Psychology 125 Developing Brain Midterm 2

Common source of confusion: test instructions vs. memory processes. We can label a task as explicit or implicit, but we shouldn't assume that this task only engages declarative or non-declarative memory. True or false?

TRUE

Face recognition develops sloooooowwwwllyyy. Expertise continues to be honed through our 20's & early 30s! TRUE OR FALSE?

TRUE

Face selectivity in the brain increases from infancy through childhood - likely as a result of lots of experience discriminating faces. TRUE OR FALSE?

TRUE

Faces appear to be a special class of stimuli, processed differently from other complex visual stimuli - by adults, anyway.TRUE OR FALSE?

TRUE

Immaturity is due both to the fact that the sensory apparati are still developing (e.g. cells in the retina) and the fact that the brain is still developing & garnering experience. TRUE OR FALSE?

TRUE

Infants are attracted to faces long before their vision is fully developed - perhaps based on subcortical route. TRUE OR FALSE?

TRUE

REMEMBER: RIGHT VISUAL CORTEX IS REPRESENTING LEFT SIDE OF SPACE! vice versa. TRUE OR FALSE?

TRUE

There are parts of the brain, including the FFA, that respond more to faces than to other complex visual stimuli. TRUE OR FALSE?

TRUE

We have all 5 senses at birth, but none of are fully mature yet. TRUE OR FALSE?

TRUE

Color Vision?

• At 1 week, the infant can discriminate the desaturated red from gray • At 2 months, the infant can discriminate the desaturated blue from gray • by 3-4 months infants have color perception similar to adults (Adams, 1995).

What are the differences between human and animal language learners?

• Typical two-year old human child - "Look at that train Ursula bought." • Nim Chimpsky (sign language) -"Nim eat Nim eat" - "Tickle me Nim play" -"Me banana you banana me you give" -"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you"

How do you measure an infant's vision?

• Visual acuity is defined as the smallest pattern that can distinguished dependably • Infants prefer to look at patterned stimuli instead of plain, non-patterned stimuli

Arcuate fasciculus?

-Important white matter tract -Connects language regions in the temporal and frontal lobes -Present in infancy, and already stronger in the left hemisphere

Ventral pathway?

- translating sounds into meanings -important for word learning?

Fusiform Face Area (FFA)?

-A face-selective region discovered in the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe -Person had a stroke in the FFA region of the brain and they have a problem recognizing faces but not other objects they now have prosopagnosic -Suggests that FFA is necessary for face recognition but not object recognition -FFA was not identified in the group of 5-8-year-olds,maybe it was too small & variable in location to be observed when averaged across the group -Small number of voxels translating to a small number of cells thats important for face processing in children and then that area gets larger over development true for faces but not other objects

Retina?

-A newborn's rods are fairly mature, making it possible to see black & white shapes, but the cones, which are important for seeing details & for color vision, are not -retina a bunch of cells in the back of the eyeball that represents the visual world -not mature at birth -cones are not mature yet

Hypothesis: infants have two memory systems?

-An early-developing system that corresponds to non-declarative memory (spared following hippocampal damage) that is available to infants from birth -A later-developing system that corresponds to declarative memory (impaired following hippocampal damage) that is available [starts to come online?] in the latter part of an infant's first year

Hem?

-An important signaling center for hippocampal development -Morphogens and transcription factors define the position of the hem at the future site of the hippocampus. -The hem expresses morphogen that activates transcription factors in concentration gradient -> development of sub-areas of hippocampus -In vitro studies: if tissue from additional hems are transplanted into the structure, more than one hippocampus develops!

How good is animal "language"?

-Apes' sign language was a very coarse approximation of real American Sign Language -Vocabulary estimated at 25 - 125 "words" -Jane Goodall remarked that many of the signs were also seen in chimps in the wild -Bonobos might be better than common chimps

What is reflexive process of attention?

