Cognitive Neuroscience Lecture Notes

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering terms and concepts from cognitive neuroscience, behaviorism, memory types, brain imaging techniques, and evolutionary psychology based on the lecture transcript.

Behaviorism

A psychological approach that involves highly controlled experiments, matches objective external stimuli to measurable behavior, and rejects subjective work on mental functions.

Miller's View of Memory

The perspective that memory processes recode complex stimuli into smaller units for cognitive processing.

Noam Chomsky

An influential figure who used human language as an argument that behaviorism could never explain the structural and generative properties of mental phenomena.

Action Potentials

Electrical signals that are transmitted long distances along neuronal axons.

Synapses

Structures that form inputs onto dendrites where axon terminals release neurotransmitters to bind to receptor molecules on target neurons.

Phrenology (Correct Concept)

The idea that different parts of the brain contribute to different sorts of information processing, though the mapping to skull bumps was incorrect.

Neuroscience

The scientific study concerned with the organization and function of animal and human nervous systems.

Cognitive Neuroscience

A field that attempts to create biologically grounded models of cognitive function and searches for neuronal correlates of cognition.

Convergence

The approach of combining results from multiple experimental paradigms to understand a single theoretical concept.

Meta-analysis

An analytical method that combines data across multiple studies to effectively increase the sample size.

Quantitative Meta-analysis

Identifies a comprehensive set of studies on the same cognitive function and looks for similarities among their results.

Semantic Meta-analysis

A method that combines studies according to similarity in their underlying concepts.

Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

A technique that provides information about blood metabolism and maps local changes in cerebral blood flow using radioactivity.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

A non-invasive technique that detects local changes in cerebral metabolism and blood flow with better temporal resolution than PET.

Diaschisis

A loss of function in an uninjured portion of the brain that is connected to a damaged area.

Agonist

A chemical that activates receptors in a similar manner as the usual neurotransmitter for those receptors.

Computerized Tomography (CT)

An imaging scan that gathers X-ray intensity information from multiple angles to generate a tomogram.

Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI)

A variation of MR techniques used to examine white matter pathology, such as in multiple sclerosis, by visualizing water diffusion.

Optogenetics

A technique that incorporates ion channels that open or close in response to light of a certain wavelength into neurons of interest.

Event-Related Potentials (ERPs)

Scalp electrical activity related to cognitive events, due to the summation of dendritic field potentials of groups of neurons.

BOLD Signal

Blood oxygenation level–dependent signal; it occurs when the vascular system supplies blood containing oxyhemoglobin to active regions of the brain.

Double Dissociation

Provides definitive evidence for separate mechanisms by showing that two brain regions have different cognitive functions.

Cocktail Party Effect

The phenomenon where we selectively remember an auditory input to which we attended while ignoring unattended inputs.

Endogenous Attention

The ability to consciously direct attention to a particular aspect of the environment.

Attentional Blink

A brief deficit in the ability to detect a second target $150$-$450\,\text{ms}$ after detecting an initial target.

Hemispatial Neglect Syndrome

A condition usually caused by a lesion in the right inferior parietal lobe resulting in the patient ignoring stimuli in the left half of the visual field.

Balint's Syndrome

A condition characterized by oculomotor apraxia, optic ataxia, and simultanagnosia, resulting from bilateral lesions in the posterior parietal and lateral occipital cortex.

Sprague Effect

The restoration of balance between activity in the left and right parietal cortex following a lesion to the superior colliculus.

Default-mode Network

A set of brain areas including the anterior cingulate cortex that become relatively more active when one is not engaged in an attentionally demanding task.

Blindsight

The ability of patients with lesions in the primary visual cortex to make correct visual responses within their scotoma more often than chance.

Declarative Memory

Conscious memory for events (episodic) and facts (semantic) that depends on the medial temporal lobes.

Anterograde Amnesia

The loss of memory for information acquired after the occurrence of brain damage or trauma.

Skill Learning

A nondeclarative memory process involving gradual improvement in performance due to repeated practice.

Operant Conditioning

A form of learning where the probability of a behavioral response is altered by associating it with a reward or punishment.

Extinction

The process where a conditioned response gradually disappears if the unconditioned stimulus is no longer provided.

Long-Term Potentiation (LTP)

A persistent increase in synaptic strength following high-frequency stimulation, implicated in spatial memory via NMDA receptors.

Consolidation

The process of stabilizing memory traces over time, involving the activation of the hippocampus for certain memories.

Semantic Dementia

A condition resulting from damage to the anterior temporal lobe, characterized by severe language and nonverbal semantic knowledge deficits.

Confabulations

False memories or confusion about the temporal order of events, often associated with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices.

Savant Syndrome

A condition where individuals, typically regarded as mentally handicapped, demonstrate expert abilities in a specific domain.

Myelination

The process of forming a myelin sheath around axons, which increases the speed of action potential conduction and is important for cognitive emergence.

Foraging Hypothesis

The suggestion that demands of feeding on food sources that vary spatially and temporally favor the evolution of enhanced cognition.

Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis

The theory that primate social complexity led to the evolution of advanced brain development and the ability to infer others' intentions.