b&b exam 4 - study guide

Why LTM can become unstable and susceptible to alteration?

- a lot happening before and after - where false memories can happen - push for having better protocols in eye witnessing testimony

Patient H.M. (Henry Molaison)

- having multiple seizures a day - one source was right in the medial temporal lobe area around the hippocampus - doctor removed the hippocampus - successfully treated epilepsy, but left him with anterograde amnesia and minor retrograde amnesia

LTM has a vast capacity but is subject to distortion...

- not always an exact record of what happened - memory trace - doesn't degrade overtime, certain details can get mixed up and interfere with retrieval processes

Clive Wearing

- viral encephalitis - damage to the right and left temporal lobes - repeated moment of awakening --> doesn't remember writing in his journal - lost episodic memory --> can't put himself in the past or future - has semantic memory, but no conscious memory

What are the three processes involved in executive function?

1) smooth task switching between different cognitive operations 2) continual updating of the cognitive plan based on new information of the contents of working memory 3) timely inhibition of responses that would comprise the plan

voluntary attention

Attention that is consciously directed toward a stimulus.

Reflexive attention

Bottom-up - the involuntary reorienting of attention toward a sudden or important event.

What is the role of the hippocampus in memory?

Bridge between STM and LTM - an intact hippocampus is required to consolidate declarative STM into LTM's.

What may explain why H.M. still had retrograde episodic memory intact, but Clive Wearing does not?

Clive had hippocampus AND frontal lobe damage, it appears that episodic memory is stored in frontal lobe.

choice system

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex + parietal regions - what to do after the evaluation of the situation

why does the right ear advantage occur?

Due to contralateral control --> when sounds are heard in the right ear, it is passed over to the left hemisphere which is where it is processed and sent to speech systems in the same hemisphere whereas sounds in the left ear are processed by auditory cortex in the right hemisphere and is passed back to the speech systems in the left hemisphere

What is the neural mechanism in which strong emotions enhance memory formation?

Emotional event --> adrenal glands --> epinephrine/norepinephrine --> amygdala

What evidence is there that the frontal cortex is involved in executive function?

Frontal lesions may cause impaired executive function. For example: a person with executive dysfunction due to frontal lesions who is given a simple set of errands may be unable to complete them without numerous false starts, backtracking, and confusion.

What neural network is involved in consciousness?

Frontal/Parietal Network

Which region of cortex is crucial for face recognition?

Fusiform gyrus

What is the P3 effect of auditory processing?

It occurs later in the ERP and may reflect higher-order processing - late attentional selection - filtering out other information, extracting information --> using your working memory (what is being said/by who) - people with schizophrenia do not have normal P3 wave.

What does the button-pressing experiment relate to free will?

Makes people question if they actually have free will or if the brain decides for someone.

mirror tracing task

Milner: patient HM and other subjects had to trace a star in a mirror identical implicit learning: muscle memory no explicit learning: no conscious recollection of doing it, all got better with practice - evidence of motor memory

In ERP studies of normal subjects, it has been found that a semantically incorrect sentence provokes a _______ wave from _______ cortex.

N400; temporoparietal

Describe the experiment that suggests that conscious experience of intention may be felt much later than the activity of making a decision.

Participants were told to push a button while looking at letters on a screen, whenever they want to. - told to remember the letter on the screen - the fMRI showed that the participants felt the intention to press the button 5-10 seconds before they actually did.

Describe how sensory information can become a long term memory.

Sensory information is encoded into short term memory, information may be consolidated into long-term storage

What happens when a split brain patient is shown an object in their left visual field? Right visual field?

Stuff shown in our left visual field is sent to our right hemisphere, but if you have a split-brain, information cannot be sent → stuck in the right hemisphere (not production of language) It is being processed but the right hemisphere can't talk. - will be able to draw it

late selection model

Suggests that bottleneck occurs later, after substantial unconscious processing has occurred.

What is the connectionist model of aphasia?

The Wernicke's area decodes sounds and transmits info to Broca's area via the arcuate fasciculus - speaking a written word: PVC--> angular gyrus --> Wernicke's area --> Broca's area --> motor cortex - speaking a heard word: Primary auditory cortex --> Wernicke's --> Broca's --> motor cortex

What are some ways that learning and memory change synapses?

