cogs1000 - quizzes

are cortical areas used in sign language different from spoken language?

Cortical areas used in sign language are not largely different from those used in spoken language.

what is the correlation between right handedness and language skills

there is no correlation between Right-handed people and significantly better language skills than left-handed people.

statement about lateralization of brain functions regarding dominance of hemispheres / brain areas

The prevalence of dominance suggests that lateralization of function maximizes use of the available neural circuitry.

is planum temporale asymmetry detected in everyone?

is detectable in about two-thirds of humans.

Wilder Penfield, in the course of epilepsy surgery, performed electrical stimulation of cortex for the main purpose of

avoiding damage to critical language brain structures during the surgery.

do neurons respond to singular words

Neurons have not been found that respond preferentially to a single, specific word.

Healthy controls and patients with dyslexia are asked to read a paragraph while being scanned by fMRI. Where would you expect to see functional differences between the two groups during this task?

Left occipito-temporal sulcus

the most essential function of the core cortical language areas is
Select one:

symbolic representation.

As evidenced by the studies of Paul Broca, patients with damage to the ventroposterior region of the left frontal cortex

can understand language but cannot produce organized speech.

As evidenced by the studies of Carl Wernicke, patients with damage to the left temporal lobe

can produce words but have difficulty understanding language.

Phonemes are

the percepts elicited by different speech sounds.

During the 1950s and 1960s Norman Geschwind

showed that a number of cortical areas (other than Broca's and Wernicke's areas) have specialized language functions.

Studies of neuronal responses in the temporal cortex of the rhesus monkey have revealed

norm-based tuning and population coding of objects.

Which symptoms would you expect a patient with a right temporal lobe lesion to exhibit?

Deficit in recognizing faces

The delayed response task has been used to examine

performance impairments in monkeys with bilateral prefrontal lesions.
c

What symptom would you expect bilateral lesions to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to produce in a monkey?

Delayed or abolished success during the delayed response task

If output from neocortical layer 6 is blocked, which structure would lose significant input?

Thalamus

the cellular structure of the cerebral cortex contains what else?

The archicortex includes the hippocampus.

Contralateral neglect syndrome arises from damage in which location?

Right posterior parietal cortex

When visually examining an object such as a painting of a face, a person will usually

make many rapid eye movements, in different directions, acquiring information primarily during brief pauses at different locations on the object.

A patient recovering from a car accident discovers that she can no longer voluntarily direct her gaze away from a stimulus in her visual field (she cannot perform an anti-saccade). The patient most likely has sustained damage in which location shown in the figure?

B - on diagram **

does stimulation of UMN in the SC provide movements in the sam direction

Stimulation of particular upper motor neurons in the superior colliculus always produces a movement of the same magnitude and direction.

Lesions of the left frontal eye field result in

transient deviation of the eye to the left, plus a transient contralateral saccade deficit.

A patient is experiencing double vision. A medical exam reveals that she can successfully gaze to the left (without head movement), but when asked to gaze forward or to the right, only the right eye moves as directed. Where is the doctor most likely to find neurological damage in this patient?

In the left oculomotor nerve

During a medical exam, a patient presents with eye movement task dysfunctions. Specifically, smooth pursuit movements are jerky, with more errors and irregularities than average. During a free-viewing test, visual sampling of a scene is less robust than average, viewing only a small portion of the image. Finally, the patient has difficulty remaining fixated on a target object. What disorder might these test results indicate?

Schizophrenia

what determines eye movements

Eye movements are determined by the particular oculomotor neurons that are active and their firing rates.

what areas are involved in smooth pursuit eye movements

The superior colliculus
The PPRF
The frontal eye fields
Area MT

Which brain region(s) is(are) thought to be most important for vergence eye movements?

Extrastriate occipital regions

A patient is having trouble abducting their left eye (moving the eye in a direction away from the nose). What nervous system damage would you expect to find from diagnostic tests?

