Cognitive Psychology Ch. 2 (Neuroscience)

What is cognitive neuroscience?

Study of the biological basic of cognition

In the 1940s, what led to physiological research in the cognitive revolution?

Major Technological Advances

What are the basic building blocks of the brain?

Neurons

What are neurons?

Cells specialized to create, receive, and transmit info in the nervous system

What is the nerve net theory?

Neurons are interconnected, allowing for continuous communication

Who is the father of modern neuroscience?

Santiago Ramon y Cajal (credited with discovering neurons that have 3 basic parts & transmit signals)

Santiago Ramon y Cajal investigated what?

Tissues of newborn animals & found they had less density (examined neurons on microscope)

What are the 3 basic parts of a neuron?

Dendrites, axon, and cell body

What is a dendrite?

Branches from cell body, receive transmission from other neurons

What is an axon?

Nerve fiber that transmits electrical signal to other neurons

What is the cell body? (Metabolic center)

Contains mechanism to keep cell alive 😱

What is the neuron doctrine?

Individual neurons are not interconnected, instead transmit signals to one another

What is action potential?

Nerve impulse, electrochemical signal that travels down the axon

What is resting potential?

the state of the neuron when not firing a neural impulse

What is depolarization?

Electrical charge exceeds -55 mil threshold 😝

What are neurotransmitters

chemical messengers

What releases neurotransmitters into synapse?

Action potential in axons

What are the TWO key features for info processing

Summation & all or none principle

What is summation?

Threshold for excitation summed across time & space

What is the all or none principle?

Action potentials have 1 strength, they response completely or not at all 🚫

What is the principle of neural representation?

everything a person experiences is based on representations in the person's nervous system

What is specificity coding?

representation of a specific stimulus by firing patterns of a single neuron

What are feature detectors? 👀

Neurons that respond best to a specific stimulus

where does specificity coding exist?

This coding exists in primary sensory areas of the brain

What is distributed coding?

Multiple cells fire in response to a stimulus, more than one neuron

What is population coding?

Represents stimulus by firing patterns across many neurons

What is sparse coding?

representation of a stimulus by a pattern of firing only a small group of neurons

What is hierarchal processing? 👑

specificity coding in lower-level (primary senses), distributed coding in higher-level (association cortex) brain regions

What is Localization of Function

specific functions are served by specific areas of the brain

What is the primary sensory cortex (involved in sensory processing)

Receives input from senses via thalamus (EXCEPT olfactory 👃)

What production is Broca's area involved in?

Language

What does Wernicke's area control?

language comprehension

What is broca's aphasia?

Damage to the Broca's area causing issues with language production

What is Wernicke's Aphasia?

Damage to the Wernicke's area causing issues with language COMPREHENSION!!!

What is prosopagnosia? (Involved in face processing)

Damage to the temporal lobe resulting in "face blindness"

What is face blindness (prosopagnosia)?

Inability to recognize human faces (face card decline 🚫💳)

What are neural networks?

interconnected areas of the brain that communicate with each other

What is an fMRI?

functional magnetic resonance imaging

- This can look at both structures & which are active by measuring amounts of oxygenated vs deoxgenated blood in the brain.

Difference between MRI & fMRI

MRI takes a single image

fMRI takes multiple images quickly

"BOLD" signal in fMRI

Blood Oxygenated-Level Dependent