Cognitive Neuroscience, Perception, Pattern Recognition, and Imagery Flashcards

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering terms, definitions, and concepts from lecture notes on cognitive neuroscience, visual streams, perception, pattern recognition, and mental imagery.

Subcortical Structures

Brain structures located underneath the cortex that are evolutionarily older, including the limbic system and basal ganglia, responsible for primitive regulation in the center of the brain.

Parallel Processing

The brain's processing approach where ~86 billion neurons and over 100 trillion connections (synapses) signal simultaneously in a distributed manner rather than serially.

Receptive Field

The spatial area to which a specific neuron will respond.

Coarse Coding

Also called population coding, a neural coding scheme with overlapping ('sloppy') receptive fields that increases sensitivity compared to fine coding with distinct fields.

Frontal Lobe

Brain lobe specialized for planning and reasoning, inhibition, motor mapping, and containing Broca's area; damage can cause perseveration and mimicking.

Temporal Lobe

Brain lobe specialized for sound memories, speech comprehension (Wernicke's area), and visual object identification ('what' system).

Parietal Lobe

Brain lobe housing association cortex that links visual info to meaning and contains the 'where/how' stream; damage impairs integration of parts into wholes.

Occipital Lobe

Brain lobe containing the primary visual cortex and visual topographic map.

Cerebellum

Brain structure responsible for motor control, adjustment, refinement, balance, and posture.

Limbic System

Subcortical brain system involved in emotion regulation and the 'Four Fs' (feeding, fighting, fleeing, mating).

Basal Ganglia

Subcortical brain nuclei involved in action selection and habit formation.

Sensory Homunculus

A visual body map in the brain scaled according to the cortical area devoted to each body region, which varies by species.

Super-releaser

An artificial stimulus that triggers greater neural responding than the natural stimulus.

Broca's Aphasia

An expressive language disorder caused by frontal lobe lesion, characterized by halted but contentful speech and impaired syntactical processing.

Wernicke's Aphasia

A speech comprehension disorder caused by temporal lobe lesion, resulting in fluent but contentless 'word salad'.

Anterograde Amnesia

The inability to create new memories after an injury, as demonstrated by patient H.M.

Ventral Stream

The 'what' visual pathway running from the occipital to the temporal lobe; slow, detail-oriented, and specialized for object recognition and identification.

Dorsal Stream

The 'where/how' visual pathway running from the occipital to the parietal lobe; quick, motion-sensitive, and used for locating objects relative to self and visually guided behavior.

Double Dissociation

A research finding where two subject groups display opposite strengths on two distinct tasks, providing strong evidence for separate functional modules.

Agnosia

Inability to recognize objects or interpret visual images despite intact low-level vision, general intellect, and language abilities.

Bottom-Up Perception

Perceptual processing driven directly by physical characteristics of the stimulus (realism).

Top-Down Perception

Perceptual processing where knowledge, expectations, or thoughts actively influence perception (constructivism).

McGurk Effect

A perceptual phenomenon demonstrating that auditory speech perception depends on visual cues from the speaker's face.

Word Superiority Effect

The phenomenon where target letters are identified faster and more accurately when embedded within words than when presented alone or in nonwords.

Apparent Motion

Perceived movement generated by sequentially presented still frames, based on the assumption that objects across frames are identical entities that moved.

Correspondence Problem

The visual system's challenge of determining which specific objects in one image frame correspond to objects in a subsequent frame.

Ternus Effect

An apparent motion effect where a long inter-frame pause leads to globally coherent motion, whereas a short pause leads to local motion judgments.

Lateral Inhibition

A process where active neighboring neurons suppress one another, enhancing visual contrast and edge detection.

Ebbinghaus Illusion

A perceptual illusion where central shapes are evaluated relative to surrounding shapes, illustrating that human vision acts as a contrast detector.

Cognitive Impenetrability

The feature of perceptual processing remaining resistant to conscious strategies and explicit knowledge, indicating isolated perceptual modules.

Ponzo Illusion

An illusion in which identical lines placed between converging lines appear different in size due to depth cues from a 3-D visual assumption.

Tau Effect

A tactile illusion where the perceived distance between sequential skin taps depends on the temporal interval between them, assuming constant motion velocity ($D = RT$).

Template Model

A pattern recognition model asserting that inputs are recognized by matching them against holistic, photograph-like templates stored in memory.

Feature Analysis

A pattern recognition model proposing that visual inputs are recognized by identifying and combining component feature parts.

Pandemonium Model

Selfridge's (1959) pattern recognition model utilizing image, feature, cognitive, and decision 'demons' working hierarchically.

Interactive Activation Model

McClelland & Rumelhart's (1981) model feature-letter-word network with bidirectional connections, used to explain the word superiority effect.

Simple Search

Visual search for single features conducted in parallel, resulting in reaction times that remain flat regardless of distractor count.

Conjunctive Search

Visual search requiring combination of multiple features, which demands serial movement of attention and shows increased reaction time with larger array sizes.

Illusory Conjunctions

Perceptual errors occurring when rapid presentation prevents attention from binding features, causing features to combine incorrectly.

Geon Theory

Biederman's structural analysis theory proposing that objects are recognized by 36 primitive geometric components (geons) and their structural relations.

Reality Monitoring

The cognitive ability to distinguish mental images from actual visual presentations, which can fail when frequent imaginings are misidentified as real events.

Resistance to Reinterpretation

The property of mental images being difficult to reinterpret in novel ways because an image already incorporates a specific perceptual interpretation.

Cortex vs. subcortical

 Cortex is a vocab term on the slides. Subcortical: limbic system is 'underneath the cortex; evolutionarily older'; basal ganglia are 'also subcortical brain nuclei.' More primitive regulation is in the center. 

Sulcus / gyrus

A sulcus is a groove or indentation on the brain's surface, while a gyrus is a raised ridge.

Grey matter

• Composed mainly of neuronal cell bodies.

• Located primarily in the outer cortex of the brain.

• Involved in processing information, including sensory perception, muscle control, and memory.

• Volume tends to decline slowly with age, particularly in areas related to memory and executive functions

white matter

• Made up of myelinated axons, which facilitate communication between different brain regions.

• Found deeper within the brain, surrounding the gray matter.

• Prone to wear and tear, leading to conditions like white matter disease, which can affect cognitive functions and balance.

• Plays a crucial role in connecting various parts of the nervous system

firing rate

refers to the mean frequency at which neurons or motor units activate, typically measured as the number of action potentials generated per unit time.

10 ms vs. 250 ms

10 msec per neuron; face recognition in 250 msec.

Parallel processing

— The brain is (largely) parallel and distributed, not serial: ~86 billion neurons, over 100 trillion connections (synapses), many neurons signaling simultaneously.

Population coding

 Coarse coding is also called 'population coding.' The nervous system is MORE sensitive because neurons have overlapping 'sloppy' receptive fields.

 Müller-Lyer

Case study of cognitive impenetrability (figure: two lines with arrow-shaped fins).