The strength of synapses in response to biochemical signals - formation of new synapse or birth of new neurons

decalrative memory

Things you know that you can tell others (facts and information acquired through learning) --> semantic and episodic

Peripheral Spatial Cueing Task

Uses a simple sensory stimulus such as light in the location to which the attention is to be drawn after a time interval - reaction time: reflexive --> flash of light - valid trial: fixation point --> unexpected stimulus --> delay --> target - invalid trial: longer reaction time --> takes longer to process

A patient speaks in a fluent manner, although her speech contains many paraphasias that make it unintelligible. She also demonstrates poor comprehension of verbal material. This patient is most likely suffering from _______ aphasia.

Wernicke's

What role may the claustrum play in consciousness?

When the claustrum was activated, it switched off consciousness - remarkable reciprocal connections with virtually every area of cortex.

How are the basal ganglia involved in learning?

When there is damage to the basal ganglia, it impairs all of the three learning skills such as sensorimotor skills, perceptual skills, and cognitive skills - involved in skill learning through repetition

auditory N1 effect

a negative deflection of the event-related potential, occurring about 100 milliseconds after stimulus presentation, that is enhanced for selectively attended auditory input compared with ignored input

delayed non-matching-to-sample task

a test of object recognition memory that requires monkeys to declare what they remember - pick up object over a well that provides a treat - has to pick up new objects that they haven't seen before. Conclusion: the severe disruption of new declarative memories in H.M. is due to both the hippocampus and nearby cortex.

brain activation when speaking and generating a word:

activations more on the left --> language areas of the brain

Wernicke's aphasia

also known as fluent aphasia - can produce language and speak, but does not make sense - is not comprehendible

Broca's aphasia

also known as non-fluent aphasia - difficulty producing speech, but can understand speech well.

Patient N.A.

amnesia due to accidental damage to the dorsomedial thalamus and mammillary bodies - has short term memory but cannot form declarative long term memories

The most striking impairment suffered by Henry Molaison (patient H.M.) was

anterograde amnesia

In early-selection models of attention, when is information filtered out?

at the level of sensory input

place cells

become active when in, or moving toward, a particular location

Auditory attention

being able to focus on a single sound in the presence of many other sounds - produces a unique pattern of electrical activity - an initial positive-going wave (P1) --> immediately followed by a larger negative- going wave (N1).

A large frontal lesion in the left hemisphere can produce _______ aphasia.

broca's

In most split-brain patients, words presented to the left visual field

cannot be repeatedly verbally

operant conditioning

change behavior by offering a reward or a punishment -- no brain region has been pinpointed

default mode network

circuit of brain regions that is active when we are reflective and inactive when we are intentionally doing something.

The _______ is an area of gray matter within the white matter of the of the forebrain, and is thought to play an important role in generating the experience of being conscious.

claustrum

Frontal/Parietal Network

consciousness depends on this network - coma patients can use mental imagery to create yes or no patterns of activity

The challenge facing researchers who seek to study the functions of the two brain hemispheres is that the hemispheres have many connections and function as one. The solution to this has been to study split-brain patients in which the _______ has been cut, thereby separating the connection between the hemispheres.

corpus callosum

Patient K.C.

could not retrieve personal memory due to damage to the cortex - unable to recall things that happened in their life - no damage to the hippocampus, but they found that it had shrunk

how does perceptual load incorporate both the early and late selection model of attention?

depending on what resources are used and when depending on the stimulus

episodic memory

detailed autobiographical memory (personal) - remembering the first day of school

perceptual load

determines how much of our resources are used

subjects can report little about the stimuli heard in the nonattended ear

dichotic presentation

subjects are asked to process two or more simultaneous stimuli

divided-attention tasks

frontal lobe injury leads to...

emotional, motor, and cognitive changes - Phineas Gage: Tamping rod went through his eye and damaged his frontal lobe - after the accident his behavior became inappropriate such as sexually, drinking, and can't hold a job

how is sign language support the motor theory?

employs the same language-related regions of the left-hemisphere

valuation system: neuroeconomics

evaluating the situation, considering what may be gained and what may be lost

The amygdala is directly involved in

fear conditioning

early selection model

filtering out occurs at the sensory level - attentional bottleneck: a filter

Patients like patient H.M. can learn to read mirror-reversed text even though they don't remember practicing it, which demonstrates that their problem is not in learning verbal material, but instead is in

form new declarative memories

Which brain area(s) is/are implicated in patient K.C.'s inability to recall autobiographical details of his life from many years before his accident?

frontal and parietal cortex

Semantic memory

generalized (factual) - knowing the capital of France

The P3 component of auditory processing is associated with

higher order cognitive processing of stimuli

Place cells, which are located in the _______, become active when an animal moves through its spatial environment or toward a particular location.

