, you walk across the room to the telephone and begin dialing it. - After staring intently at bright streetlamp, you notice that there is an afterimage of the light even when you move your eyes to another location. - Every time you visit the doctor to receive a shot, she gives you a cherry lollipop. After several visits you find that the taste of cherry lollipops makes you anxious.

After looking up the phone number of a local pizza place, you walk across the room to the telephone and begin dialing it.

Studies of the neural bases of autism have found that people with autism - have less activation in the medial prefrontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus when performing theory of mind tasks. - have smaller amygdalae in comparison to non autistic people. - do not significantly deactivate the medial prefrontal cortex when performing non-self- referential tasks. - All of the above are true.

All of the above are true

What were the circumstances under which Phineas Gage sustained his brain injury?

An explosion while laying a Vermont railway that sent a tamping iron through his head

The information that you are currently thinking about, perceiving, or using to guide responding is held in this type of memory store.

Anterograde memory

You are looking for a friend who is supposed to meet you in a crowded lecture hall. You know that she is wearing a bright purple sweater and glasses. Which kind of visual search best describes this situation?

Conjunction search

________ is the idea that a stimulus does not have to be completely analyzed before it can be either selected for further processing or rejected as irrelevant.

Early selection

Which of the following phenomena is the most consciously mediated? - Inhibition of return - Reflexive attention - Exogenous cuing - Endogenous cuing

Endogenous cuing

Which of the following resulted in the significant personality changes observed in Phineas Gage?

Orbitofrontal damage

Which patient group is most likely to be impaired on a task in which one must decide which of two pictures was seen most recently?

Patients with frontal lobe injuries

________ refers to the repetition of a response even when that type of response is no longer appropriate or correct.

Perseveration

Autistic children are likely to report that ______ when performing the Sally-Anne Task.

Sally will look in the location in which Anne has put the marble

Which of the following experimental tasks would be best for testing deficits in task switching? - The delayed response task - The semantic generation task - The Wisconsin Card Sorting Task - The Stroop task

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Task

With regard to the three-stage model of attention of Posner and his colleagues (1984), which component of attention is associated with the pulvinar?

The ability to engage visual attention at a particular location in the visual field

Which brain area seems to be the most important for selectively attending to positive self- relevant information, as opposed to negative self-relevant information?

The anterior cingulate cortex

The supervisory attentional system is probably localized to this region of the brain.

The anterior cingulate gyrus

Brodmann's area 46 corresponds to which of the following brain regions? - The superior temporal cortex - The pre central gyrus - The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - The anterior cingulate

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

A monkey is taught that food is associated with a stimulus card that has a star on it. After training, the animal receives a lesion to the lateral prefrontal cortex. The monkey's memory for the food- stimulus card association is then tested by presenting the animal with the two stimulus cards diagrammed here. How will the monkey now respond?

The monkey will remember the correct response and choose stimulus card 1 to earn a food reward.

Which brain region is the most susceptible to coup-contra-coup injury?

The orbitofrontal cortex

People with frontal lobe injuries and control participants learned a series of facts in the laboratory and returned about a week later to be tested for fact recall. Which of the following best describes the results of this study? - The participants with frontal lobe injuries recalled significantly fewer facts than the control participants did, but they had similar source memory for the facts. - The participants with frontal lobe injuries recalled the same number of facts as the control participants did, but they had poorer source memory for the facts. - The participants with frontal lobe injuries had both poorer recall and poorer source memory for the facts relative to the control participants. - The participants with frontal lobe injuries performed similarly to the control participants on fact recall and source memory.

The participants with frontal lobe injuries recalled the same number of facts as the control participants did, but they had poorer source memory for the facts

Which of the following is true about the prefrontal cortex? - The prefrontal cortex seems to play a role in working memory but not in long-term storage of information. - The prefrontal cortex seems to play a role in long-term storage of information but not in working memory. - The prefrontal cortex is important for both working memory and long-term storage of information. - The prefrontal cortex is not essential for either working memory or long-term storage of information.

The prefrontal cortex seems to play a role in working memory but not in long-term storage of information

Tasks involving thinking about mental states often engage which region of the brain, in comparison to thinking about social background or life events?

The right temporoparietal junction

Which of the following statements best describes the anatomical connectivity of the prefrontal lobes to the rest of the brain? - Most synapses in the prefrontal cortex originate from subcortical regions rather than from other cortical regions in the brain. - Almost all connections in this area carry inputs from other regions of the cortex rather than from subcortical regions. - Connections in this region tend to carry inputs from other parts of the prefrontal cortex rather than ions to and from the prefrontal cortex to all other lobes of the brain. - There are extensive projections to and from the prefrontal cortex to all other lobes of the brain.

There are extensive projections to and from the prefrontal cortex to all other lobes of the brain

Based on what you know about the possible role of the prefrontal cortex in attention, which of the following do you think best predicts the performance of a patient with damage to this area on the Stroop task?

This person will experience more Stroop interference than neurologically intact participants.

