Week 13

Question 1

What is priming?

Answer 1

Enhancement of certain task performance as a a result of prior exposure. No conscious awareness.

Question 2

Describe priming ability of amnesiac patients

Answer 2

Amnesiac patients demonstrated some memory for ‘forgotten’ words in a word completion/word recall task, indicating that even though they couldn’t explicitly recall the task, they demonstrated some memory for the word. Enhanced performance explained by non-declarative - priming!

Question 3

Describe conditioning?

Answer 3

Learning of associations between neural stimuli, and other stimuli that has some meaning.

Question 4

What is classical conditioning?

Answer 4

Response is elicited by some preceding experience e.g. Pavlov

Question 5

Wat is operant conditioning?

Answer 5

Involves some voluntary behaviour, e.g. pressing a bar, get some food. Voluntary changes processing of conditioning.

Question 6

Name the two types of non associative learning and describe?

Answer 6

Habituation - gradual weakening of stimuli e.g. feeling of a shirt. Sensitization - progressive amplification of the same stimuli. e.g. tight pants.

Question 7

What does psychophysics measure and describe?

Answer 7

Absolute threshold (can hear, cant hear) and difference threshold (differences between two sounds)

Question 8

If a correct rejection rate is 7/10, what is the false alarm rate?

Answer 8

3/10

Question 9

Where are the photoreceptors located?

Answer 9

Retina

Question 10

What are the characteristics of rods and cones

Answer 10

Cones - high acuity, fast/weak dark adapt, colour, fovea and periphery, Rods - low acuity, slow/strong dark, peripheral, black and white.

Question 11

What is the purpose of lateral and vertical connections.

Answer 11

Connections allow events at one location to influence events at another location.

Question 12

What are neurons in the primary visual cortex responding to?

Answer 12

Changes in retinal images? Edges

Question 13

How are complex sounds processed?

Answer 13

The auditory system breaks down the sound into individual sine waves. The basilar membrane identifies the frequencies evident in each sine wave and performs fourier analysis.

Question 14

How are information from two ears processed?

Answer 14

Choclear splits sounds and sends to superior olivary nucleus, beyond which has inputs from both hemispheres.

Question 15

Describe how visual and auditory receptive fields are defined.

Answer 15

Visual - spatial location, Auditory - frequency

Question 16

Describe early and late selection theories for attention

Answer 16

Early - attention claims certain information is selected for further processing, Late - information is selected after processing for meaning.

Question 17

How are voluntary and reflexive attention different?

Answer 17

Voluntary - top down, goal directed, Reflexive - bottom up, stimulus driven

Question 18

What are the functions of the two visual streams in the brain/ (Ventral/ Dorsal)

Answer 18

Ventral - object recognition and form identification, Dorsal - object location and motion

Question 19

What are the four components of Baddeley’s Working memory model? Describe them, and why are they assumed (on what basis?)

Answer 19

Central Executive, visuospatial sketchpad (maintenance and manipulation of visual information), phonological loop (rehearsal of auditory information), episodic buffer (links information across domains) with visual, auditory, timing e.t.c.).

Question 20

Which area of the brain is most critically involved with working memory?

Answer 20

Frontal cortex

Question 21

What are the power laws of learning and forgetting?

Answer 21

Learning - diminishing returns in terms of reaction times and accuracy, Forgetting - same power function - loose most early.

Question 22

What are the three main parts of the ear and their general function?

Answer 22

Outer - protection and amplification, Middle - transmission of vibration plus protection, Inner - converts vibrations into neural signals.