Week 2: The matter of the mind

Question 1

What is Cognition?

Answer 1

Is “the mental process of acquiring knowledge and understanding thought, experience, and the senses”.[1] It holds many aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as:

• Attention
• The formation of knowledge.
• Memory and working memory.
• Judgment and evaluation.
• Reasoning and “computation”.
• Problem solving and decision making.
• Comprehension and production of language.
• Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.

Question 2

What is Cognitive psychology?

Answer 2

Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as “attention, language use, memory, perception, problem-solving, creativity, and thinking”

Question 3

Constricting pupils, stimulated digestive and salivation activity and constricting lungs are due to the activation of the _________________ system.

Answer 3

Parasympathetic nervous system

Question 4

The peripheral nervous system links the brain to the _________.

Answer 4

Body?

Question 5

What impairment would you expect to see in an individual with damage to their primary visual cortex?

Answer 5

If you had damage to this area, what you would feel phenomenological is that you had like a black spot on, almost like, if you took my glasses and stuck a sticker on it somewhere. So, that visual information just wasn’t getting in, any information that hit that. That’s what it would feel like if some of your neural tissue here was damaged. You would have what we call a scotoma, literally kind of a black spot that followed your vision anywhere you looked.

Question 6

What is visual agnosia?

Answer 6

Is an impairment in recognition of visually presented objects. It is not due to a deficit in vision (acuity, visual field, and scanning), language, memory, or intellect.

Question 7

What is the primary role of the temporal lobe?

Answer 7

Auditory processing.

Left side of the brain is more about the speech: Wernicke (capacity to understand speech) areas.

The right side of the brain is known to perceive sounds like music

Question 8

What is the term that refers to knowledge of where a person’s body parts are located in space?

Answer 8

Proprioception

Question 9

What is the term used to describe the inability to switch strategies following damage to the frontal lobes?

Answer 9

Perseveration errors?

Question 10

What cells in the eye are responsible for edge detection?

Answer 10

Bipolar cells. Photoreceptor cells