-At times the attention is diverted towards some other activity without the conscious effort, may be against the will of the individual -You're at a party you hear your name and you orient to that -Talking to someone but focusing on what someone else is saying -or "bottom-up", or exogenous -look at center of screen and then flash a stimulus your eyes are going to gravitate to that (really cant help it)

Study: episodic memory? (Bauer)

-Baseline: infant plays with object (complex object) -Encoding: experimenter demonstrates action sequence (press this, pull the leiver) -Retrieval: experimenter returns object to infant either: - Immediately - After a 2-week delay -Measure of memory: # of actions produced, and # in the right order RESULTS: When tested immediately they had higher results -evidence of detail recollection

Why do we have so few episodic memories from the first years of life?

-Because the hippocampus is not yet functional? Probably not - Infants can form episodic-like memories by 6 months of age -But, continued hippocampal neurogenesis after birth means that new cells will branch out & make new connections and will probably disrupt existing networks, leading to rapid forgetting. (as hippocampus is being remodeled they're forgetting things)

Development of attention from 3-6 months?

-Birth to 3 months: Visual attention is reflexively drawn to salient features of the environment -3-6 months: Infants gain voluntary control of visual fixation and scanning. Begin to focus on relevant features of objects, people, events - but easily distracted -6 months on: Better able to inhibit distraction and maintain selective attention. This ability continues to improve throughout childhood and into adolescence.

Dual-route hypothesis STUDY?

-Builds on the 'dual-route' hypothesis of face processing in adults, inspired by the observation of patients with "blindsight" -Technically blind as a result of damage to visual cortex, but can nonetheless guess quite accurately where they saw a stimulus appear on the screen -May even subconsciously distinguish fearful vs. happy faces, and btwn direct and averted eye gaze (they see shadows) -This work in patients pointed to an alternate visual pathway that does not pass through visual cortex -you could have cortical blindness (being blind) studies done when they see if they can see or feel when someone/ something is on their left and right or they can tell when someone is happy or sad baed on faces -amygala is active when something is looking towards you -The studies done on these individuals showed that theres not just one visual pathway that involves the visual cortex which in these patients is not functional, there must be something else

Non-declarative memory in infancy study for classical conditioning?

-Classical conditioning study: testing whether sleeping infants can learn to associate two events (tone & airpuff)(usually when you someone blows in your eye its very unpleasant, and you'll cringe before) -Speakers in the pillows -Air puff tube over right eyelid -EEG net for brain recordings & measurement of eye muscle activity -Sleep status confirmed with heart rate, respiration, & video • Experimental group: tones immediately followed by air puff (tone, airpuff,tone, airpuff) • Control group: tones and air puffs presented at random times (no sequence, you cant predict the airpuff) -Airpuff: unconditioned stimulus that produces eyeblink -Tone: conditioned stimulus (learned) Results: Average probability of an eye movement response to the tone (i.e., the conditioned stimulus) over the course of 5 trials was that the experimental groups probability kept going higher and higher and control group went lower they were not able to know when the airpuff was coming -What can we conclude?: experimental group is showing classical conditioning

First pathway in dual root?

-Cortical pathway for face identification -Involved in detailed visual analysis based on high spatial frequencies -any image ex like the mona lisa can be broken down according to its frequencies and a high spatial frequency is one where theres a very sharp edge, and sharp change from one area to another high contrast -Important for that is the "Geniculostriate pathway"

Declarative Memory?

-Declarative memory: consciously and intentionally recollected (Cohen & Squire, 1980) -Measured by explicit (i.e., direct) tests of memory -Anything you can explicitly access; you're conscious of it, you're able to describe it (episodic and semantic memory)

Cortical networks underlying Voluntary attention?

-Dorsal attention network -Exerts "top-down" influence over the activity of visual regions -Active when attention is overtly or covertly oriented in space. Also active during feature-based selective attention -Key regions: inferior parietal sulcus, Frontal Eye Fields -You're looking at a flower and i say only look at one petal, that's you're new goal (these parts are the brain are what let you do this)

How can the infant orient to face-like stimuli?