Which of the following is true of the prefrontal cortex, schizophrenia, and depression? - Both schizophrenia and depression are associated with hyper metabolism in the prefrontal cortex. - Both schizophrenia and depression are associated with hypo metabolism in the prefrontal cortex. - Whereas schizophrenia is associated with hyper metabolism in the prefrontal cortex, depression is associated with hypometabolism in the prefrontal cortex. - Whereas schizophrenia is associated with hypometabolism in the prefrontal cortex, depression is associated with hypermetabolism in the prefrontal cortex.

Whereas schizophrenia is associated with hypometabolism in the prefrontal cortex, depression is associated with hypermetabolism in the prefrontal cortex.

In dichotic listening studies, Cherry (1953) presented competing speech stimuli to each ear and asked participants to verbally "shadow" (immediately report) the signal arriving at one ear while ignoring the other. He found that participants

accurately recalled only the content of the signal presented to the shadowed ear.

The supervisory attentional system, which seems to be localized to the ________ in the brain, becomes active during the Stroop task because this task requires ________.

anterior cingulate cortex / a response (perceiving color) that competes with a strong habitual response (reading)

Raine (2002) has argued that ________ people are likely to show evidence of reduced neural activity in the orbitofrontal cortex.

antisocial

Damasio's (1994) somatic marker hypothesis argues that memories of responses we have made in the past

are associated with emotion and autonomic sensations that influence whether we choose to engage in that behavior again.

The term ________ refers to the operations involved when we select for further processing a limited subset of information from the total information available to us from our sensory systems and stored mental representations.

attention

Baron-Cohen has proposed that people with ________ have impaired theory-of-mind abilities, coining the term mindblindness.

autism

In an experiment by William Kelly and colleagues, participants judged personality adjectives in relation to either themselves or the U.S. president. The results suggested that memory for words processed in relation to the self was ________ than that for words processed in relation to the U.S. president, and that the former condition resulted in greater neural activity in the ________ cortex.

better / medial prefrontal

Working memory has been called the ________ of the mind.

blackboard

The n-back task differs from some other commonly used working memory tasks in that it involves

both maintenance and manipulation.

Studies of attention employing the P1 waveform and the N1 waveform suggest that

both vision and audition involve an early-selection mechanism.

The primary functional problem that results from posterior parietal injury and that produces the neglect syndrome is that patients

cannot disengage attention from information in the ipsilesional side of space.

The Baddeley working memory model is ________, suggesting that ________ is more important in determining the brain regions that will be recruited.

content-based / the type of information

A monkey that has previously received a lesion in the lateral prefrontal cortex is shown two food wells, each of which is covered by a marked stimulus card: As the monkey watches, a food reward is placed into the left well and then both wells are covered. If the monkey is now allowed to retrieve the food reward immediately, it will

correctly select the left food well.

A traumatic brain injury in which impact causes the brain to bounce against the back of the skull and then rebound is known as a ________ injury.

coup de main

The Posner spatial cuing task (1980) showed that cuing participants to the location of an upcoming target

decreased reaction time to detect the target.

Studies using fMRI have found that neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex ________ when people make self-referential judgments compared to other judgments, suggesting that when we are "at rest" we are engaging in a number of self-referential processes.

decreases less

The P1 ERP is associated most closely with the

direction of attention to the spatial location of a visually presented object.

Neuroeconomic studies have shown that humans

do not always make decisions that maximize rewards and minimize losses.

Most children who are asked to sort a set of facial pictures will likely sort on the basis of ________, whereas autistic children will likely sort on the basis of ________.

emotional expression / physical features

Stanley Klein and colleagues found that after rating a personality adjective for self- descriptiveness, participants were ________ to recall a time in which they exhibited the characteristic, suggesting that self-characteristics ________ linked to recall of specific past behaviors.

equally fast / are not

Although the prefrontal cortex is not essential for working memory, it is particularly important for the storage of associative knowledge.

false

ERP studies of visual and auditory attention suggest that early ERP components like the P1 and N1 are not modulated by the participant's attentional state.

false

Research suggests that self-description judgments rely on recall of specific autobiographical episode

false

Research suggests that the brain regions that are active during mentalizing tasks and during attentional cuing are functionally distinct from one another.

false

The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex plays a strong role in forming impressions about the internal states of other people

false

The n-back task requires maintenance but not manipulation of information in working memory.

false

Unilateral spatial neglect typically results from damage to the left temporal lobe.

false

Focal injuries of the prefrontal cortex generally produce all of the following cognitive changes or symptoms EXCEPT - deficits in planning complex behaviors. - perseveration in responding. - fluent aphasia. - disruption of working memory.

fluent aphasia

Whereas the ________ will be most active during the encoding of a face stimulus, the ________ will be active during the delay period.

fusiform gyrus / prefrontal cortex

In one of the earliest studies of visual attention, Helmholtz (1894) constructed a screen on which letters were painted at various distances from the center. Following a brief illumination, he found that

he could perceive letters located within the focus of his attention better than letters outside, even when his eyes remained at the center of the screen.