Damage to the left cranial nerve VI

Vergence eye movements

depend on binocular disparity measurements made in neocortex.

are performed in conjunction with saccadic eye movements.

depend on vergence centers in the midbrain.

are driven by bursts of action potentials that drive either converging or diverging movements.

Which nucleus innervates the superior oblique muscle?

Trochlear nucleus

A patient complains of inability to move his right eye toward his nose and a drooping right eyelid. What other symptom would you expect to find upon examination?

Pupillary dilation in right eye

When shaking one's head back and forth while looking straight ahead at a stationary object, the mechanism that maintains the focal image at a roughly constant location on the retina is called

the vestibulo-ocular reflex.

You are watching a movie and having a snack when you accidently drop some of your food, causing you to avert your gaze from the television across the room to your lap. What is one visual response that will occur?

Accommodation of the lens

Upper motor neurons involved in the control of axial muscles would most likely project to the spinal cord in which pattern?

Medial gray matter over many spinal segments

Which statement about directional tuning and population coding by primary motor cortical neurons is true?

The vector summation of population responses of primary motor cortical neurons is important for directional control of motor movements.

In an anticipatory postural response of a standing person about to tug on a handle, the early response of leg muscles (such as the gastrocnemius) that precedes the actual tug is an example of

feedforward motor control.

The "indirect pathway" from cortex to spinal cord does not play a role in

post-injury recovery of fine motor functions such as using two fingers to pick up food.

What is not a function of the reticular formation?

transmission of spinal nociceptive and tactile sensory signals to the cerebellum

The acute phase of upper motor neuron syndrome is characterized by

the passive dropping of an affected limb that has been elevated and then released.

A patient is diagnosed with a tumor located in the right internal capsule. Which motor dysfunction would you expect to see in this patient?

Left side paralysis (or severe weakness) of the lower face

Although the phenomenon is not well understood, the increased muscle tone and spasticity that develop after an upper motor neuron injury appears to be due, at least in part, to

increased responsiveness of motor neurons to Ia afferent inputs.

Corticospinal axons mostly synapse on

spinal local circuit neurons.

Which method helped scientists correct a long-standing misconception about the neurological origins of facial weakness deficits seen in humans?

Anatomical tract-tracing in primates

"muscle field"

is the group of muscles whose activity is directly facilitated by a given upper motor neuron.

When Graziano and colleagues extended cortical microstimulation in monkeys to time epochs approximating those of natural movements, they observed

purposeful movements distributed sequentially across multiple joints.

Upper motor neurons synapse

synapse on local circuit neurons and/or lower motor neurons.

What is not a feature of motor unit plasticity?

Changes in the size and location of motor pools

The patellar tendon (knee-jerk) reflex is

a monosynaptic reflex arc mediated by Ia afferents.

During the patellar reflex, you measure voltage change in the flexor muscle motor neuron cell body in the ventral horn of the spinal cord. After stimulation of the stretch receptors, which of the following would you observe?

An IPSP

An animal model is developed in which gamma motor neurons are dysfunctional. If you record the activity of the Ia fiber (spindle afferent), which pattern would you expect to see when the innervated muscle contracts?

A

Golgi tendon organs are most sensitive to

muscle tension

The lamprey central pattern generator (CPG)

generates an alternating left-right bending pattern by means of crossed inhibitory fibers.

Proper functioning of the lamprey central pattern generator (CPG) is dependent on which input?

Inhibitory interneurons that cross the midline

Which symptom would you expect to see in a patient with lower motor neuron damage?

Hypoactive deep reflexes

The part of the motor system that acts as a servomechanism to minimize motor error is

the cerebellum.

The motor neurons innervating the medial gastrocnemius muscle of the cat are found

spanning several segments of lateral lumbar and sacral spinal cord.

Spinal interneurons that project ipsilaterally between the lumbar and cervical enlargements are most likely involved with

ensuring coordination of the forelimbs and hindlimbs.

Asynchronous firing of motor neurons

provides a means by which a population of motor neurons can maintain constant force over a finite time interval.

In which structure would a visuotopically organized, alternating (left/right) pattern of monocular responsiveness be found?