-Dual-route hypothesis

Visual cortex responds more strongly to stimuli appearing at an attended vs. unattended location? (ERP)

-ERP recording in right visual cortex while attending covertly to, or ignoring, the left visual field -Attentional effect found 70-100 ms after stimulus: P1 component -Attention speeds up processing of attended stimuli by boosting activity of relevant sensory regions -If you're told stimulus is going to go to the right and you're looking at the right and a stimulus is at the right then you're gonna be able to rapidly process that stimulus but if it's not on the right then you're gonna be slower to respond to that stimulus

How does face recognition diverge for upright vs. inverted faces?

-Experience seems to play a role, since... -Benefit for upright faces is small at age 6-8 -Improvements continue across ages 20-33 (Susilo et al., JEP:HPP, 2013) -Also: we're better at detecting faces of our own ethnicity & age

How might researchers measure selective (voluntary) attention in children?

-Flanker task -Focus on central fish or the central arrow and ignore all the distractions, press the button accordingly so if fish is pointed left press the left button and when its right press the right button -Easy in the congruent condition (which means all the stimuli are leading you towards the same response) -Contrast in the Incongruent trial you have to ignore the distractors and you end up with competition and you have to be able to suppress the interference from other distractors to get the right answer RESULTS: Around age 4-5 children aren't very good but around middle childhood you see a rapid improvement in selective attention (voluntary)

Frontal Eye Fields?

-Helps you orient to space, to do things that are relevant

Some ways to explain infantile amnesia?

-Hippocampus is not functional at all early on and thats why you don't see these kinds of declarative memories -Infants aren't capable of showing you everything they've learned because they cant speak and cant even do things like shake a mitten -Hippocampus is laying down memory traces its just that some of them are going to be disrupted by continued change in the structure of this part of the brain -The hippocampus binds multiple features of an event (where you were, what you were doing, who you were with, etc.) into a single memory trace.

Operant Conditioning?(long term memory)

-If i were to expose you to dogs over and over eventually you would show an avoidance response to them -behavior emitted by the organism is strengthened or weakened by its consequences (e.g. reward or punishment) --- i.e., shaping/altering naturally occurring behaviors.

Preferential looking to faces study Goren et al. (1975)?

-Immediately after birth experimenters went to the infant and would put this paddle and lay it infront of the baby's face at a distance where they should be able to see it in terms of contrast and they look at how much the infants will look at each of these types of patterns -one paddle is a normal face, one is a scrabbled face and one is blank -they have same features so its controlling for what? -contrast and visual complexity -infants are more interested in something thats more complex then plain -Results: the babies would go out of there way to look at a face either with their eyes or head more with normal face, less so for scrambled faces, but both much more so then a blank stimulus

Neurogenesis (infantile amnesia study) in mice?

-In infant mice (when the rate of neurogenesis is high), slowing down neurogenesis after memory formation leads to better retention -Conversely, in adult mice (when the rate of neurogenesis is low), speeding up neurogenesis after memory formation leads to worse retention

Inferior parietal sulcus?

-In the right hemisphere are really good for attention

When do structural asymmetries between the left and right hemisphere typically emerge? Why?

-In utero MRI: Structural asymmetries are already present before birth -starts to appear bigger around 23 weeks of gestation -Planum temporale is longer on the left -Superior temporal sulcus is deeper on the right -left hemisphere devoted to language

Conceptual Priming?(long term memory)

-Increased speed of processing the word 'teacher' after having heard the word 'student' recently -You can rapidly access information thats related to something that you've recently reactivated

Perceptual Priming?(long term memory)

-Increased speed of recognizing a face due to having seen the person recently

How does categorical perception change across development?

