mind-body problem

how do the mental and physical realms relate, e.g., how can mental causes have physical effects and vice-versa?

basic categories of mental abilities, e.g., memory, attention, language, imagination, emotion, will.

the idea that thinking and other forms of mental activity can be understood as analogous to a kind of computer program

the distinction between a program and the physical “machine” that carries it out;  used as an argument that the mind may be studied without detailed knowledge of the brain

·      an internal data structure.

·      the experience, not arising from an external stimulus, that an amputated or missing limb is still present.

if the sum of incoming signals exceeds this criterion, a neuron will fire; if not, then it does nothing

·      a neurophysiological sensing technology that uses powerful magnets to create images of brain structure.

PET (positron emission tomography)

·      a neurophysiological sensing technology that uses radioactive tracers in the blood to create images of brain activity.

·      a neurophysiological sensing technology that uses powerful magnets to create images of brain activity.

· one of two types of photoreceptors in the eye; functions at low light levels, poor resolution, black and white, most concentrated in the periphery of the visual field.

1.    cones

· one of two types of photoreceptors in the eye; functions best at light levels, high resolution, color, most concentrated in the center of the visual field (fovea).

· neurons leading from the eye to the superior colliculus and the lateral geniculate nucleus; axons make up the optic nerve.

receptive fields

retinotopic organization

· refers to the topographic organization of the primary visual cortex, in which adjacent areas of the cortex respond to adjacent locations of the visual field.

· short for “recognition-by-components”; a theory of visual pattern recognition that assumes that objects are analyzed and represented in terms of simple 3D geometrical shapes.

geons

· 3D geometrical forms such as cones, cylinders, spheres, and so on; a small vocabulary of such forms could be used to represent the shapes of many familiar objects.

canonical perspective

top-down

bottom-up

word superiority effect

 interactive activation model

· a connectionist model of visual pattern recognition that features both excitatory and inhibitory connections, and in which activation can flow from the top down (word level to letter level) as well as from the bottom up (features to letters, letters to words).

dichotic listening

·         a task in which subjects are presented with a different message to each ear over headphones.

shadowing

·         an task used to measure auditory attention in which subjects are asked to repeat a spoken message as it is presented, typically while ignoring another message.

filter theory

·         Broadbent’s theory of attention in which sensory information has to pass through some bottleneck at which only some of the information is selected for further processing.

attenuation theory

·         Treisman’s theory of attention which proposed that we “turn down” (but not completely block out) some sensory signals on the basis of their physical characteristics

late selection theory

·         a theory of attention proposed by Deutsch and Deutsch in which selection occurs at the response stage, after all incoming stimuli have been processed for meaning.

cocktail party effect

·         a phenomenon in which auditory attention is involuntarily drawn to highly meaningful or significant information on the unattended channel (e.g., the subject’s name)

capacity theory

automatic process

·         a highly practiced task or skill which requires little or no conscious attention to execute.

controlled process

spotlight metaphor

theater metaphor

·         conceptualizes consciousness as a sort of central stage in which information is made available to a wide variety of specialized processing systems.

sentience