Neuro Quiz Questions

What kind of neuron terminates on muscle fibers and causes the contractions that produce movement by transmitting Acetylcholine?

Alpha motor neurons

A patient with a language disorder demonstrates high fluency in describing the Cookie Theft Problem, demonstrates comprehension of the speech of others, and is able to repeat words spoken by others. If there remains an inability to name familiar objects and this person does not have agnosia, what type of language disorder to they have?

Anomia

____________ is a global physiological and psychological state of an organism that is correlated with greater or lesser degrees of attention.

arousal

Evidence from single-cell recordings in the macaque monkey indicates that certain cells along WHICH area of the brain exhibit face-selective firing?

superior temporal sulcus (STS)

What is the name of the process of converting raw signals from the physical environment into action potentials?

transduction

When we are able to locate sounds in space, our brains are calculating TWO different signals from the ears. What are these TWO signals?

- interaural time difference - interaural intensity difference

Homotopic connections are between:

2 corresponding areas in opposite hemispheres

Ipsilateral connections in the brain are between:

2 different areas in the same hemisphere

What is the concept in the processing of emotion that describes a "cost-benefit analysis" is performed by the brain in perceiving and reacting to an emotional stimulus.

Appraisal Theory

What are the 3 branches of science that are all dealing with the same questions about cognition, but from different perspectives?

Cognitive psychology, neuroscience and computer science

Which of the following theories relies on the simultaneous activation of physiological arousal and the conscious experience of an emotion?

Cannon Bard Theory

If you resection the lower spinal cord of a cat such that the nerves to the hind legs are isolated from the brain, and the cat is still able to walk on a treadmill, you have demonstrated that motor commands must have originated in the lower portion of the spinal cord. This is evidence for the existence of ___________.

Central Pattern Generators

Which neuroscience method allows for us to non-invasively see white matter tract connectivity based on water flow in the brain?

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI)

The dorsal visual pathway is known as the ________ pathway, and the ventral visual pathway is known as the ________ pathway.

Dorsal visual pathway: where or spatial orientation Ventral visual pathway: what or object recognition

What is the word we use for any part of the body that can move, such as an arm, finger, or leg?

Effector

Which neuroscience method allows for us to record high temporal and spatial resolution signals from an array of electrodes placed directly on the cortex?

Electrocorticography (ECoG), or intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG)

What 3 basic functions are the defining properties of every memory system?

Encoding, storage, and retrieval

According to Paul Eckman's Criteria for Basic Emotions, the basic universal emotions involve a slow onset and a long-lasting duration.

False

Recognition of faces relies primarily on the analytic processing of individual elements of a face.

False

Somatotopic mapping in the post central gyrus is similar across most mammal species.

False

T/F: PET contrasts reveal that the same areas in the parietal lobe are activated for object location tasks and object identification tasks.

False

T/F: The right hemisphere is dedicated to analytical processing, and the left hemisphere is dedicated to creative processing. Split-brain patients will show dominance of one trait over another.

False

By noting the color, softness, and ripeness of a tomato as he slices it, Brian is exhibiting ___________ and a PET scan would show activation in several distinct regions of his extrastriate cortex.

Feature Attention

Which of the neurotransmitters is most likely to prevent a post-synaptic neuron from firing?

GABA (gamma Amino-butyric acid)

What is the place on the surface of 2 neurons where they share cytoplasm and electrical charges?

Gap junctions

What is one of the key differences between a graded potential and an action potential?

Graded potential travels passively a short distance and vary in magnitude. Action potential is all-or-nothing (does not vary) and travels all the way along axon.

What is the difference between the localizationist view and the aggregate field view of cognitive neuroscience?

Localizationist = specific processes are localized to specific areas of the brain Aggregate field = cognitive processes are distributed throughout the brain

Producing Long-Term Potentiation of memory requires the function of _____________ receptors located mostly on dendrites of neurons.

NMDA (N-methyl-D-aspartate)

What is the Neuron Doctrine, who proposed it, and whose method was used to support it?

Neuron Doctrine is that the neuron is the most basic functional unit of the brain. Santiago Ramon y Cajal proposed it using Camillo Golgi's staining method.

What is the name for the functionally defined area of the brain located in the parahippocampal region of the temporal lobe that responds to stimuli depicting scenes or places?

Parahippocampal Place Area (PPA)

Which of these is NOT a principle of object recognition?

People perceive objects separated by details and not as a unified whole.

Which of the neuroscience methods requires a radioactive isotope to be injected into the bloodstream?

Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

A deficit in the ability to recognize faces is called ___________.

Prosopagnosia

If a patient has frontal lobe lesions, which task are they most likely to be impaired on?

Recency Memory

What are the cells in the eye that form an outer layer of the retinal tissue and receive signals from bipolar cells; whose axons bundle together to form the optic nerve leaving the eye?

