Final Review Flashcards
(58 cards)
What does attention do?
Selectively increases performance on perceiving and acting on stimuli that are attended to.
What types of visual-spatial attention are there? How do they differ?
There are overt and covert attention. Overt attention involves actual orientation towards the stimulus, while covert attention does not.
How do interesting stimuli grab our attention?
Activation of the superior colliculus. If activation is strong, a saccade is made. If activation is weak, covert attention is directed.
How does voluntary spatial attention affect neurons?
Neurons whose receptive fields are in the attended area fire more strongly to their preferred stimuli.
What brain area appears to direct voluntary attention?
The frontal eye field.
How is EEG relevant to attention?
EEG desynchronization is caused by wakefulness and arousal, while EEG desynchronization is caused by drowsiness and sleep.
Stimulation of what brain area causes arousal?
The reticular formation, probably caused by noradrenergic axons in the locus coeruleus, and cholinergic peribrachial neurons.
What is the locus coeruleus? What does it affect?
This small brain area in the reticular formation has noradrenergic neurons with wide projections to the cortex, and they are activated by arousing stimuli.
What happens when a neuron is exposed to norepinephrine? Are there exceptions?
Most neurons decrease their background firing rate and increase their responsiveness to their preferred stimuli, while high levels of NE in the prefrontal cortex cause general activity suppression.
How can sleep be divided?
Into slow-wave sleep, where EEG is highly synchronized, and REM, where EEG is desynchronized similar to wakefulness.
What is SWS caused by?
Intrinsic neuronal rhythims and the loop between the neocortex, dorsal thalamus, and thalamic reticular nucleus.
How is waking from sleep induced?
Activation of basal forebrain cholinergic neurons, which receive input from the locus coeruleus, glutamatergic peribrachial neurons, and hypocretin neurons of the hypothalamus.
Which neurons in the brain are more active during sleep?
A subset of neurons in the ventrolateral preoptic area, which reciprocally inhibit areas of the brain that promote wakefulness.
What is muscle atonia during REM caused by?
Hyperpolarization of motor neurons, caused by activity of the subcoeruleus region.
What leads to hemispatial neglect?
Damage to the right inferior parietal cortex.
What does damage to the right inferior parietal cortex cause?
Hemispatial neglect of the left side.
How are lethal injections administered?
An anasthetic, followed by a paralytic to prevent spasticity, followed by KCl to stop the heart.
What are the forms learning and memory can take?
Procedural (like riding a bike), semantic (facts you can remember without knowing where they came from), and episodic (episodes you can replay in your mind).
What damage did HM have?
Bilateral lesioning of the hippocampus, amygdala, and some surrounding cortex.
What area of the brain is necessary for object recognition memory?
The perirhinal/postrhinal cortex, not the hippocampus.
What area of the brain is important for remembering relationships between ideas and objects?
The hippocampus.
What is the hippocampus connected to?
It is connected reciprocally to the perirhinal/postrhinal cortex, which is reciprocally connected to the entorhinal cortex, which is reciprocally connected to other parts of the neocortex.
What is special about the CA3 region of the hippocampus?
These neurons can form autoassociative networks (Hebbian networks), and form a neural substrate for memory.
What does reactivation of CA3 assemblies cause?
Potentially, it causes reactivation of neocortical regions that were active while generating that CA3 assembly (experiencing a memory), leading to recall.
