week 2- cognitive neuroscience

Question 1

what is the pons nucleus

Answer 1

regulates sleep and wakefulness

Question 2

what does the cerebral cortex do?

Answer 2

focused on what happens when we sense things, engage in cognition

Question 3

what are the lobes of the cerebral cortex?

Answer 3

parietal
frontal
occipital
temporal

Question 4

how many parietal lobes does one have? what do they control?

Answer 4

2, one on the left one on the right
-the left parietal lobe controls the right side of the body and the right parietal lobe controls the left side of the body

Question 5

what do the parietal lobes do?

Answer 5

-it creates a sense of the environment we exist in

Question 6

what happens when one has a lesion on their parietal lobe?

Answer 6

-people with lesions on their parietal lobe, they completely neglect one side of everything (ex. they only dress one half of their body in the morning, they only brush one side of their teeth, they only draw half of pictures, etc.)

Question 7

what is the brain made up of?

Answer 7

neurons

Question 8

what do neurons do?

Answer 8

-neurons take in signals from dendrites and send signals out to other neurons
-neurons communicate with each other

Question 9

what theory did santiago ramon y cajal make?

Answer 9

-santiago ramon y cajal popularized the theory that neurons don’t actually connect or touch each other, they send signals by electrochemical communication

Question 10

what happens when information is sent down the axon?

Answer 10

-when info is sent across an axon, the charge flips (negative to positive)

Question 11

what is the charge when the neuron is at resting potential

Answer 11

negative

Question 12

what is an action potential

Answer 12

when charge is sent down the axon and charge flips from negative to positive
-the rate of firing is 1 millisecond

Question 13

what is the rate of firing dependent on?

Answer 13

-the rate of firing depends on the intensity of the stimulus, the higher the intensity of the stimulus, the higher the rate of firing

Question 14

what is the occipital lobe responsible for?

Answer 14

visual perception, including colour, form and motion

Question 15

what did Hubel and Wiesel find about feature detectors?

Answer 15

they inserted electrodes into cat brains and discovered that neurons are very specific in when they fire (ex. One neuron fires if a line you see is 90 degrees, the neuron next to it only fires if the line you see is 89 degrees, etc.)

Question 16

where does the specific info processed in the occipital lobe go after?

Answer 16

-info processed in the occipital lobe is really specific in colours, shapes, sizes, etc. and then gets pushed forward in the temporal lobe to process what were seeing as a whole, helps us recognize things in the world that are familiar

Question 17

what is specificity coding in the temporal lobe?

Answer 17

in the temporal lobe there is a bundle of neurons that are dedicated to processing faces, specificity coding is the idea that maybe the reason were so good at remembering people we’ve seen before is because there is one neuron in that bundle dedicated to each face we’ve seen before (one neuron per person weve ever met)

Question 18

is specificity coding real?

Answer 18

that’s probably not what actually happens though so we came up with…..
Population coding!

Question 19

what is population coding?

Answer 19

all neurons are dedicated to processing faces, but there are specific neurons that are dedicated to processing different features (each neuron is devoted to processing a different feature), the entire population of neurons are dedicated to processing faces but they show different patterns of activity (firing) for each face

Question 20

what is sparse coding?

Answer 20

same as population coding, only difference is that sometimes a face may not have a feature that other faces have, so not every neuron has to respond to every face

Question 21

what is the difference between sparse coding and population coding?

Answer 21

same idea but in population all neurons fire and in sparse not every neuron has to fire

Question 22

what is the fusiform cortex?

Answer 22

bundle of neurons specialized in processing faces

Question 23

where is the fusiform cortex?

Answer 23

inferior temporal lobe

Question 24

what is prosopagnosia?

Answer 24

condition that happens when one has damage to their fusiform cortex, people that have this cannot recognize any faces, even their own

Question 25

what does the anterior temporal lobe so?

Answer 25

helps us make sense of daily objects that we interact with

Question 26

describe a double dissociation

Answer 26

-can only see a double dissociation across two different people
-an experimental technique by which two areas of neocortex are functionally dissociated by two behavioral tests, each test being affected by a lesion in one zone and not the other. In a series of patients with traumatic brain injury, one might find two patients, A and B.
-researchers want to show that one brain area is solely independently responsible for a single function. A single dissociation is shown when damage to region 1 results in process A being disrupted (deficit), but process B is intact (no deficit), while a double dissociation is shown when damage to region 2 leaves process A intact (no deficit), but process B is disrupted (deficit)

Question 27

what does functional brain imaging help us with?

Answer 27

-helps us see the intact brain at work

Question 28

what does functional brain imaging show and what does it not show?

Answer 28

-doesn’t show brain activity but evaluates blood flow in the brain

Question 29

describe the weed study

Answer 29

-researchers wanted to know the impact of marijuana use on the brain, they took 20 smokers and 20 non smokers and did an MRI scan.
Nucleus accumbens- involved in reward circuit
-they found that that part of the brain as well as the amygdala (assesses positive and negative emotions) were smaller in people who smoked marijuana, they concluded that smoking marijuana results in degradation in that part of the brain and that’s why people who smoke marijuana are lazy/don’t get anything done

Question 30

why was the weed study problematic?

Answer 30

-BUT the smokers might have already had a smaller nucleus accumbens before they started smoking and that wasn’t controlled for/tested, also 20 people is not enough to make generalizations about an entire population
-they should’ve taken 40 non smokers and got 20 of them to start smoking and 20 of them to continue not smoking and then measure, to make sure they are starting at the same baseline

Question 31

how do people misuse brain imaging research?

Answer 31

-sometimes people use brain imaging research to infer higher order cognition/preferences which you shouldn’t do

Question 32

what is the reverse inverse issue in brain imaging research?

Answer 32

running a study and seeing one part of the brain light up, going into the literature and looking up what that part of the brain is doing, then using the literature to infer that that’s what it must be doing in your own study – this is an issue because you’re cherry picking what information you want to believe

Question 33

what is neuroethics?

Answer 33

Neuroethics- how do we use technology to share what we know to the public

Question 34

what is neuromarketing?

Answer 34

the study of how people’s brains respond to advertising and other brand-related messages by scientifically monitoring brainwave activity, eye tracking and skin response

Question 35

is neuromarketing effective?

Answer 35

-there’s no evidence that we can use brain imaging to guess what people are more or less likely to buy – we can also just ask people what they are more likely to buy, it’s more effective

Question 36

what can boost peoples PERCEIVED validity of articles?

Answer 36

-researchers showed that if you put an image of the brain close to the conclusions of an article, there is a boost in ratings when asking people “how valid do you think this research is?”

Question 37

label image 1

Answer 37

yellow- frontal
green- parietal
red- occipital
purple- temporal

Question 38

label image 2

Answer 38

red- dendrites
pink- cell body
purple- nucleus
blue- axon
green- axon terminals

Question 39

label image 3

Answer 39

see image