WEEKS 6-12

 
Week 6 - Sensory Systems and Perception
 Eyes (act as cameras for our bodies)
o Photoreceptors: sensors
o Lens: inverts image and projects it onto photoreceptors
 Above 2 at opposite ends of each other
o Retina: like a camera, receptors pick up points of light

o We have a system for enhancing edges

 Ganglion cells excited by light inside the receptive field
 Inhibited by light outside the receptive field
 Retinal ganglion cells can act as edge detectors
o Integrate pattern of lightness over an area
o Indicate whether that pattern of lightness within an area is different to that
in an adjacent area (an edge)
o Selective focus: fovea
 Exact centre of visual field, where light rays enter the eye straight alone eye axis
 Represents the location the eye is pointing wen looking at something
 Greatest concentration of photoreceptors
o Two types of photoreceptors
 Cones
o Colour vision
o High acuity (can see v fine detail w/ cones because they are densely packed
in fovea)
o Work primarily in bright light (daylight 'photopic' vision)
 Rods
o Black and white vision
o Low acuity (widely spaced throughout the retina, more in peripheral visual
field)
o Work well at night (nighttime 'scotopic' vision)
o Depth perception
 Left side of visual field for each eye projects to right side of brain
 Right side of visual field for each eye projects to left side of brain
 Nerve cells cross over at optic chiasm (midbrain)
 Travel to lateral geniculate nucleus of thalamus (LGN) then back to occipital cortex
at back of brain
 Ascending visual system (WHAT and WHERE)
o Primary visual cortex: occipital lobe
 Simple cells
 o Respond to an edge at a particular orientation in a specific part of
the visual field
 Complex cells
o Respond to an edge at a particular orientation but failing anywhere
within a wider field
o May also respond to direction of motion
 Hypercomplex cells
o Responds to a line which ends within the receptive field (end-
stopping)
o Higher levels
 Temporal lobe
o Detectors for combinations of lines/edges (squares or cone shapes)
 Colour + orientation combinations
 Higher still feature detectors --> object detectors
o Agnosia
 Inability to recognise objects
 Prosopagnosia: specific inability to recognise faces
 Parietal lobe (the WHERE pathway)
o Damage to parietal lobe causes problems of spatial awareness (e.g. visual neglect)
o Visual maps
 At all levels of the visual system, info is distributed in multiple parallel visual
maps
 Retinotopic: mimics the layout of the visual field
 Often center-weighted (central 5 degrees represented most strongly)
o Stabilisation of vision
 What happens when you move your eyes?
o Other connection w/ higher cortical levels exist, including frontal
association cortex
o Tell you where your eyes are pointing to make an internal map of
where things are located
 Multiple visual systems
o Blindsight
 Unconscious, but not conscious, awareness of a visual stimuli
 May be observed in some cases of visual neglect
 
Week 9 - Sleep
 Polysomnography
o Electroencephalogram (EEG) = brain waves
o Electroculogram (EOG) = eye movements
o Electromyogram (EMG) = muscle tension
o When viewing, x axis= frequency (cycles/second), y axis = amplitude
 Sleep stages
 o

o Slow wave sleep (SWS) is deep stage of sleep, awakening is more challenging
o REM = rapid eye movement, stage at which we dream

 Stage 3 and stage 4 are SWS

 Hear rate and blood pressure go down in NREM but up in REM
 Sequence of sleep stages on a typical night
 o

