Biological Psychology
What is the basic function of a single neuron?
Signal propagation
What is one property of a "representation"?
Several Options
Why did rats living in a social colony self-ingest less morphine than rats living isolated in a cage?
Multiple possible reasons:
1. Greater hydration needs in social rats due to more physical activity
2. In isolated rats, morphine is primarily used to reduce anxiety created by social deprivation
3. Psychoactive effects of morphine interfere with species-typical behaviours
What is "Psychopathology"?
The study of mental disorders
What does "LLM" stand for?
Large Language Model
What is a "synapse"?
The small gap between two neurons across which neurotransmitters travel
What does it mean to say the mind is "mulitply realizeable"?
A physical brain is not necessary to instantiate a mind
In Asch's conformity experiments, how often did individuals conform to group decision, even if they were wrong?
30-40% of the times
Is "drapetomania" a real mental illness?
No.
The capacity of AI models increased rapidly in the 2018-2021 period. What caused that rapid increase?
They were trained on larger and larger data sets (e.g. the entire internet)
What is "frequency encoding"?
A single neuron will fire more frequently to encode a stimulus of stronger intensity
Name one major difference between "conscious" and "unconscious" processing.
Conscious processing is slow, flexible, and deliberate. Unconscious processing is quick, automatic, and inflexible
Either describe the difference between "precision" and "accuracy," or draw a diagram which illustrates that difference.
Precision is when all measurements of the same thing provide a similar answer.
Accuracy is when the measurement measures what it intends to measure
What was the primary means of treating severe mental illness is the Islamic world around 1000 CE?
What would it take for ChatGPT to pass the Turing Test?
It would pass the Turing Test if human observers could not distinguish its behaviour from that of other humans.
What is the "reticular theory"?
The theory that the nervous system is composed of an unbroken "net" of interconnected units.
What aspect of consciousness does the "Global Workspace Theory" attempt to model and describe?
The unity of consciousness
What is the fundamental requirement for the formation of society?
Acknowledging that we all have minds
Describe the difference between an "illness/disease" and its "symptoms."
An illness or disease is the underlying condition which is causally responsible for the symptoms. You cannot treat the illness by treating the symptoms
In behaviourist terms, how is a Large-Language Model "trained"?
Hebbian Learning suggests that "Neurons that fire together wire together." What is the cellular process which underlies Hebbian Learning?
Long-Term Potentiation
What is the technical name for "face blindness"?
Prosopagnosia
Watching and imitating of others
Did the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders help increase the precision or accuracy of diagnosis?
The GPT of ChatGPT stands for "General Pretrained Transformer." What does "pretrained" mean in this context?