-Infants can discriminate between virtually all the phonemes used in languages, whereas adults cannot. The infant ability declines over the first year of life, as they develop proficiency with their native language(s). -based on neural commitment the more you focus on your own language you start to learn those sounds and you lose the ability to distinguish the other sounds

Testing for episodic memory in infants, delayed expression of learning? (Campanella & Rovee-Collier)

-Infants can't demonstrate what they remember if they can't perform the necessary action -You have stuffed animals and if you pull of the mitten and shake it, it makes sounds -Infants view action at 3 months of age, but don't have the motor skills to imitate it -Test memory at 6 months of age, when they are capable • At 3 months: - Infant views two specific puppets together (puppets A and B) - Infant sees the mitten taken off puppet A, shaken to ring a bell, then placed back on the hand - Multiple re-exposures to puppet A -RESULTS: • At 6 months: - Infant sees puppet B & his/her behavior is recorded... - > 3x as much mitten removal and shaking relative to naïve 6-month-old -At 6 months they take off the mitten and shake it 3 times more then they would if it was there first time seeing it -Remembering something about that time

Planum temporale?

-Key area in the temporal lobes for language comprehension -Perceiving phonemes, and different sounds and associating those sounds to meaning -Important for comprehension of speech and text -Larger in left hemisphere, even in infancy (goes deep into the cortex)

Semantic Memory?(long term memory)

-Knowledge base, you don't need to remember when you first learned about the superhero, just stuff that you know -Responsible for storing information about the world. This includes knowledge about the meaning of words, as well as general knowledge. -ex: you don't know when/ how you learned apple or student but you know what they mean and you can say what they are -ex: Being able to name different superheros & describe their superpowers

How do babies learn language acquisition?

-Learn rapidly from exposure to language, through statistical learning and social interaction

What are newborns capabilities for Vision?

-Least-well developed sense -accommodation and visual acuity limited -is sensitive to brightness -can discriminate some colors -tracks moving targets -least mature of all senses at birth -improves dramatically over the first 6 months (perfect by one year)

What is categorical perception?

-Like adults, young infants already show categorical perception: they classify sounds as one phoneme to another, with a sharp phonetic boundary between sounds. (They will turn their head when they hear a change in sound.) -Classify a sound as one thing or another not shades of grey -example: if 'ra' changes into 'la' gradually, we switch abruptly from perceiving it as 'ra' to perceiving it as 'la' -if you keep saying ra ra ra ra baby gets bored but if you say la baby gets interested and will turn and look at you again (babies can distinguish sounds better than adults)

What is working memory?

-Limited-capacity store for short-term (relevant info) maintenance of information & performing mental operations (manipulation) -Emphasizes active, goal-directed processing -Info can originate from sensory input or can be retrieved from long-term memory -"'Mental blackboard' that allows you to hold information in mind and manipulate it" (Goldman-Rakic, 1987) (sketchpad in the mind) -Central to human cognition & theories of intelligence

Age-related changes in the number of items that can be kept in Working Memory Study? (complex span task: Listening span)

-Listen to a series of sentences. Decide whether each statement is TRUE, and REMEMBER the final word of each sentence for later. -Oranges live in water YES/NO -Pigs have curly tails YES/NO -Recall the final words • water, tails -Complex span -RESULTS: Age 9 their doing doing fairly well, the development of complex task performance is delayed until they're a bit older

Age-related changes in the number of items that can be kept in Working Memory Study? (simple span tasks)

-Mean span: the average # of items that can be remembered -how many things they can keep in mind and repeat back to the experimenter, -RESULTS: theres a dramatic improvement from age 7-10 and continue improving through adolescence

Episodic memory? (long term memory)

-Memory for detailed events (typically what people think of when they think of memory) -Responsible for storing information about events (i.e. episodes) that we have experienced in our lives -Memory for past events in rich detail ex: Remembering which was the last movie you saw, and details of the experience?

When is most of neurogenesis in the Dentate Gyrus take place?

-Most of the neurogenesis (creating of new neurons) in the Dentate Gyrus (DG) takes place after birth -Neurogenesis in the DG continues to take place throughout adulthood, and is critical for the formation of new memories throughout life. -We learn new things because of the cells in DG

How do Dehaene-Lambertz and colleagues explore the functional asymmetries in preterm infants and in 2-month-olds? What can we conclude from these findings? AND RESULTS?