o Most SWS (3 & 4) in first part of night

o Most REM sleep in second part of night
 REM sleep
o Activity level in REM but pattern of activation is different to when you're awake
o Pons is important in REM
 Sends signals in two directions;
o Up (activating signal, to thalamus and then cerebral cortex) and
associated w dreams
o Down; to the spinal chord, (deactivating signal)
o Muscle movement doesn't happen in REM
o More likely to remember longer dreams, dreams that happen later in the night, and
dreams that have a lot of emotional intensity
 Sleep regulation
o Sleep as homeostatic
 The longer we are awake, the greater our need for sleep
 Distance from wake up time predicts how sleepy you feel
 Homeostatic drive or process S
 Adenasine (neurotransmitter) builds up during the day, makes you sleep
o Caffeine blocks adenasine
 Doesn't explain why sometimes you can't sleep when you are very sleep
deprived
o Sleep as circadian
 Without any external input, our body cycles at a a 24 hour period
o Behavioural, biochemical and physiological fluctuations occurring
over a aprrox. 24 hour period
 Sleep/wake cycle influenced by internal clock
 Our internal clock is generally longer than 24 hours
o We have mechanisms for synchronising this clock with the outisde
world
 Suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN)
 o

o Light is our primary zeitgeber

 Zeitgeber = time giver
o Retinohypothalamic tract
 Pathway that light travels from retina through optic chiasm into rest of brain
o Jetlag
 Occurs when crossing a large number of time zones very quickly (flight)
 Result of a mismatch between our internal clock and our external day
 Demonstrates importance of circadian rhythm for alertness levels ad sleep
propensity
 Generally worst travelling east
 Can only shift internal clock slowly, and by a few hours at a time
 Easier to shit it later than earlier
 Sleep deprivation
o Increased likelihood to sleep
o Slowed response times
o Narrowing of attention
o Microsleeps, lapses and errors in many cognitive tasks
o Mood/emotion
o Behaviour
o Decision making
 Risk-taking
 Poorer at incorporating feedback
o Moral reasoning
o Physiological effects
o Large variability in response
o Number and intensity of effects increases as deprivation increases
o Ability to compensate by applying extra effort diminishes with greater deprivation
o Performance on practical tasks (e.g. driving)
 Chronic sleep restriction
o Gradually builds up 'sleep debt'
o Similar effects to sleep deprivation over time
 Mood
 Task performance
o Recovery not immediate
  Sleep and memory
o Actively integrate new memories w pre-existing knowledge
o Sleep following declarative task learning improves retention
 Slows forgetting over time
 Memory more resistant to interference
o Sleep can lead to 'insight' into previously learned information
o Slow Wave Sleep particularly important
 How much sleep do we need?
o Varies for individuals
o Generally under-slept
 Other characteristics of sleep
o Satisfaction
o Alertness
o Timing
o Efficiency
o Duration
 'Good sleep'
o Normal range 7-9 hours per night
o Consolidated sleep - no interruptions
o Regular wake/bed times
 Problems w sleep
o Insomnia
 Can consider as symptom or disorder
o Difficulty initiating or maintaining sleep OR poor quality of sleep (at
lease one month)
o Causes significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or
other important areas of functioning
 Treatment w psychological and behavioural strategies
o E.g. restriction of time in bed, sleep hygiene education
 Sleep state misperception
 Hyperarousal
o Sleep related breathing disorders
o Central disorders of hypersomnolence
o Circadian rhythm disorders
o Parasomnias
o Sleep related movement disorders
 
