Exam 3 Flashcards
(51 cards)
What is memory and what is it for
memory =a group of mechanisms or processes by which experience shapes us and changes our brain and behavior
– knowledge that is stored in the brain and the process of acquiring, consolidating, and retrieving that knowledge
for = holds detail about or life, different time periods, helps to form identity, allows us to act appropriately to different objects and situations. it captures the regularities around us like patterns, adaptations, and co-occurrences
what is episodic memory and semantic memory? evidence of each
Episodic memory = episodes and events that happen in our life. time stamped events. usually have some emotional basis.
(HIPPOCAMPAL REGIONS)
—evidence for episodic and semantic memory being different: the patient of Dan’s that came in. he could still form semantic memories, but he could not remember any events that happen to him personally.
Semantic memory = memory of things that are factual and are more removed from one’s personal life (ANTERIOR TEMPORAL REGIONS)
most memory researchers make a fundamental distinction between “declarative” and “nondeclarative” memory. compare and contrast these by their behavioral features and their neuroanatomical underpinnings.
declarative
- Neuroanatomical = hippocampi and amygdala
- Behavioral = you consciously are aware of it, when you learnt it, and you may have some emotional connection to it
nondeclarative
- Behavioral = procedural, prior experiences impact behavior without us really knowing it. information that you just know and it is not linked to a particular situation where it was learned
- Neuroanatomical = basal ganglia and cerebellum ?
- Example: driving
Patient Boswell
- he lost his declarative semantic memory
- still had declarative episodic memory but not true episodic because there was a lot of confabulation
—- example: pool was 2 inches deep or juicy fruit tree - only had a memory span of 45 seconds, after that he forgets
- impaired naming of objects
- knew the rules of checkers but had no idea that he knew them – he just knew if it was a good or a bad move
confabulation
strongly associated with damage to the thalamus and mammillary bodies. happens more often in in situations of alcohol abuse and basal forebrain damage
what is working memory? what are the principle neuroanatomical correlates of working memory? how does working memory relate to G, psychometrically and neuroanatomically (According to Bowren?)
Working memory = ability to maintain and control mental information
- frontal lobes
- 7 +/- 2 units of information
- lasts a few minutes
- holding information in mind to perform some operation with it
- core processes of working memory include the maintenance and control of representational information encoded in neuronal ensembles
G and working memory shared neuroanatomy = arcuate fasciculus
- left hemisphere white matter in the arcuate fasciculus which is a white matter bundle that connects the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices
G and working memory psychometry = individual differences in G can be largely driven by individual differences in working memory
- focuses on the extent that performance on working memory tasks can predict individual differences in G
Baddeley - brain system that provides temporary storage and manipulation of the information necessary for complex cognitive tasks
3 sub components:
1. phonological loop - stores and rehearses speech based information
2. central executive - attentional controlling
3. visuospatial sketchpad - manipulates visual images
using a timeline, define “retrograde” and “anterograde” amnesia. how are they related to the point of neurological injury
Retrograde = impairment in memory for information acquired before the onset of amnesia
— forgetting things that happened in the past
Anterograde = can not form new memories after the onset of amnesia
— forgetting future things, can not form new memory
Retrograde —- injury —- anterograde
Hippocampus is a key structure for memory but the nature of memory processing in the hippocampus remains a matter of debate. Discuss contemporary theories of what the hippocampus does in support of memory
Baddeley paper
debate about if hippocampal activity is required for conscious retrieval on information
you need to hippocampus for consolidation
what is emotion? use ideas from Damasio and LeDoux (2013) to explain the difference between feeling and emotion.