-Near-Infrared Spectroscopy with preterm infants -Preterm infant has immature brain development, there linguistic environment is going to be completely different from baby in the womb, it can tell us what the brain is capable of at 30 weeks of gestation -The near infrared spectroscopy is around language cortex in the left hemisphere and corresponding on the right -Babies exposed to phonemes while there sleeping -There hearing diff sounds like la la la la la then once in a while they'll hear a ra (once they hear ra the blood flow response in the left hemisphere shoots up) -left hemisphere is detecting the differences between the phonemes but not detecting difference in a voice if its going from male to female and there is no response in left hemisphere to that -same words repeated over and over again and left hemisphere isn't interested in that -Left hemisphere is specifically showing sensitivity to the linguistic input not who's speaking and the right hemisphere is not showing a difference, anytime a sound changes its active AT 2 MONTHS: Presenting them with speech sounds or music they're listening to either their mother or another babies mother RESULTS: BOLD SIGNAL: in there own mother much more activity in the left hemisphere and little in the right - lesser extent to the unknown mother, maybe they don't understand what she's saying or not paying attention -BUT THER IS NO HEMISPHERIC ASYMMETRY FOR MUSIC

How do Kuhl et al. (2003) test the importance of social interaction on phonemic learning? what are the results?

-Nine-month-old American infants being exposed to Mandarin Chinese in twelve 25-min live or televised sessions. -After exposure, infants in the Mandarin exposure groups and those in the English control groups were tested on a Mandarin phonetic contrast using the head-turn technique. -The results show phonetic learning in the live- exposure group, but no learning in the TV- or audio-only groups

Non-Declarative Memory?

-Non-declarative or procedural memory: knowledge expressed through experience-induced changes in performance -Measured by implicit (i.e., indirect) tasks that don't make reference to the initial learning experience -You know how to ride a bike great but if asked how did you learn to ride that bike or what exactly are you doing you cant really answer that -Priming, classical/ operant conditioning, habituation, procedural memory, skills, habits

Covert attention?

-Often associated with, but does not require, looking at what we're focusing on -I can be looking at you but not focusing

Dual-route hypothesis?

-On face perception has to do with the fact that although babies are born nearly blind they seem to have a preference for face like stimuli

Why is imitation of a temporal sequence of actions a better index of recall than an imitation of a set of individual actions?

-Presenting an object can elicit memory for action, but does necessarily indicate episodic memory -Memory for the temporal sequence of actions is evidence of recollection -This technique is considered a measure of episodic memory -Patients with medial temporal lobe damage show impaired performance -Performance on imitation tasks in infancy is correlation with later performance on episodic memory tasks

Why would speech comprehension be an intrinsically difficult task?

-Prosody and word accent/stress help in finding boundaries; eg. if 1st of 2 syllables stressed, hear 1 word not 2 ('lettuce' not 'let us') -Even a simple vowel is made up of multiple sounds - frequency components called formants -Broad range of different distributions of vowels -Vowels overlap so it's hard to hear the difference of O and A (overlapping distributions) -Talker: variability in size and shape of vocal tract - big differences when men, women, and children produce the same phoneme -Rate: speed of speech alters acoustic properties of phoneme -Context: sound of phoneme depends on the preceding & following phonemes -Consequence: one vowel can sound exactly like another & we need to take these variables into account to understand speech

Procedural Memory/Skill Learning?(long term memory)

-Responsible for knowing how to do things, i.e. memory of motor skills. It does not involve conscious (i.e. it's unconscious - automatic) thought and is not declarative. For example, procedural memory would involve knowledge of how to ride a bicycle or snowboarding

"Geniculostriate pathway"? classical pathway (first pathway)

-Retina to Lateral Geniculate Nucleus of the Thalamus to Primary Visual (Striate) Cortex - Essential for detailed visual perception (lines, shapes, colors, textures) -Retinotopic maps of visual field (every point in the world is represented on the retina)

How did Janet Werker test phoneme discrimination in infants and young children?

-She records Indian consonant sounds to pinpoint the critical period of development the point when babies exposed to English can no longer discriminate among Indian sounds (they had 2 different words that sounded the same but only one letter difference)

Why does she suggest that social interaction is essential for learning language?

