quiz #2

Cognitive neuroscience

its what helps locate a specific function and helps provide neural representations of information

neurons

building blocks of the brain and nervous system

how many parts are a neuron made up of

Three: dendrite, cell body, axon

dendrite (tree)

Its function is to receive messages along with processing, integrating, and transmitting these signals.

Soma

AKA cell body. Its function is to keep the cell alive. So it works alongside dendrites as it decides whether to send a message onward to the axon for transmission.

Axon

Transports sends messages

What are the three stages of information transmission?

Resting potential, action potential, neurotransmitters

Resting potential

Neuron at rest

Action potential

change in electrical charge of a neuron during information transmission

Neurotransmitters

Chemicals released by one neuron to transmit info to other nueorns

Synapse

a junction where a neuron transmits an electrical or chemical signal to another neuron or target cell

Acetylcholine

memory functions

lack relates to alzheimer’s

norepinephrine

memory retrieval and attention

alertness

Dopamine

Motivation and impulse control

Serotonin

Attention, mood, eating behavior

Glutamate

LEARNING and memory

Glial Cells (glue)

Supports and protects for neurons during the transmission of information.

Astrocytes (star shaped)

immune functions, provide energy, info processing

Oligodendrocytes

creates myelin known as the energizers and insulators

What is myelin

A protective fatty substance that forms an insulating layer around nerve fibers or axons. it helps facilitate electrical signals quickly and efficiently.

What are the two forms of neural communication?

• electrical transmission

• chemical transmission

basis of synaptic communication, the mechanism which neurons pass signals to other cells.

What role does myelin play?

Thick substance that speeds up electrical signals, protects and insulates nerves, supports nerve health, and affects brain function

Top-down processing

Using prior knowledge to understand new sensory information it receives.

• not from scratch but applying whats already understood

Bottom up processing

perceptual processing that starts with our senses so it goes through a process up to be interpreted.

Gestalt principles

A set of rules that describe how our brains naturally organize and interpret visual info into something meaningful, unified wholes

• whole is different from the sum of its parts

Helmholtz unconscious inference

Our perceptions are not accurate reflections of the sensory data received by our eyes. The brain unconsciously makes assumptions and inferences based on prior experiences and knowledge.—— happens so quickly it is unnoticed

Bayesian inference

A statistical method for updating your beliefs about a hypothesis as new evidence becomes available. its a framework that combines existing knowledge with observed data—— educated guess

Dorsal pathway (PHD)

Visual processing stream from the occipital lobe to the parietal cortex. Known as the where or how pathway so it helps with spatial location an motion.

whats an example of a doral pathway?

Visually-based actions like grabbing

ventral pathway

A visual processing stream that travels from the occipital lobe to the inferior temporal cortex. Its referred to as the what pathway and helps identify what is being looked at.

What an example of the ventral pathway

distinguishing objects, shapes, colors and textures

What does it signify to perceive

to recognize and identify it then later processes it and interpret it.

size constancy

an object thats further away looks smaller than the one closer in distance

inverse projection problem

Our visual system faces a challenge of interpreting the 3D world from the 2D image projected onto the retina.

Why is our vision considered an inverse problem?

Our vision must work from our 2D vision and then determine the causes which would be the 3D objects and environment.—- ex. distance

Viewpoint invariance

An object being identified as the same object despite different angles

Perceptual constancy

An example of top-down processing which helps perceive familiar objects as having stable properties like shape, size, and color despite the variations in the sensory info we receive from them.—— helps us navigate and interpret the world accurately under changing conditions.

whats an example of perceptual constancy?

A door is perceived as a rectangle whether it is open or closed, even though the retinal image of an open door is a trapezoid.

whats an example of viewpoint invariance

recognizing an object like a car from different angles

How does top-down processing help us in our communication?

It helps divide the continuous stream of sounds into recognizable words

Gestalt psychologists argued that we do not perceive objects
by identifying parts. Rather, we perceive each object as a

unit

Gestalt laws of orginzation

In basics its grouping

Perceptual orginzation

the way elements are grouped together to create a larger object

Perception is _____ due solely to the operation of feature detectors!

not

How many gestalt principles are there?

seven

Figure Ground

The figure (object) vs. ground (ground)

Closure

close some incomplete shapes and patterns

Proximity or nearness

Group elements are placed close together

Similarity

Group objects look similar to one another

Good continuation (continuity)

the edge of one shape will continue into the space and meet up with other shapes

Common fate

Entities that move together, are grouped together

Pragnanz (similarity)

The resulting structure is as simple as possible

Organizations will tend to favor:

simple, symmetric, regular

Oblique effect

Humans are better at perceiving and recognizing horizontal and vertical lines between diagonal (oblique) lines

Light-from-above heuristics

Its a top-down processes and is based on that most light sources in our environment come from overhead.

what kind of heuristic is Light-from-above

physical regularities

what kind of heuristic is Oblique effect

physical regularities

scene schema

Mental framework that represents knowledge about what a particular scene contains and how its elements are arranged.