emotion = unconscious, automatic, physiological
- physiological response happens when the brain detects certain challenging situations
—- in the brain - change in arousal levels and cognitive functions
—- in the body - change in endocrine, autonomic, and musculoskeletal responses
feeling = conscious experience that you get from these somatic and cognitive changes
Primary emotions: happiness, sadness, disgust, fear
Secondary emotions: primary emotions combine in different strengths. associated with wants, desires, and expectations
Love is a secondary emotion and a feeling
Decerebrating cats study = produced sham rage (rage for no reason) showed that there was a neural basis for emotion and that it is involved with the hypothalamus (now known as the limbic loop)
how does emotion help and interact with other functions like memory, decision-making, social interactions, and even survival
- because fear is a primary emotion, a lack of fear impacts all secondary emotions downstream like embarrassment
- memory - can make conditioned responses to emotionally salient functions but if it is not emotionally salient due to a lack of fear, this would be impacted
- decision making and survival - SM makes poor decisions like walking through an alley alone because she has no fear and has not made that fear association
- social interactions - SM has no personal space ideas
summarize and evaluate evidence that supports the idea that the human amygdala functions as a sort of “fear detector”
- animals with this area lesioned fail to learn the associations between a conditioned stimulus and an unconditioned stimulus so they do not express fear when the conditioned stimulus is presented alone
- SM’s ability to detect or feel fear was basically non-existent
(seemed like she had no self preservation skills) - she can not experience fear based learning
- the lateral nucleus projects from the thalamus and body to the amygdala = this is the site of synaptic change in fear based learning
SM permitted a number of novel, path-breaking insights about the role of the amygdala in emotional processing. Cite 3 specific observations in patient SM that have advanced knowledge on how the amygdala is important for emotion
- she did not learn conditioned fear responses: she walked through dark alleys and was held at gun/knife point many times. she also was in a domestically abusive situation but still did not fear her partner or the criminals
- deficits in personal and social decision making: she had a blunted ability to feel emotion
– she had a autosomal recessive genetic disorder where there is a thickening of skin and mucus membranes with calcification of limbic system (bilateral damage only to the amygdala) - she was not afraid of inherently scary stimuli: took her to pet snakes and spiders, walked her through a haunted house, and watching clips of a scary move. she was more fascinated with the stimuli
NY times says “researchers at UIOWA have discovered the brain center for religion” the article talks about the Asp et al. paper 2021. what did the researchers “discover” that prompted the New York times coverage
- people with VMPFC damage had increases in specific religious beliefs following their brain injury
- not just people with lesions or a profound medical event, it was specific to this area – so it is not the case that a life threatening event made them “find god”
- prefrontal cortex is crucial for mediating doubt and without doubt people are more susceptible to believing
religious fundamentalism was studied with the proxy of doubt and found that higher level of authoritarianism and religious fundamentalism have lower doubt and more damage to PFC
false tagging theory (2 steps in the process of doubting):
1. you hear a statement and automatically assume it has some truth
2. you then go back and assess if it actually is true which tags it as doubtful or not
using findings from Asp et al. 2019, explain why damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex might be associated with reduced third-part punishments for violent crimes
3rd party punishment - judge (someone not involved in the situation)
- patients with VMPFC lesions have deficits in emotional processing
— they gave more lenient punishments on violent crimes than the comparison group did
— in nonviolent crimes, there was no difference between the punishment given by the comparison group and the VMPFC damage group
what did the “field” experiments by Feinstein et al 2011 add to our understanding of the role of the amygdala in fear processing
- crucial for induction and experience of fear emotion
- her reactions did not lack a response, she was very interested, curious, and aroused by the fear stimuli
—- she wanted to hold the snakes, talk to the haunted house workers, and was interested in the scary movie clips so much so, she asked for the title to watch it later
—- felt an overwhelming sense of curiosity
Benson and Geschwind (1985) in their discussion of aphasia, distinguish the terms speech, language, and thought. why? what are the implications of these distinctions, and what is the rationale for defining them carefully at the onset of a discussion of aphasia
- there are clinical disorders for each individual term, which leaves the other functions in tact
- speech - coordinate muscle activity of oral communication and to the neural control of this language
- language - signal systems used by one individual to communicate with another
- thought - all forms of mental activity, both linguistic and non linguistic
what is the left perisylvian language network of the human brain? what are the key structures and areas. where are they located
- involve early auditory and somatomotor cortices
- involved in transient reconstruction and explicit phonemic representation of word forms
- Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, posterior superior temporal gyrus, portions of the anterior and lateral temporal cortex, inferior parietal lobe, supramarginal gyrus, angular gyrus, inferior frontal cortex, insular cortex
the major aphaisas (Broca’s, Wernicke’s, global, and conduction) have reliable signs and symptoms and reliable neuroanatomical correlates. for each of them, what are the typical signs and symptoms, and what are the neuroanatomical correlates
Broca’s
- comprehension issues with syntax
- disordered speech production
- speech deficits
- can sometimes sing normally
- unaware of their errors and can get frustrated
- speak spontaneously
- repetition
- articulation problems
- single utterance patters of speech or muttering of ingle syllable, word, or phrase
- posterior portion of the left inferior frontal gyrus = pars triangularis + pars opercularis
Wernicke’s
- difficulty understanding spoken or written language
- maybe can not understand language at all
- fluent speech with normal prosody and grammar but with nonsensical words
- superior temporal gyrus
- damage to white matter that connects temporal lobe language areas to other areas
conduction
- have issues producing spontaneous speech, repeating words, and may use words incorrectly
- can hear or see their own speech errors but can not repair them
- damage to arcuate fasciculus which is the area that connects broca’s and wernicke’s
global
- total impairment of most language
- comprehension, spoken, repetition, and naming are impaired
- can not read or write
- right hemiplegia
what is a mental lexicon. Define morpheme, phoneme, and semantic. how do these constructs come into play in building the mental lexicon in the brain.
