UCSD PSYC 2- Final

In classical conditioning, a novel stimulus is paired before a(n) ______, which eventually provokes a(n) ____.

Unconditioned stimulus, conditioned response

What neurotransmitter(s) are involved in the consolidation of flashbulb memories into long-term memory?

Norepinephrine and Dopamine

In addition to memory loss, a patient is observed to frequently confabulate responses when interviewed by her neuropsychologist. What is her likely diagnosis?

Korsakoff's syndrome

What are place cells?

Neurons tuned to a actual or imagined spatial location

Which of the following is an example of working memory?

At a party, you try to remember a stranger's name while holding a conversation

How can well tell that the striatum plays a role in learning?

Patients with Parkinson's disease (who have damage to the striatum) are unable to learn habits or what probably will or will not happen under certain circumstances without forming explicit memories

Habituation in sea slug gill withdrawal occurs by ___.

Decreased neurotransmitters release at the sensory-motor synapse

What receptor allows sodium into the cell, depolarizing it enough to unblock the NMDA receptor in long-term potentiation

AMPA

What molecule blocks the calcium channel of NMDA receptors that must be released for long term potentiation to occur?

Magnesium

Why was HM able to form implicit memories, but not remember the experience?

The hippocampus is required to create and form declarative, but not implicit, memories

What evidence led Lashley to draw his conclusion of equipotentiality and mass action?

Impairment of learning depended on the amount of cortical damage rather than the location

What assumption did Lashley make that later researchers rejected?

Any convenient example of learning will reveal the mechanisms that apply to all learning

Why did Thompson conclude that eyeblink conditioning depends on the lateral interpositus nucleus, instead of the red nucleus?

Inactivating the red nucleus suppressed responses, but did not prevent learning

What was the original concept of consolidation?

The time necessary to synthesize proteins

Emotional arousal facilitates consolidation by what means?

Increased release of norepinephrine, epinephrine, and cortisol

How does the cortex store a working memory?

Occasional bursts of gamma oscillations

Which of the following would probably prevent most cases of Korsakoff's syndrome?

Require all alcoholic beverages to be fortified with vitamins

What type of memory do patients with Alzheimer's retain better than other types?

Procedural memory better than of facts

Currently, what seems the most promising explanation for infant amnesia?

More new hippocampal neurons in infants than in older individuals

What is anterograde amnesia?

Inability to form new memories

What was the status of working memory in patient H.M. ?

His working memory seemed normal unless he was distracted

Which of the following was most severely impaired in patient H.M. ?

Episodic memory

Why is it unsurprising that H. M. had intact procedural memory?

Procedural memory depends on the striatum, not the hippocampus

Why type of memory do the radial maze and Morris water maze test?

Spatial memory

Evidence that rats can imagine the future came from recordings from what type of cell?

Place cells

Why are certain cells in the entorhinal cortex called grid cells?

They respond to locations distributed in a hexagonal grid.

The striatum is primarily responsible for which type of learning?

Gradually learning habits

Someone with semantic dementia has lost which of the following?

Factual knowledge

What is true about a Hebbian synapse?

It strengthens if its activity is associated with an action potential in the postsynaptic cell.

Cells that fire together wire together, but only if which of the following?

The cells are close together

Why is Aplysia an appealing animal for studies of the physiology of learning?

It has relatively few neurons, and they are the same from one individual to another

What is responsible for habituation in Aplysia?

A change at a synapse

What is meant by the "cooperativity" of LTP?

LTP is greater if two inputs are active together

What excites NMDA receptors?

The transmitter glutamate, but only if the membrane is depolarized

During the formation of LTP, which ions enter at the NMDA receptors?

Calcium and sodium

What does CaMKII do?

It releases a protein that alters the expression of several genes?

How effective is Ginkgo biloba for improving memory?

Possible benefits for older people who take the herb for months

In what way, if any, does the human brain exceed those of all other species?

Humans have a larger number of neurons

Of the following, which correlates most strongly with intelligence?

The surface area of the cerebral cortex

In which way are men's and women's brains most similar?

Number of neurons

What happens to the heritability of intelligence, as people grow older?

It increases

the heritability of intelligence appears to be lowest under which of these conditions

An impoverished environment

When researchers selectively bred guppies for large brains, which of these occurred?

The guppies decreased their reproduction

Which of these enabled humans to evolve a larger brain?

Learning to cook food

What brain structure in the so-called "reward pathway" is felt to play a significant role in addiction?

Nucleus accumbens

In a research study with rats examining the effects of withdrawal on addiction, which group of rats pressed the lever the most in hopes of getting heroin?

The rats who had access to heroin when they went through a withdrawal period

____ is prescribed to help individuals with alcohol use disorder, while ____ is prescribed to help individuals with opiate use disorder.

Antabuse; methadone

Studies of the relationship between the serotonin transporter gene and depression in which group of people after they experience life stressors?

People with two short forms of the gene

In treatments for depressed patients, _____ work/s by blocking the reuptake of serotonin, while _____ work/s by blocking the reuptake of dopamine.

SSRIs; Bupropion

Which of the following in NOT a proposed risk factor for the development of schizophrenia?

Having a parent with a history of depression

What mechanism of action do the so-called atypical, of "second generation" antipsychotic (neuroleptic) medications use?

They have weak dopamine antagonism but strong serotonin antagonismamine

Which of the following is considered a POSITIVE symptom of schizophrenia?

Delusions

Which of the following are NOT contributing factors to the development of autism spectrum disorders?