Retinal Ganglion Cells (RGCs)

Receptors in the skin that are receptive to temperature are called:

Ruffini corpuscles

The famous Sternberg memory task demonstrates that human memory comparison unfolds in a ________ process, not in a ________ process.

SERIAL PARALLEL

While cutting and singing, Brian's attention was momentarily interrupted by loud beeping from the timer on the microwave. This event probably triggered activity in his _____________, which appears to provide an alert that acts like a circuit breaker, interrupting the current attentional focus that is established by the goal-directed dorsal network.

Temporal Parietal Junction (TPJ)

What is the primary function of Schwann's cells, and where are they primarily located?

They form myelin in the Peripheral Nervous System (PNS)

Which neuroscience technique allows us to non-invasively create "fake lesions" in a research participant by targeting an area of cortex and disrupting neural firing?

Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)

If you train an organism to display a conditioned fear response to a conditioned stimulus, and then give the organism an additional stimulus that is normally unconditioned and produces the same reaction, the response is potentiated.

True

In the brain, the further you get away from the primary auditory cortex (A1), you find INCREASED sensitivity to speech sounds.

True

It is now possible to use fMRI to decode some of the visual content of dreams.

True

Single-cell recordings from a population of neurons in the dorsal premotor cortex of monkeys demonstrate preferred movement direction, and when the two cues appear, the firing rate increases in neurons tuned to both targets before an action is initiated. This provides support for the Affordance Competition Hypothesis: the idea that action selection and specification occur simultaneously within an interactive neural network & evolve continuously from planning to execution.

True

The Delayed Non-Match-To-Sample task demonstrates that the amygdalae are not necessary for episodic memory.

True

The neural processing of racial perception cues in the amygdala disappears when category cues that are stronger or more salient than race are present.

True

What is the dimension of emotion that varies based on how pleasant (positive) or unpleasant (negative) an experience is?

Valence

When scanning a nearby bowl of for any green, unripe tomatoes among mostly red ones, Brian is performing ___________, and when his focal spatial attention is directed to the location of a green one, there are amplitude modulations in his early visual cortex.

Visual Search

While cutting vegetables for dinner, Brian was singing along to loud music on his stereo. While doing so, he had no problem maintaining his gaze on the task at hand. He was demonstrating ______________.

Voluntary Spatial Attention

A patient with a language disorder is unable to repeat words spoken by another person, fails to demonstrate comprehension of others' speech, but uses fluent (but non-sensical) speech themselves. This patient likely has which form of aphasia?

Wernicke's Aphasia

The clinical diagnosis for patients who are unable to judge whether two images that present different views of the same object really are of the same object is called _____________.

apperceptive agnosia

When we view an object such as a dog, it may be real, drawing, statue, or an outline made of just dots. The insensitivity to the specific visual cues that define an object is known as ____________.

cue invariance

Evidence from WHICH MEASUREMENT TECHNOLOGY demonstrates the presence of neural mechanisms for face perception in the human fusiform gyrus?

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)

What are the 3 sections of the corpus callosum?

genu, body, splenium

What is the condition, resulting from destruction of the V1 area in one hemisphere, in which a patient is unaware of any visual stimulation presented in the side of space contralateral to the lesion?

hemianopia

What form of memory is a super-fast-decaying store of visual information?

iconic memory

The principle of dynamic polarization means that some parts of a neuron are responsible for taking information in, while others for sending it out. What part of the neuron receives input? What part is responsible for output?

input = dendrites output = axon / axon terminal / axon terminal button

One reason proposed for the categorically selective ability of some patients with visual agnosia to recognize inanimate objects (but not animate objects) is that visual knowledge of inanimate objects is developed through physical interactions and memory, This implies that we have ______________ (2 words) in the mind/brain that are unlikely to exist for most living things.

kinesthetic codes

When a person identifies an object from multiple viewpoints, we see a repetition suppression effect in the ____________, giving support to the view-invariant frame of reference for object recognition.

left fusiform area

Light waves that enter the eye are bent by the ___________, whereby they are broadcast upside down and backward across the ______________.

lens and cornea, retina

The Subsequent Memory Paradigm demonstrates:

neural correlates of encoding

The ability to recognize an object (or a person) regardless of it appearing in a different context, appearing with different features, from a different perspective, or under different lighting is known as _______________

object constancy

What is the name of the neurological syndrome in which patients have great difficulty using visual information to guide their actions even though the ability to recognize objects is unimpaired?

optic ataxia

Which of the following areas of the brain has been most reliably know to show activity when a person is experiencing anger?

orbitofrontal cortex

What is the structure in the midbrain that is known as the "sensory hub" or the "gateway to the cortex" through which almost all sensory information is routed?

thalamus

What is the part of a section of spinal cord that carries motor commands from the brain to the muscles?

ventral horn

The idea that recognition does not happen by simple analysis of the stimulus information, but instead the perceptual system extracts structural information about the components (features) of an object and the relationship between them is called the _______________ frame of reference.

view invariant