Descartes' theory about mind/body -existence of “animal spirits” that are affected both by our high-level thoughts (originating from the soul) and the physical world (the senses) - not held true today.. why?

There are no widely accepted scientific proposals for how the soul and body could interact even in principle; as a result, most neuroscientists believe dualism to be false

ultimately responsible for determining whether a proposed psychological research study is ethically permissible?

Vohls and Schoolers

(independent and dependent variable?)

independent = belief in free will

dependent = cheating behavior

ways in which an agonist can affect neuronal communication

a.     Block the reuptake of neurotransmitters by the presynaptic neuron

a.     Depolarization causes sodium channels to open allowing sodium to flow into the cell

•  In myelinated axons action potential skips from node to node
• During conduction, depolarization in one area of the axon membrane causes ion channels in adjacent area of membrane to open
• speed of act. pot. propogation does NOT depend on the strength of stimulus
• Action potential propag. faster in myelinated axons 

fovea, cone cells

why we see an object so clearly when we look right at it under good lighting conditions

     How do our brains receive information about color?

When any color is presented in the visual field:

three types of cone cells respond in a ratio that is unique for the color and intensity of the stimulus

A patient can change the size of her grip appropriately to grab a rectangular prism in front of her, even though she can’t report that she is reaching for a rectangle. In fact, she cannot verbally identify any shapes put in front of her. She most likely has damage to her

the blocking of our view of one object by some other object

monocular depth cue

imperfect guides to brain function because they do not occur along specific functional boundaries

fMRI

(strenght and weakness)

fMRI has good spatial resolution but poor temporal resolution.

EEG

(strength and weakness)

a.     EEG has good temporal resolution (good for measuring timing)

but poor spatial resolution (bad for measuring where in the brain things happen).

TMS is ___ for measuring the precise timing of activity in the limbic system

The principle that the intensity of a neuron’s individual action potentials is always essentially the same (though the firing rate may vary) is called

theories that contribute to the current theory of human color vision

b.     The opponent-process theory - there are three pairs of color antagonists: red-green, blue-yellow, and white-black

•   Leaving the eyeball, optic nerve carries sensory information first to the ___ in the ___ and then to the ___

1.     Our visual system not only detects brightness boundaries, but actually amplifies these boundaries by a process called ___, which relies on ____

• A visual illusion caused by the exaggerations of edges is ___. 

edge enhancement

lateral inhibition

mach bands

A radio station plays Julie’s favorite song at apparently random times: sometimes twice in an afternoon, sometimes every couple of days, so Julie keeps listening to the station

example of?

reinforcement delivered on a variable interval schedule

1.     Imagine that you run the following study: you put a dog in a box with a red light and a green light.  You first condition the dog to salivate by repeatedly pairing the red light with food.  You then pair both the red light and the green light with food at the same time.  After a few dozen trials of this, you present the red light and the green light separately, but without food.  Based on what you know about the “blocking” phenomenon, what results would you expect?

a.     The dog will salivate in response to the red light, but not the green light

1.     The idea of “grandmother cells” is that there could be individual neurons in ______________, in the _________ lobe that each fire to signal one single distinct “thing” we might recognize.

a.     In humans, free will is an illusion: all of our behaviors are governed by our history of learning experiences

most effective approach to achieving a long-term memory of something without meaning (like a sequence of random numbers)

brain lesion that leads to loss of memory for events that took place in the hours leading up to the accident

this is ?

a.     retrieval is easier in the context in which the memory was encoded

d.     classical conditioning is a form of ___ memory

explicit

implicit

implicit

implicit

Single feature distinctions rely on ___, in which response time isn’t related to the number of distracters

Pitch is encoded by where on the cochlea the responding hair cells are

c.     priming

all examples of __

In signal detection theory, someone with an unusually high number of both hits and false alarms has: 

likelihood results happened by chance

o   p-value < 5% or .05 - unlikely to be accidental

a statistical technique for combining the results of many studies on a particular topic, even when the studies used different data collection methods

refractory period

after action potential

then they’re pumped out to restore the electrical charge; neuron cannot fire again during this period

movement, motivation, emotion

·      Agonists ___ the neurotransmitters’ activity and antagonists ___ it

o   Hormones: chemicals released by glands; travel through the bloodstream and influence metabolic rate, arousal level, and liver’s sugar output

o   Neurotransmitters travel very short distances only across the synaptic gap, while hormones have to travel throughout the body so their effects are slower but longer-lasting

o   Parasympathetic branch: restores the body’s normal resting state and conserves energy

thick bundle of fibers that connects the brain

·      Projection areas (“maps”) in the brain: 

exception? why?

