The Social Brain
Attention
Emotions
Memory
Vision
Misc
100
'How you think about social constructs, and how you learn about social information' defines what concept?
Social Cognition
100
What is the difference between attention and arousal?
Arousal is the global state (whole being inc. mental, physical, and emotional) of a being which ranges from deep sleep to hyper-alertness. Attention is the localisation or concentration of consciousness.
100
What are the three types of pain?
Nociceptive pain: when receptors in your skin are activated (nociceptive receptors) - heat, excessive pressure etc
Inflammatory plain: damaged tissue and inflammation to joints or by tumour cells - sharp or throbbing pain, localised or diffuse
Neuropathic pain: lesion or other damage to the nervous system specifically (not skin) - e.g.
100
Define Memory
The mental capacity for retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., or of recalling or recognizing previous experiences.
100
What is the function of the eye?
To capture light and turn it into neural messages for the brain
100
What are two ways to test neglect?
The line bisection test (shown an image of lots of horizontal lines and asked to intersect each one with a vertical line, they will intersect one side) and clock test (they are asked to draw a clock and will often only draw half)
200
Simulation: To understand the ___ of the _____ grasp, one must at least be able to ____ oneself or someone else grasping an object.
Meaning of the concept, imagine oneself. (Understand and conceptualise what grasping means, i.e. it's intention)
200
What are the two types of attention and their functions?
Voluntary/Endogenous: top-down process guided by our goals, expectations and rewards.
Reflexive/Exogenous: bottom-up and automatic, guided by sensory stimuli that involuntarily capture our attention
200
What does the direct pathway model state about pain? What are the issues with this?
States that pain signals are sent directly from the skin to the brain. BUT other factors alter pain such as direction of attention and mental state.
200
How long does sensory memory last and what are the two types?
Milliseconds to seconds. Two Types: echoic (auditory) and iconic (visual)
200
The retina is a thin sheet of neural tissue on the back of the eye made up of what three cells?
Photoreceptors (rods and cones), bipolar cells and ganglion cells
200
Why might reaction times be slower when a stimulus is presented to the left of the previous stimulus?
Revers in direction: moving your eyes to the right is faster as it follows our natural order of viewing things from left to right.
300
Action ___ and action ____ use the same _______
Action perception and action production use the same neural structures
300
What are the two subtypes of attention under voluntary attention?
Overt (obvious by behavioural cues) and covert (no external cues but neural changes)
300
What is the neomatrix of pain?
Cognitive processing, sensory processing and motivation/emotions all interface together to evaluate pain, react to pain, and cope with pain (stress regulation)
300
How many things can you hold in your short term/working memory?
4 +/- 1 - Millers law states 7 +/- 2 (wrong)
300
What is Pigment epithelium?
Enzymes that keep rods and cones alive
300
What fMRI findings support the biased competition theory of attention?
Neural responses are less when multiple stimuli are presented at once because competition is occurring. This effect is mainly in the V4 area, related to higher-level/late visual processing.
400
How does multimodality influence action perception?
Multimodal functional clusters for an action like grasping fire when:
Grasping is performed, observed, imagined, inferred, or heard;
The grasping is of any type, done by any agent, on any object, in any manner, and in any location.(Universality)
400
Why is it important to maintain a balance between voluntary and reflexive attention?
Balancing attention allows us to be not too focused to miss danger and not too scatterbrained that we never accomplish anything
400
What subcortical areas are involved in the pain matrix?
Hypothalamus, limbic system and the thalamus
400
Which part of long-term memory is the hippocampus involved in?
Acquisition (NOT consolidation/storage)
400
What are Atypical Opsins?
A type of molecule that binds and discharges from rods and cones - this is what actually allows light detection
400
What ERP readings are related to attention?
When a stimulus is shown, ERP electrodes in the Occipital Lobe show a big positive ERP wave at 60-70 ms and peaks at 100 (P1 wave), followed by a negative wave at 180 ms (N1 wave). P1 has a higher amplitude for attended stimuli compared to non-attended stimuli.
500
How is the premotor cortex broken up?
F1-F7 are functionally distinct and contain neurons that respond to visual, somatosensory, and auditory stimuli. Each area of the premotor cortex is connected with distinct regions of the posterior parietal cortex
500
What is the cocktail party effect?
In a loud environment with many stimuli, we can selectively attend to one auditory stream at a time (e.g. a conversation). However, sometimes reflexive attention is activated when you hear a specific salient audio stream (e.g. your name)
500
What are the two aspects of pain?
Sensory-Discriminative: sensory information processing. Determining intensity and location of pain, quality (sharp/dull) and duration of pain
Affective-motivational: unpleasantness and urge to escape this feeling
500
What are the two types of long-term memory?
Declarative (explicit) - memories we can verbalise
Non-declarative (implicit) - not verbalised, shown through performace
500
What are photons?
Small packets of energy which make up light
600
What are the three classes of neurons found in area F5 and their functions?
1. Motor general-purpose neurons (general grasping etc)
Visuomotor neurons:
2. Canonical Neurons (respond to an object)
3. Mirror neurons (respond to an action performed by someone else)
600
Attention functions like a _____ where only a certain amount of information can be attended to at a time.
Bottleneck
600
What two neurotransmitters/hormones play a role in bonding and pain regulation?
Endorphins and Oxytocin. Oxytocin is related to pair bonding behaviour of mammals and it also has analgesic (stop pain) and reward properties.
600
What are the features of semantic vs episodic memory (under declarative memory)?
