Cognitive Science Final Exam Questions and Answers, Exams of Brain and Cognitive Science

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COGSCI C100 Final Questions and Verified Answers (100 out of 100) Already GRADED A Common aim of mindfulness therapies cultivating an attitude of awareness of the present moment with acceptance Labeling the fear-inducing object Reduced activity in the amygdala, the seat of fear and other negative emotions - Increased activity in a parts of the prefrontal cortex (right ventrolateral and medial PFC) involved in vigilance and discrimination, relative to controls focused meditation Step 1 of mindfulness practice; enables us to connect with the nonmoving mind and the "suchness" of experience, which produces a sense of general "Okness" default mode network active when we are not focused on a particular task; reduced activity when meditating open monitoring Step 2 of mindfulness practice; mindfulness or awareness of the present moment with acceptance insula specializes in body awareness mental elaborations most of the negative emotions we feel do not come from actual aversive events, but from our reactions to them awe emotion that confers the greatest health benefits compassion meditation emphasis is on generating feelings of benevolence and compassion; Long-term practitioners produced showed high levels of activity in gamma-band frequencies (25-42+ Hz) and increased neural synchrony gamma wave very high-frequency brain wave; size associated with number of neurons firing in sync left prefrontal cortex brain activity in this region is known to be associated with positive outlook and feelings of happiness and well-being three-stage model of memory the disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of old information explicit (declarative) memory Long-term memory for factual knowledge (semantic) and personal experiences (episodic). This type of memory requires a conscious effort to remember and entails making declarations about the information remembered. implicit (nondeclarative) memory Long-term memory for procedural tasks, classical conditioning, and primary effects. This type of memory does not require conscious awareness or the need to make declarations about the information remembered. long-term potentiation an increase in a synapse's firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation. Believed to be a neural basis for learning and memory; Process involves binding of glutamate to NMDA receptor frontal lobes important role in recalling information and holding it in working memory hippocampus a neural center located in the limbic system; helps process explicit memories for storage dissociation when brain damage affects two behaviors very differently, this suggests that the two behaviors are produced by different processes posterior hippocampus contains place cells (spacial navigation); increased size in cab drivers cerebellum important role in forming implicit memories; involved in learning of procedural memories for skills basal ganglia important role in forming implicit memories; deep brain structure important in motor sequencing ACT-R an acronym for "Adaptive control of Thought-Rational"; this approach uses a series of network models in an attempt to account for a wide variety of tasks including memory, learning, spatial cognition, language, reasoning, problem solving, and decision making; The general information processing that takes place in the buffers is symbolic ✧ In contrast, the calculations that determine whether or not a particular item of knowledge ends up in a buffer are subsymbolic anterograde amnesia an inability to form new memories retrograde amnesia an inability to retrieve information from one's past organic amnesia the loss of memory due to biological factors such as brain disorders, tumors, strokes, degenerative diseases, or any other of a multitude of other disruptions of neurological function Korsakoff's amnesia amnesia caused by thiamine deficiency; (bilateral mammillary body destruction, seen in alcoholics); patients tend to make things up (confabulate) rather than admit they can't remember psychogenic amnesia loss of memory resulting from repression of psychological, emotional trauma or damage dissociative identity disorder (DID) a rare dissociative disorder in which a person exhibits two or more distinct and alternating personalities. Formerly called multiple personality disorder. dissociative amnesia inability to recall important personal information, usually precipitated by a traumatic experience; hypnosis may be used to help recover memories dissociative fugue self-reference effect tendency to better remember information relevant to ourselves schemas generalized mental representation or concept of a given class of objects, scenes, or events that can aid (or distort!) recall mood congruence effect Tendency to retrieve experiences and information that are congruent with a person's current mood. mood effect people score more poorly on memory tests when they are depressed Introversion/extraversion factor introverts are more easily distracted by outside noise/music during encoding than extraverts factors that enhance neurogenesis Learning • An enriched environment • Exposure to estrogen • Physical exercise savant syndrome a condition in which a person otherwise limited in mental ability has an exceptional specific skill, such as in computation or drawing; largely attributable to a seemingly limitless memory neurocognitive model of savant syndrome Disruption of global connectivity in neural networks, which results in impairment in certain types of cognitive processing, such as executive function and social cognition; disruption leads to enhanced connectivity in local brain regions, resulting in specialization and facilitation of low-level cognitive processing three stages of memory processing encoding, storage, retrieval; forgetting occurs due to problems in one of these stages encoding failure failure to process information into long-term memory; lack of attention storage decay poor durability of stored memories leads to their decay; primarily due to interference (degree depends on similarity of memories) retrieval failure the inability to recall long-term memories because of inadequate or missing retrieval cues or repression of painful or anxiety-provoking information tip of the tongue phenomenon sensation we have when we are confident that we know the word for which we are searching yet cannot recall it; often can identify important attributes such as the first letter, the number of syllables infantile amnesia the inability to retrieve memories from much before age 3; hippocampus one of the last brain structures