The most salient symptom in people who have suffered damage to the orbitofrontal cortex is

inappropriate social behavior

The self-referent effect refers to the phenomenon that

information processed in relation to the self is enhanced in memory.

The observation that participants are actually slower to detect targets that appear at recent previously attended locations is called

inhibition of return

All of the following describe differences between early-selection and late-selection models of attention EXCEPT - early-selection models argue that selection occurs before semantic analysis of incoming stimuli. - late-selection models argue that human information processing has limited capacity, whereas early-selection models argue that capacity is unlimited. - early-selection models argue that all higher-level information processing requires the use of attention. - late-selection models argue that a stimulus may be categorized or even identified before selection.

late-selection models argue that human information processing has limited capacity, whereas early-selection models argue that capacity is unlimited.

One concern with interpreting fMRI studies employing a "resting state" for comparison with cognitive activities of interest is that

many processes are engaged "at rest," including self-referential processes.

Schema control units are

mental representations of possible responses.

The involuntary failure to attend to sensory stimuli presented in the side of space opposite to the site of brain injury (in the absence of sensory problems) is called the ________ syndrome.

neglect

Techniques such as EEG are particularly well suited to studies of attention. However, one difficulty in using these techniques is that

one must also use a structural neuroimaging technique to isolate the source of attentional activation to a specific brain structure.

The main deficit in Balint's syndrome is that patients can focus attention on only

one object at a time.

The ventromedial zone is also known as (the)

orbitofrontal cortex

Neuroeconomic functional MRI studies have suggested that rational decision making is associated with the ________, and emotion-driven decision making is associated with the ________.

orbitofrontal cortex / amygdala

The process of directing one's attention to a specific external stimulus is called

orienting.

When deciding whether an adjective describes ________, we rely on ________.

others / memories of specific behaviors

The term theory of mind refers to

our ability to make inferences about the mental states of other people.

Neuroimaging experiments have demonstrated that working memory engages the

prefrontal cortex and more posterior brain areas involved in perception and mental representation.

The ability to organize and segregate events in memory is called

recency memory

Studies of the perception of the self and others have suggested that

similar regions of the medial prefrontal cortex are activated when we answer questions about the self and about others, if they are close.

Item memory tends to rely more strongly on ________ lobe function, whereas source memory relies more strongly on ________ lobe function.

temporal / frontal

To engage in joint attention, a child will pay attention to

the direction of your eye gaze.

One finding demonstrated by the Posner spatial cuing task (1980) is that

the focus of attention can be moved separately from eye fixation.

Both early- and late-selection models of attention share the idea that

the human information processing system cannot fully process every piece of information it receives.

When Bisiach and Luzzatti (1978) asked patients with the neglect syndrome to describe their own mental images of the Italian city in which they lived, the researchers found that

the patients also neglected the contralesional side of their own mental images.

In general, increased activity in the anterior cingulate cortex has been observed when participants perform tasks that have any of the following properties EXCEPT - the task requires planning and decision making. - the task involves well-learned or automatic responses. - the task is likely to require error correction. - the task requires a response that competes with another strong habitual response.

the task involves well-learned or automatic responses.

Limiting the amount of conscious awareness that we have for our own information processing may have the advantage of all of the following EXCEPT - this allows us to filter out sensory information before it has received much processing by the brain. - this reduces the number of extra cognitive operations that accompany conscious processing. - this minimizes the amount of time for information processing to be completed. - this reduces the amount of metabolic resources that are used for information processing.

this allows us to filter out sensory information before it has received much processing by the brain.

Patients with extinction are unable to detect a visual stimulus presented on the contralesional side of space if

this stimulus is presented at the same time as a stimulus on the ipsilesional side of the visual field.

Extrastriate cortical regions specialized for the processing of color, form, and motion are modulated by visual attention to these stimulus features.

true

False-belief tasks require participants to direct their attention away from invalid information to answer questions about another person's mental states.

true

In visual search tasks, the amount of time it takes to find a target among distracters is independent of the number of distracters if the target can be identified by a single feature.

true

Information processed in relation to the self is better remembered.

true

People with frontal lobe lesions are often impaired in organizing and segregating events in memory.

true

Prefrontal areas likely are a temporary repository for representations accessed from other neural sites.

true

The lateral prefrontal cortex is important for working memory tasks.

true

When spatial attention is introduced to one stimulus in a spatial array, simultaneous presentation of competing stimuli interferes less compared to the absence of spatial attention.

true

In attention experiments, cues that correctly predict the location of the target are called ________, whereas cues that predict other locations are called ________.

valid / invalid

A patient who had a stroke in her right parietal lobe has extinction as a result of her injury. This person will fail to report a

visual stimulus presented to her contralesional visual field if another stimulus is simultane- ously presented to her ipsilesional visual field.

Hillyard and colleagues (1973) recorded event-related potentials (ERP) from participants while they performed a dichotic listening task. When comparing the ERPs collected when participants attended to a given signal to when they ignored this signal, the researchers found that auditory ERPs

were larger for attended versus unattended signals