-Social interaction is more important for language human need human to learn if you show them an online video they don't learn the language at all -baby brain as computer, human beings tell them in a sense implicitly when to turn the learning part on. "time to learn" so when they are teaching there kids to learn they need the social interaction for there brains to turn on and start working

What is Voluntary process of attention?

-Sometimes an individual will divert his attention towards a particular activity or situation deliberately -Or Selective, or "top-down") -focus on center of screen and don't move your eyes its really difficult, it requires selective focus of attention to not move your eyes to that -Called top down because it requires a control thats influencing parts of the brain that are important for lower-level visual attention

What is motherese , and how might this help with alleviating the speech comprehension problem?

-Speech register used by caretakers in most cultures -Mothers who stretch the vowels to a greater degree have infants who are better able to hear the subtle distinctions in speech -Way you speak to a baby (say aaaaaaah)

Second pathway in dual root?

-Subcortical pathway for face detection -Rapid detection based on low spatial frequencies -if you see something that looks like a snake and you jump then you say no thats a cable thats the subcortical route -infants probably use this one

Whats the most important formats for determining vowel sounds?

-The first and second formant are the most important for determining how the vowel sounds - it's common to plot the frequencies of these sounds against each other to describe the quality of a sound -different components of frequencies make up one vowel

How does the hippocampus encode and retrieve memories?

-The hippocampus binds multisensory inputs into coherent memories by coordinating the activity of multiple brain regions -Damage to the hippocampus or to its input/output pathways produces amnesia.

When is the hippocampus mostly built?

-The hippocampus is mostly built prenatally, through the action of morphogens & transcription factors -CA subfields (CA1-CA3) and dentate gyrus are key subdivisions within the hippocampus - locations & connections are highly conserved - a specific, stereotyped flow of information that is crucial for memory

"Infantile amnesia"?

-The idea that babies are unable to retrieve episodic memories -Assumption: hippocampal memory system is not yet online to support episodic memory -Loss of early memories

Complex span?

-The number of final words that can be recalled while answering all of the questions correctly

Testing visual acuity in infants?

-There are solid grey blocks and blocks with different amount of stripes -If the infant looks at the two stimuli equally long(ie both the solid and the striped) it indicates they are not able to distinguish the stripes from the solid gray

What is Contingent social feedback?

-There has to be social interaction and is contingent on what the baby is doing -STUDY: 8-10 month old -Contingent social condition:mother smiles, moves closer, & touches infant when s/he makes a sound -Non-contingent social condition: mother's responses are timed to vocalizations of another baby (by experimenter's instructions via headphones): 'yoked control' -Extinction period: no instructions given Results: Contingent feedback increased complexity of infant vocalizations (more fully formed syllables relative to overall babbling) -The more social response at the right time the more the baby would babble

What does Janet Werker suggest about the relation between the environment and language learning? (study)

-Theres a reorganization in speech perception across the first year of life so the young infant is ready to learn any human language and experience the functions to narrow that Universal set of abilities that universal discriminatory to be specific to the particular language that the baby is learning -Exposure to the environment commits some neurons to forming useful networks we become better at one language as we lose the ability to to perceive others

What does Patricia Kuhl mean when she says that infants are the "citizens of the world"?

-They hear all these distinctions and adults are limited to those that are used in our native language -When babies are a few months old they can hear every sound of all languages

What are newborns capabilities for Hearing?

-Turns in direction of sounds -less sensitive to soft sounds than an adult would be but can discriminate sounds that differ in such dimensions as loudness, direction, and frequency -Particularly responsive to speech; recognizes mothers voice -Babies start to hear pre natal around 23-27 weeks so when they are born they are used to mothers voice

Cortical networks underlying Reflexive attention?

-Ventral attention network -"Bottom-up" activation in response to stimuli in the environment (stimulus-driven) -Active when behaviorally relevant stimuli occur unexpectedly (e.g., outside current focus of attention) -[Might also be involved in voluntary control - role is debated] -Key regions: temporo-parietal junction, ventral frontal cortex

Describe the key components of Alan Baddeley's model of working memory? Visuospatial? Phonological loop?