to mature and much of our explicit memory is indexed with command of language reconsolidation Whenever we retrieve a memory, the brain rewrites it a bit - it is slightly altered chemically by a new protein synthesis that links it to our present concerns and understanding consistency bias the tendency to reconstruct the past to fit the present repisodic memory recall of a supposed event that is really the blending of details over repeated and related episodes misinformation effect incorporating misleading information into one's memory of an event source amnesia attributing to the wrong source an event we have experienced, heard about, read about, or imagined evidence in support of propositional code People have difficulty identifying that a part belongs to a whole if they have not included the part in their original verbal description of the whole; some ambiguous figures are difficult to reinterpret in a mental image Analog vs propositional code The majority of research supports the analog viewpoint, but some people on some tasks use a propositional code Aphantasia inability to form mental images; only voluntary visualizations which suggests deficits between frontal and visual cortex imagery rehearsal rehearsing a task mentally without observable movement in order to learn it cognitive therapy cognitive rehearsal or practicing a role under conditions that are supposed to represent the real situation Stress Inoculation Therapy a psychotherapy method intended to help patients prepare themselves in advance to handle stressful events successfully and with a minimum of upset. Imagery Rehearsal Therapy (IRT) a treatment involving rewriting a nightmare by visualizing positive images while awake dream reentry technique Imagine yourself back in the dream and determine what else you can do - come up with alternative ways of acting in the dream to effect a more favorable ending skill building hypothesis language is acquired as a result of learning language skills, such as vocabulary and grammar; what the curriculum is currently comprehension hypothesis language skills such as vocabulary and grammar, result from language acquisition; watching movies, reading books, conversations; better for learning language direct access hypothesis Readers recognize words directly from the printed letters indirect access hypothesis Readers convert the printed letters into a phonological code to access the word and its meaning Speech perception in infancy We are all born with the ability to recognize speech sounds or phonemes (e.g., b vs. p) from all the world's languages but gradually lose this ability motherese/child directed speech speech that includes several characteristics that help babies attend and respond to what they hear; utterances are produced with higher pitch and greater pitch fluctuations, slower rate, and are clear and fluent, simple utterances, longer pauses between utterances language acquisition device (LAD) Chomsky's term for a hypothesized mental structure that enables humans to learn language, including the basic aspects of grammar, vocabulary, and intonation. Evidence against LAD Competency in a second language can be attained even when initial exposure to the language happens relatively late Argument against nativist view Connectionist network models demonstrate that it is possible to learn complex linguistic skills without having any explicit linguistic rules encoded in it overregularization The application of rules of grammar even when exceptions occur, making the language seem more "regular" than it actually is. word segmentation In language development, the ability to break the stream of speech sounds into distinct words. Neurolinguistics the study of the relationship between language and the brain hemispheric specialization Left hemisphere typically performs most language processing (95% for the right-handed; 50% for the left-handed); However, right hemisphere interprets a message's emotional tone, decodes metaphors, and resolves ambiguities aphasia difficulty in producing or comprehending speech caused by brain damage Broca's aphasia condition resulting from damage to Broca's area, causing the affected person to be unable to speak fluently, to mispronounce words, and to speak haltingly Wernicke's aphasia condition resulting from damage to Wernicke's area, causing the affected person to be unable to understand or produce meaningful language Bilingualism the ability to use two languages; brain processes in same region when learned early; respond with more "head" than "heart" when using second language disadvantages of bilingualism - May pronounce some speech sounds slightly differently - May take longer to make some language-processing decisions advantages of bilingualism superior performance on measures of ability to follow instructions, as well as certain types of concept formation and problem solving task; delays onset of dementia Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis view that language determines thought; underlying assumption of use of affirmations in cognitive therapy; Russians have distinct names for various shades of blue algorithm A methodical, logical rule or procedure that guarantees solving a particular problem. exhaustive search A search for information in which each item in a set is examined, even after the target is found. heuristics a rule-of-thumb strategy that allows one to reduce the number of operations that are tried in solving a problem; speedier but more error-prone means-end heuristic divide problem into sub-problems and try to reduce difference between initial state and goal state for each of sub-problems General Problem Solver a program whose basic strategy is means-ends analysis analogy approach problem solving is often a matter of finding a useful analogy between the present problem or situation and some other problem or situation with which you are more familiar; candle problem confirmation bias a tendency to search for information that confirms one's preconceptions; obstacle to problem solving cheater detection module A mental module that detects cheaters, those who benefit but do not contribute in the process of reciprocal altruism; explains why humans are better at reasoning for deontic conditionals (rules and permissions) mental set a tendency to approach a problem in one particular way, often a way that has been successful in the past functional fixedness the tendency to think of things only in terms of their usual functions; an impediment to problem solving people who spent longer deliberating over small-cost items were more satisfied, and people who spent shorter deliberating over large-cost items were more satisfied Piaget's stages of