Psyc 108 UCSD Midterm 2 Study Guide

Based on the study Guide for Psyc 108 UCSD with Professor Adrian.

Attention

The process of selecting information for additional processing

Orienting

Moving attention from one place to another

Overt orientatiion

Attention moves with the eyes or body

Covert orientation

No need for physical movement

Exogenous (bottom-up)

Attention driven by external stimuli

Endogenous (top-down)

Attention driven by our internal goals

Salient

Something that stands out

Inattentional blindness

Failure to notice something because focus is elsewhere

Change blindness

Failure to notice differences from the now to earlier

Spatial Attention

Focus on a region in an area

Feature Based Attention

Focus on a specific object

Dorsal System

LIP and FEF

Ventral System

TPJ and VFC

LIP and FEF role

Eye control and multisensory salience map

TPJ and VFC role

Interrupts cognitive attention

Endogenous visual cues

Increase in dorsal activity but decrease in ventral activity

Exogenous unexpected cues

Increase in dorsal activity and increase in ventral activity

Pseudo-neglect

Focus more on the left side of space due to right hemisphere bias

What is the right hemisphere more dominant in?

Attends;

What is the left hemisphere more dominant in?

Diverts more for feature-based attention

Feature Integration Theory

Basic features are coded in parallel, where we pay attention, different features are binded together

Early Model

Filter begins after perceptual analysis

Late model

Filter begins after semantic analysis

What is the general selection model of attention?

Low level perception —> perceptual analysis —> semantic analysis —> output

Hemispatial negelct

Lesion to the brain causes low level processing of environment opposite of the hemisphere the lesion is. Therefore, they cannot access information from sight.

Short term Memory

limited memory that is currently on the mind

Long term Memory

unlimited memory that is not always consciously accessible

Declarative/Explicit Memory

Memory you are aware of that you can consciously recall

Explicit region

medial temporal lobe

Types of Declarative Memory

episodic memory and semantic memory

Episodic Memory

memory of past events

Semantic Memory

memory of facts and details

Non-declarative and Implicit Memory

unconscious memories you are unaware of

Implicit Region

basal ganglia

Types of Non-declarative memory

procedural memory: skills, conditioned responses, and perceptual memory

Retrograde Amnesia

forget memories from before injury

Anterograde amnesia

inability to form memories after the injury

Memory Consolidation

how moment to moment changes in brain activity are translated into permanent brain structure

Ribot’s Law

when earlier events are easier to recall than more recent events in amnesia due to consolidation resulting in old episodic memories becoming semantic memories

According to Ribot’s Law, what regions of the brain are more active for which type of explicit memories?

medial temporal lobe for more recent episodic memories (temporary memory), cortex for older semantic memories (long-term store)

Subsequent Memory Effect

Increasing stimuli in consolidated pathways, or repetition, strengthens or modifies built pathways

Why did Patient HM get his medial temporal lobe, including parts of his hippocampus, removed in surgery?

He attempted to recover from epilepsy

What did HM’s lesion result in?

Anterograde Amnesia

What did he lose, what does he still have?

Lost explicit memory, kept implicit memory

What are the three steps for consolidation of memory?

Selective item consolidation, item integration, and multi-item integration

Selective Item Consolidation

sleep filters out some memories for remembering and some for not

Item Integration

selected things are assigned to groups of previous information

Multi-item integration

items are semantically categorized

What are examples of some semantic categories?

gist extraction, rule extrapolation, and identifying false memories

Phoneme

smallest unit of sound that differentiates meaning, like “tree”

Morpheme

smallest unit of sound with its own meaning, like the s signifying multiple in “trees”

Aspects of language

comprehension, repetition, and production

Broca’s Aphasia

damage to posterior inferior frontal gyrus causes difficulty in finding the right words due to aggramaticism, or problems with articles and affixes, and apraxia of speech.

Wernick’s Aphasia

very poor comprehension leads to effortless word-vomit of meaningless sentences, or word salad due to damage in the superior temporal gyrus.

Conduction Aphasia

Good comprehension but intermediate production of words and poor repetition.

Global Aphasia

Damage to all three aspects of language

Foreign Accent Syndrome

People’s accent change from normal due to damage to the anterior central sulcus

N400 test shows ___

prediction theory is correct because the brain reacts to words more if they are inappropriate to the context of the sentence

Prediction theory

we predict the next word as we read

Integration theory

we passively integrate words

Literacy

the ability to read and write

Grapheme

the smallest meaningful unit of written language, like tree

Word superiority effect

we recognize letters faster when they are in a word that makes sense

Visual lexicon

internalized knowledge of word properties; the structure of known written words

Visual Word Form Area (VWFA)

the expert area in the fusiform gyrus (left if right handed, right if left handed)

What does expert area mean for VWFA?

The VWFA is meant to recognize faces as well as words, but with more experience with writing it reacts almost exclusively to word stimulus

Lexical Semantic Route

we get pronunciation of words by recalling semantic memory of the reading the word before

Lexical Semantic Region

uses the Anterior Temporal Lobe

Grapheme-Phoneme Conversion Route

we get pronunciation of word by our learned common pronunciations

Grapheme-Phoneme Region

inferior frontal gyrus

Surface Dyslexia

cannot use the lexical semantic route for pronunciation

How do people with surface dyslexia say common words?

They say words like it is spelled

Phonological dyslexia

Cannot use the grapheme-phoneme conversion route for pronunciation

How do people with phonological dyslexia read non-words?

They say known words that are closest to the misspelling

Central dyslexia

Can compute the word but then some process before pronunciation goes wrong

Pure Alexia

Difficulty in reading words due to damage in parallel processing

Parallel processing

we read an entire word as a group of letters instead of reading individual letters

Peripheral Dyslexia

Words cannot even be processed

Developmental Dyslexia

Less activation of the VWFA, not caused by a lesion, results in a mix of problems that is hard to identify