Week 10 - Language and Communication
 Nature of language
o Complexity: speaking and listening
 Pragmatics ('There is quite a draft in here')
 Slip of the tongue ('With this wing I red thee')
 Early grammar ('Mum, he goed away')
o Psycholinguistics:
 The study of the relationship between linguistic behaviour and the
psychological processes (e.g. memory, attention) thought to underlie it
 The common aim of all who call themselves psycholinguists is to find out
about the structures and processes that underlie a human's ability to speak and
understand language
 Perception of speech
 o Speech perception: so called because of its reliance on the perceptual system
 Confusing bc you can perceive sounds without knowing what they mean
o Sounds and sound sequences are analysed and identified as they relate to meaning
o More than auditory perception:
 Meaning plays a crucial role in the identification of speech sounds
 Recognising speech sounds
o Phonology:
 Study of the principles that govern the organisation of sounds in a language
and how sounds vary
o Phonemes:
 Minimum unit of sound (perceptually discriminable) that conveys meaning
in a particular language
o E.g. p vs b, e vs I
o Some problems in decoding:
 Speech is not discrete
 Phonetic segments (sound segments at the level of pronunciation) are not
invariant (e.g.,/p/ in pill vs. spill)
 Pronunciations might differ
 Speech is not always clear BUT we can selectively attend and meaning plays
a role
 Context in continuous speech
o Speech to communicate: listen for meaning
o Intelligibility of speech
o Effect of context on recognition
 Top-down-processing
 Phonemic restoration effect
o Syntax and semantics interact to affect perception
 Understanding the meaning of language
o Meaning conveyed by:
 Syntax
 Prosody (stress, rhythm, pitch)
o Tone of the language
 Rules of conversation
 Shared world knowledge
 Non-verbal cues (non-verbal communication)
o Pragmatics: use and comprehension of language in everyday life
 Syntax
o The rules according to which words are arranged to convey relationships of meaning
within (and also between) sentences
 'I mean what I say' does not equal 'I say what I mean'
o Syntax of language appears to be acquired implicitly
o Some syntax cues are:
 Word order, word class (verb, noun, etc.), affixes, word meaning, prosody
 Hierarchical structure of language
o Sentence --> phrase --> words --> morphemes
 Types of syntactic cues
o Prosody: patterns of stress, pitch, and rhythm
 E.g. John gave Sam the book (watch where emphasis is put and how it
changes the sentence)
 o Semantics/word meaning: strong cue to syntax and subsequent interpretation of
sentence
 'smoking volcanoes can be dangerous' - we understand bc of the context
 How do syntax and semantics relate?
o Surface structure
 Grammatical structure of sentence (concrete)
o Deep structure
 Underlying meaning of a sentence (abstract)
o Transformational rules
 Rules showing relationship between sentences with the same meaning but
different surface structure
o Slips of the tongue
 Insights into mechanisms of speech planning
 Broca's aphasia
o Based in the frontal lobe
o Have trouble forming entire sentences
 Can get basic words out to convey message but miss words like 'is' and 'are'
o Can get comprehension confused when words are presented in a certain order
 Wernicke's aphasia
o Based in temporal lobe
o Poor comprehension of written & spoken language
o Production superficially ok but meaningless
 May produce what sounds like complete normal sentences, but when
listening to sentences they make no sense
 Child language acquisition
o Phonology (system of sounds)
o Morphology (combining sounds into meaningful words)
o Syntax (combining words into sentences)
o Semantics (meaning system)
o Pragmatics (appropriate use of language)
o Nonverbal communication
 Infant's speech perception
o Typical order in which responses to different stimuli appear, with approximate ages
o Neonate
 Startle response, head turning, preference for mother's voice, soother by
voice, can discriminate speech sounds
o 1-2 months
 Smiles in response to speech
o 3-7 months
 Responds differentially to tone of voice
o 8-12 months
 Responds to name, 'no', phrases from routines, recognises some words
 Prelinguistic communication: intentionally
o Some evidence that as early as 6 months babies seem to communicate intentionally
o Types of intentionality shown (later part of year 1):
 Rejection (e.g. pushing away a toy)
 Request (e.g. greeting, gesture to obtain object, lifting arms to be picked up)
 Comment (e.g. pointing at object repeatedly to get adult to attend)
 First words and meaning
o Emerge between 9-12 months
 o Protowords
 Preverbal vocalisations used consistently in set situation and containing
certain sound patterns
 Not meaningful to others, invented by child
o First words
 Mostly refer to concrete objects in the environment
o Overextensions and underextensions
 Occur when inferences go wrong
 Overextension: calling every male 'dad'
 Underextension: calling only their dog 'dog'
 The acquisition of grammar
o Holophrases
 One-word sentences (child can name, request, demand, question, e.g.
'milk')
o Holophrases tend to refer to familiar actions
o Also use nonverbal gestures
o Initially: one word at a time (12-15 months)
o Then: vocabulary spurt, at 18 months as many as 50 words
 More in their passive vocabulary bc they understand more than they can
produce
 Fast mapping
o Explains rapid acquisition
 Two word stage: telegraphic speech
o Locate: there book, demand: more milk, negate: not tired, etc
 Towards grammar (2-5 years)
o From 2-word stage to three, to sentences
o More rules of language inferred
 Overregularisation
o Fotts, hitted, goed
o Cross-linguistic research suggests that all children go through this process
o Overregulariation reflects active participation in learning language rules
 The linguistic environment
o Child-directed speech = motherese
 Exaggerated intonation and pitch (babies prefer this pattern in speech)
 Creates two-way interaction
o Adults interpret any vocalisation as meaningful
o Adults' speech
 Refers to concrete objects and events
 Changes with perception of child's linguistic competencies
 Involves joint attention
 Can include recasting of children's speech
 Behaviourist theories - the case for nurture
o Skinner: language learned through stimulus-response contingencies which are
reinforced
o Mechanisms: classical conditioning; operant conditioning; imitation
 Nativist theories - the case for nature
o Chomsky
 Universal grammar
o Innate set of linguistic principles that is shared across cultures
 Language acquisition device (LAD)
 o Inborn mechanism for acquiring language
 Interactionist theories
o Cognitive theory
 Language as aspect of general cognitive development - does depend on
maturation and experience
o Social communication theory
 Communication and social context of language use are critical
o Types of interactionist theories
 Both children's innate abilities and the environment shape the development
of language
 The bilingual child
o No negative effect on language development - bilingual children have equal
vocabularies
o Positive effects on cognition
 Bilingual children score higher on metalinguistic ability, attentional
flexibility, analytical reasoning
o Apparent disadvantage in processing speed BUT not when controlling for social class
 Second language acquisition
o Critical period - age of acquisition determines proficiency
 Onset at age 2, finish at age 13 (puberty)
 However, no known neurological basis for the end point
o Rate of acquisition: adolescents and adults faster
o Facility of acquisition: affected by similarity between languages
o Pronunciation: poorer the higher the age of arrival/acquisition
o Global comprehension & syntax/morphology: idem
o Success partly determined by individual factors: motivation and acculturation
 Language and thought
o Which comes first?
o Whorf: the language we speak influences our way of thinking and how we perceive
the world
 Linguistic determinism (strong version) - language determines the way we
think
 Linguistic relativity (weak version) - distinctions coded in one language may
not be found in another; unique characteristics of a language may influence
thought and behaviour in subtle ways
o Strong version of this hypothesis is no longer held
 Translation is possible
 Oddities in another language can nonetheless be explained
 Lacking a word does not equal lacking a concept
o But, language does affect perception and memory
 