Layer 4 of visual cortex

In the upper layers (2 and 3) of primary visual cortex, a lateral sampling of pyramidal cell responses would reveal

a roughly sinusoidal pattern of ocular dominance moving from left dominance, through equal responsiveness, to right dominance, and then back.

Near and far cells are distinct from other pyramidal cells in terms of their sensitivity to

binocular disparity.

For which task would near and far cells help the viewer extract relevant information?

Deciphering a random dot stereogram

Visual area _______ is most specialized for processing color information.

V4

In which brain region would you expect to find very large, motion-sensitive cells that respond selectively to oriented moving edges, while lacking responsiveness to fine structural details?

Middle temporal area (MT)

Which statement about extrastriate areas is false?

Deficits in the ventral stream often give rise to visual deficits such as an inability to perceive the motion of objects.

in the pupillary light reflex of a healthy individual,

light falling on one eye will cause both pupils to constrict equally.

Stanley has a car accident and is discharged from the hospital with orders to notify his doctor of any changes in health or unusual behaviors. A few days later he notices that his cat was moving in a very strange way, appearing to jump from place to place, as if in an old-time cinema reel. Stanley then discovers his brother is moving in the same way. What part of Stanley's brain is dysfunctional?

The dorsal visual pathway to the parietal lobe

Macular sparing

is a selective preservation of vision, the basis of which is unknown.

A contralateral visual field deficit is

often due to optic tract or cortical damage.

The strictly monocular portion of the visual field is represented exclusively by which region of the retina?

Nasal

Which feature is not a characteristic of certain primary visual cortex neurons?

Recognition of faces

the iris

regulates the amount of light entering the eye.

what happens to PR cation channels at rest?

Unlike typical neurons, cation channels are open at rest, allowing the influx of sodium and calcium.

The death of retinal cells in retinitis pigmentosa is most likely caused by

apoptosis.

The main reason that rods are more sensitive to light than cones is that

the rod transduction mechanism provides greater signal amplification.

By which mechanism are rod signals transmitted in conditions of low light?

Rod bipolar cells synapse on amacrine cells, which in turn synapse on cone bipolar cells.

You measure changes in membrane potential in an ON-center bipolar cell that is exposed to light in the center of its receptive field. What response would you expect to see?

Depolarization due to decreased release of glutamate by the photoreceptor cell

Which statement about the retina's operation across different levels of ambient light is true?

1.For a given level of ambient light, an ON-center ganglion cell responds proportionately to a small spot of light over an intensity range of about one log unit.
2.Via adaptational mechanisms, ON-center ganglion cells can dynamically encode brightness levels in their ON-center over a range of 6 log units of ambient light levels.
3.Ganglion cells generally do not report absolute light intensities, but rather encode relative intensity differences between center and surround.
4.Interactions within the inner plexiform layer play an important role in modulating the photic sensitivity of ganglion cells.

What sequence represents the most direct pathway for the transmission of visual information from the eye to the brain?

Photoreceptor → bipolar cell → ganglion cell → brain

The two main functions of the retinal pigment epithelium are _______ and _______.

phagocytosis of shed outer segments; regeneration of the photoreceptor photopigments

The mechanism that accounts for light-induced hyperpolarization of photoreceptors is

a rapid fall in the concentration of cGMP, leading to closure of Na+ / Ca2+ channels.

28. In a muscle with a high gain, a _______ stretch of a muscle would lead to _______
increase in extrafusal muscle tension.

small; a large

ventral and dorsal pre motor cortex

the ventral premotor cortex (PMv) is involved in grasping and object manipulation, while the dorsal premotor cortex (PMd) has been suggested to play a role in reaching and action selection

While driving, you quickly glance horizontally to the left without moving your head.
During that eye movement, which neuronal response is most likely occurring?

An increase in firing rate in lower motor neurons in the left abducens nucleus
and right oculomotor nucleus.

The right paramedian pontine reticular formation (PPRF) innervates the:

right abducens nucleus directly and the left oculomotor nucleus indirectly