mental lexicon - mental store of information about words that include semantic info (word meaning), syntactic info (how they combine in sentences) and details of word forms (sounds/spellings)
- lexical access - stages of processing where words are integrated into sentences, discourse, or larger context to facilitate understanding of the whole message
- morpheme - smallest meaningful representation unit and meaning can change with each morpheme
—– ex: de-frost = 2 morphemes - phenome - smallest unit of sound that makes a difference to meaning; words with overlapping phenomes are thought to cluster in a mental lexicon
- semantic - representation in mental lexicon are organized according to semantic relationships between words like categories and factual information
what is akinetic mutism and what are the neural correlates of this condition
- people lose the motivation to speak or communicate
- make no attempt and have few facial expressions
- thought to have lost the will to interact verbally and kinetically with their environment
- neural correlates = bilateral damage to the anterior cingulate, mesial frontal, or supplementary motor regions
what are the main findings from the H Damasio et al. 1996 study? what are the category specific naming deficits? according to Gess et al. 2014 how might such deficits be rehabilitated
the goal of errorless learning is to always be correct or always pass
- face presented with name to learn
- face presented with name - last letter
- face presented with less and less of the name each time they get it correct
normal retrieval of the words denote concrete entities depend on classic language areas and higher order processes
- they might do okay in one category, like tools, but are deficient in another, like animals.
- rehabilitated with errorless learning
Damasio and Tranel 1993 reported that the neural systems for retrieving nouns are separate from the neural systems for retrieving verbs. discuss the evidence for this and the damasio’s interpretation
- patient case studies show that people can be deficient in one but not the other; shows double dissociation
—- Boswell and AN1033 - could not retrieve nouns (specifically in animals, fruits, and veggies category but ok with verbs
—– KJ1360 - could retrieve nouns but not verbs
Neuroanatomy:
- damage to the posterior temporal and occipitoparietal cortices = associated with common and proper noun retrieval
- damage to left frontal areas = associated with verb retrieval
Interpretation:
- not a localization between areas but instead a connection and this connection between areas is not direct. instead, it depends on a set of neural structures that use convergence zones to link separate regions
define the terms anosognosia and Anosodiaphoria. how do these two conditions relate to each other
anosognosia - a lack of awareness of a disability or the refusal to admit its existence
- can be in relation to anything (a limb is paralyzed, can not hear or see anymore, can not interact socially anymore)
- unawareness - not having the neurological mechanism to understand that there is something wrong
- denial - rationalizing everything and denying an issue
Anosodiaphoria - indifference or unconcern for the deficit. minimization or apparent indifference to the existence of the handicap
using the gainotti 2018 article. how would you unpack the anosognosia? is this a single basic mechanism, or a more conflated construct that covers basic biological mechanisms and psychodynamic mechanisms of denial?
- it is a more conflated construct that covers both
- thought to be motivational and denial based
- as time went on people were more accepting and acknowledged the issue but still minimized it and made excuses
- depression and anxiety often followed acceptance of it
- people who suffer from these tend to see illness as an imperfection or a danger to their independence and prestige