Semantic memory: related to facts and knowledge that does not include context.
Episodic memory: memory of events and personal experiences, details are bound to the context of where and when things happened
700
What percentage of mirror neurons are strictly congruent to a certain action (e.g., twisting vs grasping)
Less than 30%
700
What is the debate between early and late selection?
Early selection states that individuals select stimuli during early processing, and only some stimuli make it to high-level processing and perception (irrelevant stimuli are 'tossed out'). Late selection states that all information reaches higher processing stages and selection determines what information gains access to awareness.
700
How do emotions differ from mood?
Emotions are short-lived feelings that come from a known cause (they are response patterns), while moods are feelings that are longer lasting than emotions and have no clear starting point of formation.
700
What are the three steps for memory processing?
Encoding, storage, retrieval
800
Mirror neurons in monkeys responded differently for each condition - they did not fire for the grasping motion without actually grasping - true for both full vision mimicking and hidden mimicking when the monkey knew there was no object. Means monkeys can infer the goal of an action even when the visual information is incomplete (e.g. hidden condition)
800
What cortical structures are used in attention?
Superior frontal cortex, posterior parietal cortex, posterior superior temporal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex.
800
Which parts of the brain make up the emotion circuitry?
Amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and insula
800
Memory encoding is broken down into what two steps?
Acquisition: Filtering the sensory information and deciding what information makes it into short-term memory - Involves Attention Mechanisms
Consolidation: Changes in the brain that stabilise a memory for long-term memory - Can take days, months or years
900
What parts of the brain make up the mirror system in humans?
BA44 (Broca's area), BA6, STS (Superior Temporal Sulcus) and PPC (posterior parietal cortex)
900
Which sub-cortical structures are used in attention?
Superior colliculus in the midbrain and pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus
900
Which part of the brain is responsible for "quick and dirty processing" and conditioned emotional responses?
Amygdala. An underactive/damaged amygdala leads to minimal emotional response and not learning from a stimulus (e.g., psychopaths). Overactive related to anxiety
900
What parts of the brain make up the
1000
How do mirror neurons work according to the Simulation Hypothesis?
By simulation- Since action and simulation use some of the same neural substrate, that would explain why the same neurons are firing during action observation as during action execution
1000
What are the three main theories of attention?
Feature integration theory, Biased competition theory and Premotor theory of attention.
1000
What can damage to the Orbitofrontal Cortex result in?
Lack of emotion in decision-making (low-risk aversion), poor social judgement (antisocial behaviour) and poor emotional control (anger). Example: Phineas Gage
1100
What is the function of the F5ab-AIP Circuit?
Transforms intrinsic physical features of objects (e.g., shape, size) into hand motor programs required to act on them. The brain is preparing for how to interact with that object
Examples: Manipulate objects, grasp them, hold them, tear them apart.
1100
What is neglect and how does this differ from blindness?
Neglect is the complete lack of attention to an entire hemisphere (e.g. eating from one side of a plate, or reading one side of a book). Patients with attention are not blind in one half, they can actually see flashes of light or see an object when there is no competition with an object in the preferred half, it is just that they prefer one side.
1100
Which part of the emotional circuitry is involved in decision-making, attention, and physical representations of emotions (e.g. shaking with fear)?
Anterior Cingulate Cortex
1200
How do canonical neurons work according to the simulation hypothesis?
By Simulation. The sight of a graspable object triggers the simulation of grasping - same neural substrate
1200
What type of attention is predominantly impacted by ADHD and why might this be?
Voluntary attention. Research shows that patients with ADHD have reduced white matter, especially in the prefrontal cortex and in the voluntary attention networks.
1200
What is the function of the Insula?
Role in processing convergent information to produce an emotionally relevant context for sensory experiences, such as disgust and feelings of unease- helps in experience of pain
1300
Premotor and parietal areas are neurally integrated and work together to construct a representation including____
(a) Actions (mirror), together with (b) objects acted on (canonical), and (c) locations toward which actions are directed (action-location)
1300
What is feature integration theory?
Items are easier to identify when they have salient features (pop-out search) - the reaction time remains the same even if you add new distractions. It is much harder when the target shares the same features (conjunction search) - Reaction time increases as more distractors are added.
1300
Empathy is an emotional response (not only cognitive) triggered by observing or imagining the emotion experienced by another person. Why is it important to be aware that the emotion is coming from another person?
You can regulate and control this (can either activate it more or inhibit it) - intentional cognitive processing that feeds down to your motor response.
1400
The Anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and Right ventral prefrontal cortex (RVPFC) are both active when a person is socially excluded - how are these areas interesting?
ACC changes mediated the RVPFC-distress correlation, suggesting that RVPFC regulates the distress of social exclusion by disrupting ACC activity
1400
What does biased competition theory state about attention?
There is a competition between two stimuli and we must decide which one to attend to, the one you are more biased towards, your brain will pay more attention. This competition is on a neural level: neurons will fire at a higher rate for attended stimuli. Biases can include priming or schema.
1500
What is the connection between physical pain and social pain?
They have the same neurocognitive basis, alerting us to injury to our social connections, and allowing restorative measures to be taken – This could explain why social and physical pain are affected in a similar way by social support and neurochemical interventions
1500
Which theory of spatial attention states that attention is nothing more than a preparation of motor action?
Premotor theory of attention (Rizzolatti et al., 1987). Encompasses both overt orienting, in which actual movement occurs, and covert orienting (a movement that is planned but not executed).