areas where the brain tissue seems to form a “map” of the sensory information

o   Auditory is exception because both hemispheres receive input from both ears

apraxia

(what brain part usually?)

a serious disturbance in beginning of carrying out voluntary movement; often caused by lesions in the cortex of the frontal lobe

nonfluent vs. fluent aphasia

(diff. brain parts?)

o   Nonfluent aphasia (Broca’s area, region in left frontal lobe): inability to speak properly or at all

§  Frontal lobe

o   Fluent aphasia (Wernicke’s area): can produce speech but can’t understand what is being said to them

§  Temporal lobe

o   inability to recognize faces; damage in both temporal and parietal lobes; can spread beyond face recognition à farmer unable to differentiate cows, woman unable to find her car

• New synapses: neurons create new connections for new stim. patterns
•  Modified cortical organization: projection area map reorganized; more cortical tissue area dedicated to representation of finger input (musicians); visual cortex of blind reorganized to now better respond to fingertip stimulus
• Neurogenesis: birth of new neurons through lifetime; very slow in adult brain; most don’t survive long; humans least likely species to form new neurons maybe b/c sophistication requires a relatively stable neuron pattern

o   Proximal stimulus: the energies from the outside world that directly reach our sense organs

·      Absolute threshold: the smallest quantity of an input that one can detect

·      Difference threshold: the smallest increase or decrease in an input so that one can detect the difference

·      Just-noticeable difference (jnd): the minimal amount of change that an organism can reliably detect between two stimuli

the observation that the size of the difference threshold is proportional to the intensity of the standard stimulus

the strength of a sensation is proportional to the logarithm of physical stimulus intensity

different sensory qualities are signaled by different quality-specific neurons; only correct in a few cases like pain

different sensory qualities are encoded by specific patterns of firing among the relevant neurons; it’s the pattern of activation that matters, not which neurons are firing; more common explanation

distinct types of receptors are associated with different sensations à the difference among the senses is signaled by labeled lines, but more commonly the nervous system uses a pattern code to distinguish the qualities within each sense

Olfactory epithelium

sites in the brain’s olfactory bulb where signals form the smell receptors converge

• photoreceptors in the retina that respond to lower light intensities and give rise to achromatic (colorless) sensation
•   Contains the pigment, rhodopsin, which breaks down more easily to light

• ·    visual receptors that respond to greater light intensities and give rise to chromatic (color) sensations
• Three different cone pigments: differences among the three are crucial to the cones’ ability to discriminate colors

fovea

(contains many?)

·      area around the retina’s center containing many cones and where acuity is greatest

a theoretical approach emphasizing the role of organization in perception and other processes; we understand the elements of a visual input as linked/related to each other

how you separate a scene into individual objects and link together the parts of each object but do not link one object’s parts to some other object

a depth cue based on the differences between the two eyes’ views of the world; difference becomes less pronounced the farther an object is from the observer

patterns that can be represented on a flat surface in order to create a sense of a three-dimensional object/scene

when looking at, say, sand on a beach, the retinal projection of the sand shows a pattern of continues change in which the texture becomes less prominent from farther away

as you move, the image of nearby objects move faster than the image of farther objects do

·      a form of learning in which a neutral stimulus (i.e. the bell) is first made meaningful through classical conditioning; then, that stimulus (now the CS) is paired with a new, neutral stimulus repeatedly until the new stimulus also triggers the original reaction (salivation)

law of effect

(whose theory?)

·      Thorndike’s theory that a response followed by a reward will be strengthened, whereas a response followed by no reward or by punishment will be weakened

according to Skinner, an instrumental response that is defined by its effect on the environment

the process of causing a desired response by rewarding behavior that are increasingly similar to that response (successive approximations)

a pattern of delivering reinforcements only after a certain number of responses

a pattern of delivering reinforcements only after a certain amount of time has passed

a way that learning can cause a neuron to give a long-lasting increase in response

o   Took 11 years to recover

o   Character changes; loses good decision-making ability

o   Iron rod through his cheek and out top of head

o   He knows what numbers mean, but there is a disconnect between knowing and connecting its meaning