Vaccines

A child exhibits deficits in social and emotional exchange, stereotyped behaviors/movements, resistance to change in routine, and altered reactivity to environmental stimuli. What is the most likely diagnosis

Autism spectrum disorder

Which of the following is easier for split-brain people than for people with an intact corpus callosum?

Draw two circles at different speeds at the simultaneously using their left and right hands

Which task has NOT been used to test for conscious vs. unconscious processes?

the WADA procedure

In split-brain patients, the left hemisphere serves what role for the left hand's (right hemisphere's) actions?

Acts as its interpreter

Which example best supports the notion that humans are born with a built-in mechanism for learning language?

Deaf children without formal schooling invent their own sign language and teach it to others

Mina has damage to her right hemisphere. Due to her spatial neglect, which of the following is she most likely to do?

Ignore food placed on the left side of her plate

Which of the following is one thing that baby Bonobos and two-year-old children DO NOT have in common?

Both learn food words earlier than number words

A person with Broca's aphasia would have the most trouble with what?

Speaking grammatically correct sentences

What were the finding from a study examining the role of oxytocin in love and attraction?

Oxytocin increase male participants' attraction to their partners

Which of the following is NOT behavior exhibited by people with frontotemporal dementia?

Feeling embarrassed if they trip and fall in front of a stranger

In which of the following scenarios would you perform best at the Stroop task?

If the words are in foreign language

In humans, what happens to visual information from the left visual field?

It reaches the right half of each retina, which sends messages to the right hemisphere

At the human optic chiasm, which axons cross to the opposite hemisphere?

Those from the nasal (inside) half of each retina

Under what condition can a split brain person describe something he or she sees?

After seeing it in the right visual field

When the right hemisphere reacts to something to sees, causing a behavior that the left hemisphere can feel, how does the left hemisphere react?

It invents a logical- sounding explanation

Which of these does the right hemisphere control better than the left?

Reactions to emotional stimuli

What is a likely explanation for bonobos' success at understanding speech?

The bonobos started young and learned by imitation

If humans language did not evolve from other primates' vocalizations, what else is a likely hypothesis?

Language evolved from gestures including mouth gestures

what is unusual about many people with Williams syndrome?

Good language ability despite intellectual deficiencies

The FOXP gene strongly affects what else, in addition to brain development

The jaw and throat

If someone is bilingual from the start, how does the brain represent the two languages?

Both in both hemispheres

People with Broca's aphasia are most impaired on producing and understanding which type of words?

Prepositions and conjunctions

Which of the following is characteristic of Wernicke's aphasia?

Difficult remembering names of objects

Which of the following best states the identity position regarding mind and brain?

Mental activity causes brain activity

What do the following have in common: flash suppression, backward masking, and binocular rivalry?

They prevent consciousness of a stimulus that someone would otherwise perceive.

What procedure is used in backward masking?

Researchers present a visual stimulus followed by a second, longer, stimulus.

If your left eye views red vertical stripes and your right eye views green horizontal stripes, what do you perceive?

Alternation between seeing red stripes and seeing green stripes

What happens when you are conscious of a stimulus that does not happen when the same stimulus is present without your consciousness of it?

The response to the stimulus spread to much of the brain

People are conscious of a prolonged stimulus, but not one with an extremely short presentation. What happens at an intermediate duration of presentation?

People are sometimes conscious of it and sometimes not, and stimuli after the vent can influence the outcome

What happens in the brain when people lose consciousness?

Activity in one brain does not effectively spread to other areas

Certain people in a vegetative state gave possible indication of consciousness by doing what?

Different brain activity after directions of what to imagine doing

What happens in top-down attention?

the prefrontal cortex facilitates activity in appropriate sensory areas

Suppose someone who is trying to divide a horizontal line in half picks a spot far to the right of center. This results suggests probable damage or malfunction in which part of the brain?

The right hemisphere

If someone has spatial neglect of the left side, which of these procedures, if any, would increase attention to a touch sensation on the left side?

Ask the person to look to the left during the touch sensation

During a perceptual decision, what happens in the front orienting fields?

Cells compare inputs from elsewhere to determine which side is ahead

Can rats "think about the future"? And what is the evidence?

Yes. At a choice point hippocampal place cells imagine possible routes

In a value decision, how do responses by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex differ from those of the basal ganglia?

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex adjusts more rapidly to new information

How would someone with prefrontal damage probably react on Iowa Gambling Task?

Slow to switch from a poor strategy to a better strategy

Which hypothesis best summarizes our current understanding about oxytocin?

Oxytocin increases attention toward social cues

Which of the following helps explain why people with frontotemporal dementia fail to show empathy?

They are impaired at understanding emotional expressions

Which of the following types of drug would be a strong agonist?

One with high affinity and high efficacy

The gene with the best documented effect on predisposition to alcohol abuse exerts its effect in what way?

It alters how the lvier metabolizes alcohol

What evidence demonstrates predispositions toward drug or alcohol abuse?

Siblings of someone with drug addiction also show abnormalities of brain and behavior

Genetic predisposition is most strongly evident for which type of alcohol abuser?

People with early-onset alcohol abuse

Of the following, which type of person is more likely than average to abuse alcohol?

Someone who shows little effect after moderate drinking

What is the relationship between drug abuse and dopamine?

Most abused drugs release dopamine, but not in proportion to addictive potential

What if the effect on the nucleus accumbens after repeated cocaine use?

The nucleus accumbens becomes less responsive to rewarding experiences