Week 11 - Navigation
 Spatial navigation
o How we find our way in an environment
 Navigation research framework
o Microscopic analysis
 How do you keep track of your own location and object locations as you
move?
o Small-scale space
o Short time scale
 o Perception
o Macroscopic analysis
 How do you remember where things are?
 How do you use that memory to guide navigation?
o Large-scale space
o Long time scale
o Learning and memory
 Neural mechanisms of location tracking
o The medial temporal lobe (MTL)
 Perirhinal cortex
 Entorhinal cortex
 Parahippocampal cortex
 hippocampus
o Place cells
 In the hippocampus fire when you are in specific locations within a given
time
o Grid cells
 In the entorhinal cortex dire when you occupy one of the hexagonal grid
points within a given environment
o Other types of cells have been discovered
 Head direction cells
 Spatial view cells
 Boundary cells
 Time cells
 Speed cells
 Travel axis cells
o These cells, together with place and grid cells, constitute the neural basis of spatial
navigation
 Location tracking in the human brain
o Early evidence suggests that these basic systems of location are shared across
species
o Between-species differences are present in the way these core systems are fed with
inputs, however
 For example, humans rely heavily on vision to generate these inputs, but
bats primarily use their hearing
 Spatial updating behaviour
o How do we come to achieve such excellent performance?
o What type of information is most relevant?
 Actual experience in walking/moving
 Mental imagery an top-down control
 Observing others walking/moving
o Is any body-based information equally effective for facilitating spatial updating?
o Actively controlled walking enhances spatial updating
o For updating your location as you move, body-based information is useful
o When the body-based info is generated from actively controlled movement, the info
is even more effective
o Are these behavioural observations relevant to the neural mechanisms in the MTL?
o Epilepsy patients who surgically removed their MTL (typically only in one
hemisphere) tend to walk farther than controls
 Microscopic analysis: summary
 o Neurons in the MTL play and important role in keeping track of your location as you
move
o There are many different types of neurons, each of which is tuned to a different
aspect of location information
o Spatial updating behaviour observed in humans shows characteristics that can be
explained by the MTL neurons' properties
 Large-scale navigation
o GPS is helpful when navigation is challenging, but it does not always offer best
navigation experiences
o Two systems of large scale navigation
 Place learning
o Identify object locations within a larger environmental framework
o Rapidly acquired, allows flexible behaviour (e.g. short cut), but
requires conscious retrieval and susceptible to forgetting
o Declarative memory based, MTL-dependent system
 Response learning
o Perform a specific sequence of action
o Slow to learn, only rigid behaviour is possible, but does not require
conscious awareness and much longer-lasting
o Procedural memory based, caudate-dependent system
 Memory for geographical information
o Geographical information is represented in a hierarchical structure
o Judgements about spatial relations are biased by higher-order information (e.g.
which state a city belongs to)
o Distant estimates are often asymmetrical
 Macroscopic analysis: summary
o Large-scale navigation ability is still crucial for our well-being, even though
navigation aids such as GPS are now becoming commonplace
o There are two systems of navigation in the brain
 Place learning for flexible but cognitively demanding navigation
 Response learning for rigid but effective navigation
o Memory for geographical information tends to be biased in a variety of ways
 It is not like a real map at all
 These biases affect how people navigate by using their memories for places
and locations
 