What is an example of scene schema

When you enter a familiar setting, such as a kitchen, your brain uses your kitchen schema to anticipate where to find common objects like a stove or sink. This allows you to direct your attention efficiently and ignore irrelevant areas, like the ceiling or a blank wall

what kind of heuristic is scene schema

Semantic regularities

Experience-dependent plasticity

The ability of the brain to adapt and reorganize its neural connections in response to unique, individual learning experiences throughout a persons life.

What was the Blakemore & Cooper (1970) study

Study done on newborn kittens while their visual cortex was developing. They were kept in complete darkness and then divided into two groups one vertical only group and then horizontal only group. Lastly they were placed in a normal well-lit room with various objects.

What were the implications of Blakemore & Cooper (1970)

Showed the importance of neuroplasticity and that early experiences can change the brains organization with significant and lasting perceptual consequences.

Greebles

omputer-generated, artificial objects used in psychology experiments to study how people learn to recognize novel items and how visual expertise affects the brain

what were the results of greebles

The experiments demonstrated that, with enough expertise, participants process Greebles in a holistic (whole-object) manner, similar to how humans naturally process faces. Novices, by contrast, tend to recognize objects based on individual parts.

expertise hypothesis

argues that specialized visual processing is not an innate function for faces alone but rather develops with experience and training

Face-fusiform area (FFA)

a region of the brain, specifically located in the fusiform gyrus in the temporal lobe, that is highly active when viewing and identifying faces

Agnosia

inability to recognize objects, people, or sounds using one or more of the senses.

What pathway is agnosia related to?

ventral pathway

Ataxia

neurological symptom or condition characterized by a lack of muscle coordination that results in clumsy, awkward, and unsteady movements

What pathway is Ataxia related to?

Dorsal pathway

Removal of temporal lobe

Failure on object discrimination task

Removal of parietal lobe

Failure on landmark discrimination task

Ungeleider & Mishkin (1982)

trained monkeys to perform two distinct visual tasks, then surgically removed different parts of their brains to observe the effects on performance.

What happened during the Object discrimination tasks in Ungeleider & Mishkin (1982)

Monkeys with lesions in the temporal lobe, which corresponds to the ventral pathway, were severely impaired at this task.

What happened during the Landmark discrimination tasks in Ungeleider & Mishkin (1982)

Monkeys with lesions in the parietal lobe, which corresponds to the dorsal pathway, were severely impaired at this task. 

Basal Ganglia

Controls, regulates, and coordinates voluntary movements

learning

Limbic system

It handles emotion, memory, and motivation

What are two parts of the limbic system?

amygdala and hippocampus

Amygdala

the fear and anger zone

hippocampus

necessary for memory generation

Thalamus

Its a sensory relay so all the sense information except for smell goes through here

Hypothalamus

Regulates the four fs of survival

Cerebral cortex

white matter and gray matter

What are the main divisions of the brain

1. frontal lobe

2. parietal lobe

3. occipital lobe

4. temporal lobe

frontal lobe

executive control center because it governs many of the higher-level cognitive functions that enable goal-directed behavior, social understanding, and personality—- think of the movie inside out

Parietal lobe

Interprets sensory info to form a coherent picture of our surroundings and our body's position within it.

Occipital lobe

process and interpret visual info from the eyes making it the brains main visual processing center.

Temporal lobe

a critical hub for processing sensory information, particularly auditory stimuli, and for crucial higher-level functions like memory, language, and emotion. 

Brodmann’s Areas

a system for dividing the cerebral cortex into distinct regions based on their cytoarchitecture, or the cellular composition and arrangement of brain tissue

What types of information do the brain (cells) process?

The neurons and glia processes basic sensory data to complex cognitive and emotional states

Everything a person experiences is based on representations in the person’s
nervous system

true

Neural representation

Information that the brain (or neurons) carries about the organism’s
environment

Hubel and Wiesel (1959)

Working with anesthetized cats, they discovered that neurons in the visual cortex are highly specialized, responding only to specific types of visual stimuli.

what were the findings of the study done by Hubel and Wiesel (1959)

• "simple cells," which respond strongly to lines or edges of a specific orientation and position in the receptive field.

• "complex cells," which also prefer oriented stimuli but are less picky about the position of the stimulus within the receptive field

• The simple cells integrate information from multiple retinal cells, and then complex cells integrate information from multiple simple cells.

Hubel and Wiesel (1959) concluded that visual system processes are

hierarchal

Hubel and Wiesel (1959) research led to what later studies

groundwork for later studies describing the brains what and where visual processing pathways.

Specificity coding

the idea that your brain has one single, special nerve cell—like a "light switch"—for each specific thing you know

The grandmother cell concept

neuron that would fire exclusively in response to seeing or hearing one's grandmother

Population coding

Your brain uses a team of nerve cells to recognize and represent things