-Visuospatial sketchpad that is your mental representation of spatial/object information (ask you where the campanile is you'd be drawing on your visual semantic memory so your knowledge base you'd be keeping it in mind) (Superior Parietal Cortex, thats part of the Dorsal Pathway for attention are more active when you're maintaining spatial information) ex: if you mentally reorganize the shopping list into categories (manipulation) -Phonological Loop (someone asks you whether gown rhymes with town, or if i ask you to repeat back to me a series of words or numbers, you have to keep them in mind then repeat them back) Typically drawing on language (left hemisphere thats more important for language are more active when you're maintaining phonological information than spatial) ex: you walk into a store and you're rehearsing what you're gonna buy (maintenance) -Central Executive which allows you to switch flexibly between these different kinds of working memory, and allows you to engage in working memory when you need to -Later he added this 3rd one which is the idea that in some cases instead of processing information you got from the environment you're actually retrieving it from episodic memory

Depth perception? how do we see 3d when our eyes are 2d?

-We have two eyes that both create a visual image of the world that slightly jitter because our eyes are far apart and that way we can see in stereo -Having 2 eyes and having the brain integrate inputs from both eyes allows us to see depth but it take time for that ability to develop

Process faces right side up or upside down?

-We process faces much better right-side up, because we perceive them holistically as a whole (if you saw a car upside down you would know which part are out of place) -Process faces as a whole and much more quickly right side up then upside down and this is used to argue that no faces are special

What were Janet Werkers findings? (study)

-We teach the baby to turn her head when the sound changes in testing we can then tell if the baby can hear the sound change because she turns her head in anticipation of the toys coming on, toys serve as a reward for correct head turn. Her head turns when she hears the sound change to look at the toys as a reward -The one year old was not able to discriminate between the two different sounds, the different in sounds is no longer there he turns his head after the toys appear -In infants/young children they had them listen to the different ka ka but when the ka sound changed to something very similar the infant was able to spot the difference and turn his/ her head, but the one year old wasn't able to

Recollection: Pattern completion?

-When one node is re-activated, the whole memory can come flooding back -Note: Hippocampus is also critical for pattern separation, since each memory trace is slightly different). This is what allows us to distinguish s(partially non-overlapping set of nodesimilar memories from one another.

Classical conditioning? (long term memory)

-When you see a stimulus thats scary over and over and you pair the things together ex:Fear & avoidance of dogs after having been bitten?

Non-Declaritive Memory Infant memory Study for operant conditioning? (Carolyn Rovee-Collier)

-Working on Ph.D., needed a way to keep her baby entertained in his crib. Attached his foot to a mobile above his bed, so that he could move it by shaking it... later, he would shake his foot even when he wasn't in the crib. Evidence of memory for the event? -Tested with an operant conditioning paradigm -Phase 1: 3-minute baseline measure of kicking when foot is tied to crib (how much baby shakes its foot) -Phase 2: 9-minute acquisition period during which baby discovers that kicking moves the mobile -Phase 3: Measure amount of kicking now that the foot is no longer tied to the mobile -Retention ratio: Kicking rate during Retention test/Kicking rate during Baseline test -Results: 6 months old remember it if tested right away and remember it 7 days later, but if only tested 14 days later theres a little drop, then 21 days later bigger drop same results for 2, and 3 month olds -2, and 3 months very little if any retention but at 6 months there more retention starts becoming more reliable -By 6 months you can see operant conditioning/ declarative memory

'Wernicke's area'?

-auditory processing, comprehension - if damaged loss of understanding the meaning of words

Dorsal pathway?

-auditory-motor integration (during language acquisition, tunes system towards comprehension & production of native language) -(if you hear a sound and try to replicate it, thats a pretty complex process, thats important for you to fine tune your own speech capabilities, that requires the Arcuate fasciculus) -If there is damage to this then you are no longer able to repeat a sound that somebody else makes

What initial evidence do we have for short-term memory of linguistic input, based on activity patterns in Broca's area?