Week 12 - The Psychobiology of Love, Fear, and Loathing
 Emotion vs mood
o Emotion
 Immediate responses to a specific object or situation
o Mood
 Diffuse, long-lasting emotional states
 Love
o Bartels & zeki have performed a number of fMRI studies looking at 'the nerual basis
of love'
o Romantic and maternal love activate a set of overlapping brain structures including
cingulate cortex, insula, hippocampus, and basal ganglia
o There are deactivations of areas including tempo-parietal junction (TPJ) (thought to
be involved in 'mind reading')
 Neurotransmitters and neurohormones
 o At synapses, neurons often secrete chemical signals called neurotransmitters that
diffuse a short distance to bind to receptors on the target cell
o Neurotransmitters play a role in sensation, memory, cognition, and movement
o Neurohormones are a class of hormones that originate from neurons in the brain
and diffuse through the bloodstream
 The endocrine and nervous systems act individually and together in regulating physiology
o Signals from the nervous system initiate and regulate endocrine signals
o The hypothalamus receives information from the nervous system and initiates
responses through the endocrine system
o Attached to the hypothalamus is the pituitary gland composed of the posterior
pituitary and anterior pituitary
 The posterior pituitary stores and secretes hormones that are made in the
hypothalamus
 The anterior pituitary makes and released hormones under regulation of the
hypothalamus
o Hypothalamic-pituitary axis produces oxytocin
 Emotion
o Feeling/experiencing emotion
o Signalling emotion
o Recognising emotion and empathising
 Autonomic nervous system
o Sympathetic
 Controls smooth muscle and glands
 Fight or flight
o Dilates pupils, inhibits flow of saliva, accelerates heartbeat, dilates
bronchi, inhibits digestion, relaxes rectum
o Parasympathetic
 Controls cardiac muscle (heart)
 Rest and digest
o Constricts pupils, stimulates flow of saliva, slows heartbeat, relaxes
bronchi, stimulates digestion, contracts rectum
 Dimensions of emotion
o Arousal
 High: excited, tense
 Low: calm, lethargic
o Valence
 Positive: elated, contented
 Negative: sad, gloomy
 o