cognitive development 1. sensorimotor 2. preoperational 3. concrete operational 4. formal operational object permanence the knowledge that an object exists even when it is not in sight; important accomplishment in sensorimotor stage (0-2years) formal operations stage Piaget's fourth and final stage of cognitive development, in which logical reasoning processes are applied to abstract ideas as well as to concrete objects, and more sophisticated scientific and mathematical reasoning processes emerge. Weaknesses of Piaget's Theory 1. It depicts children's thinking as more consistent than it really is 2. It underestimate the competence of children and infants 3. It underestimates the effects of the social world 4. It is vague about the cognitive processes that give rise to children's thinking and the mechanisms that produce cognitive growth rouge test of self-recognition younger child touches mirror or tries to look behind it to find red-nosed child Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) Vygotsky's concept of the difference between what a child can do alone and what that child can do with the help of a teacher Scaffolding (Vygotsky) support of learning allows students to complete tasks they are not able to complete independently mindreading (theory of mind) the ability to understand other people's mental states; key to human social interaction; involves metarepresentation pretend play make-believe activities in which children create new symbolic relations, acting as if they were in a situation different from their actual one; self-directed -> other-directed -> object-substitution; involves metarepresentation Metarepresentation use of a representation to represent another representation, rather than referring directly to the world false belief task A type of task used in theory-of-mind studies, in which the child must infer that another person does not possess knowledge that he or she possesses (that is, that other person holds a belief that is false). theory of mind an awareness that other people's behavior may be influenced by beliefs, desires, and emotions that differ from one's own; BELIEVES operation is much harder to acquire than the PRETENDS operation intentionality detector responsible for perceptual sensitivity to purposeful movements mindreading system 1. intentionality detector 2. eye direction detector 3. emotion director These first three basic components of mindreading are typically in place by the time the infant is 9 months old Shared Attention Mechanism (SAM) occurs when infants look at objects (and take pleasure in looking at objects) because 1. Another person is looking at object 2. Another person is looking at infant looking at object the empathizing system (TESS) Shift from studying brain localization to functional connectivity, which looks at brains close to their natural state; particularly well suited for schizophrenia because patients have less densely connected modules major depressive disorder - Reduced connectivity between regions in the frontoparietal network (FN), which is involved in cognitive control of attention and emotional regulation − Reduced connectivity between frontoparietal systems and parietal regions of dorsal attention network involved in attending to the external environment − Increased connectivity in the default network (DN), which is believed to support internally-oriented and self-referential thought, such as rumination hallucinations - often have lesions in different parts of the brain, but in each case, the lesion was tightly associated with the extrastriate visual cortex ➜ Symptoms often correlate with damage to a specific circuit, not a specific location hyperarousal - The greater the degree of arousal during and immediately after a traumatic incident, the more likely it is that person will have PTSD or other neuropsychiatric symptoms following trauma ➔ Symptoms less severe if patient is treated quickly after trauma (e.g., with propranolol) - Neural changes of PTSD make a person more susceptible to further traumatizing: exposure to even mild stress when young makes person more vulnerable to trauma-induced brain changes later in life Glucocorticoids Hippocampus contains a large number of these receptors; PTSD is associated with a low number of these dissociative aspect of trauma • Little or no connections forms between the neocortex and memory storage and emotional centers (e.g., amygdala) • In addition, PTSD is associated with overactivation of brain's opioid system: this may cause a numbing of feelings, a sense of being cut off from life or from concern about others' feelings sensitivity to context - How good you are at taking into account the context in which you find yourself in regulating your emotional responses - Differences in hippocampal volume, particularly anterior hippocampus (regulates behaviorial inhibition) - the part closest to the amygdala - as well as strength of connections between hippocampus and other brain regions, especially the prefrontal o As mentioned, PTSD is associated with loss of hippocampal volume psychotherapy - Help patient understand that jumpiness and nightmares, hypervigilance and panics, are part of symptoms of PTSD - this makes the symptoms themselves less frightening - By putting sensory details and feelings into words, memories are brought more under control of the neocortex, where the reactions they kindle can be rendered more manageable helplessness Research suggests that this feeling is what makes a given event subjectively overwhelming in PTSD patients psychodynamic therapy - therapy deriving from the psychoanalytic tradition that views individuals as responding to unconscious forces and childhood experiences, and that seeks to enhance self-insight - Based on view that the reason negative emotional patterns are so difficult to change is that they are not just established through conditioning, but are deeply interwoven into the way we try to gain love Transference the way in which we internalize our parents and project them onto other people client-centered therapy a humanistic therapy, developed by Carl Rogers, in which the therapist uses techniques such as active listening within a genuine, accepting, empathic environment to facilitate clients' growth. (Also called person-centered therapy.); unconditional positive regard mirroring therapist's reflecting back to the client an understanding of his inner state, leading patient to feel acknowledged and understood Emotionally Focused Therapy - Psychotherapy approach based on attachment theory that helps partners understand their attachment-related emotions, communicate their emotions, and collaborate to better meet one another's emotional needs.