-fMRI -3 month olds, they're listening to short sentences, and sometimes sentences are repeated and is in Broca's area (important for aspects of language comprehension) -Bold signal when sentences are presented is normal then when the sentence is repeated theres some habituation, theres some way in which theres short term memory for those sentences in some way detect that the information has been repeated (REALLY SURPRISING IN SUCH YOUNG AGE) -Frontal activation provides infants with an efficient short-term verbal memory

What is rapid statistical learning?

-involves picking up information from the environment, forming associations among stimuli that occur in a statistically predictable pattern (language: what sounds go together, which ones don't belong in out language) STUDY: -exposed 6- and 8-month-old infants to 8 sounds for ~2 minutes -Phonemes along the spectrum from 'da' to 'ta' -Bimodal hears very ta like and very da like -unimodal group hears whats in the middle -evidence of rapid statistical learning -bimodal does better

What happens to the Visual Cortex after birth?

-it's still developing after birth: -The cells are not yet segregated by type (many different cell types) -Most of the neurons are not yet coated with myelin (not long range communication) -The dendrites within visual cortex are still really short

'Broca's area'?

-speech production & speech comprehension -good for semantics, and understanding sentences - In the frontal lobe -if damaged won't understand sentences

Measuring ERP components associated with face processing (Rossion & Caharel, Vision Research, 2011)

-study in adults how quickly we respond differentially to faces versus cars (all kinds of cars like there are all kids of faces so its similarly complex) -They look at as a Control condition a scrambled face with all the same color and contrasts and scrambled cars and what they did was an ERP study so they got electrode array on the scalp and they flash up a scrambled face or car at time zero, around 100 milliseconds (super fast) after stimulus appears you get this positive going deflection that have been traced to higher visual areas, then after 170 mm you get n170 which is a negativity over an area thats been linked to the fusiform gyrus in temporal lobe -If you show an actual face already by 100 mm you're seeing greater activity then for all other kinds of stimuli -If you show a car within 100 mm were orientating more to a face than to a car -Its equally active for scrambled faces and normal faces -In the n170 is when you see a differentiation between the normal faces and normal cars more then scrambled images -P1 (source in extrastriate visual cortex): ~80-100 ms: intact and scrambled faces > intact and scrambled cars -N170 (source in fusiform gyrus): intact faces > intact cars > scrambled images -Early sensitivity to faces driven by low-level visual cues; later driven by higher-level visual discrimination.

Subcortical route? (second pathway)

-superior colliculus (SC), TO pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus (Pu), TO amygdala, TO anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) -reacting fast to something

How do we measure working memory capacity?

1) Simple WM span tasks measure the ability to maintain information (a.k.a. short-term memory) -keep things in mind over a short term which is maintenance 2)Complex WM span tasks measure the ability to maintain & manipulate information in working memory

What are newborns capabilities for Smell?

Detects a variety of odors; turns away from unpleasant ones. If breast-fed, can identify mother by the odor of her breast and underarm area

Conditioning?(long term memory)

Fear & avoidance of dogs after having been bitten?

Language acquisition involves?

Language acquisition involves neural commitment: Early in development, learners commit the brain's neural networks to patterns that reflect natural language input. There's a sensitive period for this neural commitment, during which these sounds must be heard.

What are newborns capabilities for Taste?

Prefers sweet solutions; can discriminate sweet, salty, sour, and bitter tastes

Auditory threshold?

Refers to the quietest sound that a person can hear.

What are newborns capabilities for Touch?

Responsive to touch, temperature change, and pain.

Visual Acuity?

Sharpness of vision, measured by the ability to discern letters or numbers at a given distance according to a fixed standard.

In what ways are language a uniquely human ability?

• As humans evolved, our throats got longer and our mouths got smaller -- physiological changes that enabled us to effectively shape and control sound • According to fossils, the first humans who had an anatomy capable of speech patterns appeared ~50,000 years ago