 Theories of emotion
o Common sense
 Stimulus comes first, then the subjective experience (fear), then the body
response (arousal)
o 'My heart is pounding because I feel afraid'
o James Lange
 Stimuli comes first, then body response (arousal), then subjective
experience (fear)
o 'I feel afraid because my heart is pounding'
o Cannon Bard
 Visceral changes occur too slowly to precede emotional experience
 Cats with sympathetic nervous system removed still display emotional
reactions to barking dogs
 The thalamus and 'sham-rage'
 Stimuli comes first, then subjective experience (fear) and body response
(arousal) occur at the same time
o The bear makes me feel afraid and my heart pounds
o Two-factor
 Stimuli comes first, then body response (arousal), then interpretation, then
subjective experience (fear)
o My pounding heart means I'm afraid because I interpret the
situation as dangerous
 How can peripheral bodily events influence emotions?
o Schacter injected people with adrenaline or placebo
 Little effect of adrenaline
o Emotion eliciting situation: more fear for a horror movie, more anger when insulted,
etc.
 Evolutionary perspective on emotion
o Charles Darwin
 Emotions are functional (e.g. fight or flight) and confer survival advantage
 Facial signals are universal
 Facial signals of emotion are not arbitrary
 Emotions are categorical: e.g. they have evolved in response to distinct
evolutionary pressures and fulfill different functions
 Haxby's model of the face processing system

 Spontaneous facial expressions of emotion in athletes

o 2004 olympics and paralympic games
o Congenitally blind, noncongenitally blind, sighted athletes
o Analysed expressions after winning and losing
 Ekman's seven basic expressions of emotion
o Happy
o Surprise
o Sadness
o Fear
o Anger
o Contempt
 Emotions non-arbitrary
o Fear and disgust may perform opposite functions in terms of promoting versus
inhibiting sensory input
o Fearful face configuration allows greater field coverage and is associated with faster
eye movements than neutral (baseline) and disgust is lower than baseline
o Fearful face configuration allows faster/greater air intake than neutral (baseline) and
disgust is lower than baseline
 This could enhance/ reduce olfactory sampling
 Fear and the amygdala
o Adolph: amygdala lesions selectively impair fear recognition
o Calder, Lawrence & Young: imaging studies looking at fear conditioning and viewing
facial expressions both activate amygdala
o Suggested that the amygdala is involved in both the experience and the recognition
of fear
 A fast route for threat related stimuli
o In blind-sighted patients threat related faces evoke peripheral indices of fear/threat
related response even when the patient has not consciously perceived the facial
expression
o Such blind findings have given rise to the suggestion that there is a fast subcortical
processing stream that is specific for the detection of threat related materials
 Disgust and the insula
o Gray: impaired recognition of facial expressions of disgust in pre-symptomatic
Huntington's gene carriers
 o Calder, Lawrence & Young review of imaging: right basal ganglia and bilateral insulae
activated by disgusted faces
 Have suggested a special role for the insula in the recognition of disgust
 Both of us disgusted in my insula
o Overlapping region of anterior insula activated whilst smelling disgusting odorants
and whilst viewing the facially signalled disgust of others while smelling odorants
 
Week 13 - REVISION
 Big picture stuff
o Cognitive neuroscience
 The neurobiological approach to cognition
o Cognitive psychology
 The study of mental processes
o Neuropsychology
 The study of neurological processes
 Sensory systems and perception
o Anatomy/function
o Damage/disorder
 Sleep
o Stages/types of sleep
o Circadian, homeostatic
o Sleep deprivation/problems with sleep
 Language and communication
o Theories of language acquisition/development
o Aphasias
o Components of language & communication
 Navigation
o Neural regions/mechanisms
o Factors that affect navigation accuracy and learning
 Emotion
o Neural bases of emotion
o Theories of emotion