hippocampus

One of the revealing finds of neuroeconomics is that

humans are risk-averse

In infants, the left planum temporale is larger than the right, suggesting that

humans have an inborn neural mechanism for language

In the delayed non-matching-to-sample task in monkeys, the subject

identifies an unfamiliar object in a pair of objects

A viewer closely focused on a complex task, such as being asked to count how many times a group of people throw a ball back and forth, may miss other nonattended stimuli such as dancers moving through the group of people. This is due to an attentional phenomenon called

inattentional blindness

The _______ likely evolved because it prevents reflexive attention from settling on unimportant stimuli for more than an instant, a reaction that would be adaptive in animals foraging for food and/or scanning for predators.

inhibition of return

PET scans of brain activation during progressively more complex language processing tasks showed _______ in Broca's area as compared to activation during simple word repetition or reading aloud.

marked activation

brain activation when listening to words:

more left activation in the temporal lobes (auditory cortex)

brain activation when speaking words (repetition):

mostly involves motor cortices and even the cerebellum

Diminished social insight, distractibility, and emotional lability are associated with injuries to the _______ cortex.

orbitofrontal

Criticism of Connectionist Model

oversimplifies the neural mechanisms of language and furthermore modern fMRI confirms that left-hemisphere language zones are not as rigidly modular as previously believed.

Attention in which the focus coincides with the individual's sensory orientation is called

overt attention

A change in the processing of a stimulus due to prior exposure to the same (or similar) stimuli is referred to as

priming

People with conduction aphasia are unable to

repeat words or sentences

ERP (event-related potential)

reveal the time base for language processing - Semantic mistake (using incorrect word) --> N400 - Grammatical errors --> P600 - shows that it takes us longer to process grammatical errors

Brain activation when looking at words:

see most of the activation in the left occipital lobe

Knowing the meaning of word, without knowing where or when you learned it, describes _______ memory.

semantic

Radial Arm Maze

spatial location recognition Study: Rat goes in the middle, goes through the arm, gets a treat, comes out and goes into a different one - should not go into one they have already gone into -- hippocampus plays a huge role

measures reaction time to a specific target that is preceded by a cue telling the subject where it will appear

symbolic cueing task

hierarchical cognitive control

the ability to direct shorter-term actions while simultaneously keeping longer-term goals in mind - frontal cortex in executive functions

The visual P1 effect

the appearance of an enhanced, positive wave of the ERP that occurs when the stimulus is a valid cue, but not when it is invalid - huge reduction in the P1 - selectively attended visual input

associative learning

the association between two stimuli, or between a stimulus and a response

Describe the study that questions our current definition of consciousness

the coma patients that could use mental imagery to provide yes and no answers to questions.

Compared to animals placed in impoverished conditions, animals kept in enriched conditions have been found to have heavier brains, due primarily to increased thickness of

the cortex

right ear advantage

the fact that humans typically hear speech sounds more readily via the right ear

anterograde amnesia

the inability to for new memories AFTER onset of amnesia

retrograde amnesia

the loss of memories BEFORE onset of amnesia

The "hard problem of consciousness" refers to understanding

the neural processes that result in a person's unique subjective experience.

What is inhibition of return?

the relative difficulty in getting attention to move back to a recently attended location - prevented reflexive attention from settling on unimportant stimuli for more than an instant

Consistent with the motor theory of speech perception, deaf people who use American Sign Language use _______ language-related regions of the left hemisphere as hearing people who use spoken language do.

the same

neuroeconomics

the study of brain mechanisms during economic decision making --> occurs in the frontal cortex

what is the motor theory of language?

the theory that speech is perceived using the same left-hemisphere mechanisms that are used to produce complex movements that go into speech.

non-declarative memory

things you know that you can show doing (shown by performance, indicated motor response)

hard problem of consciousness

understanding brain processes that produce people's subjective experiences of consciousness - explain what sour tastes like or what the color red looks like? - impossible to do

easy problem of consciousness

understanding how particular patterns of neural activity create specific conscious experiences by reading brain activity directly from people's brains as they're having particular experiences - pattern identification/visual reconstruction

In a symbolic cuing task, _______ attention is shown to enhance processing, reducing reaction time to the stimulus, and _______ cues decrease reaction time the most.

voluntary; valid

what are some possible behavioral consequences of damage to the right hemisphere in humans?

- Facial recognition - emotional perception of language - read faces - perception of music

classical conditioning

- Pavlov dog study unconditioned stimulus, conditioned stimulus, unconditioned response, conditioned response Study: Rabbits --> play a tone --> puff of air in eye Eventually when the rabbits hear the tone, they blink which is a conditioned response --- cerebellum is involved