In this bundle you can find the lecture notes from the course 'Cognitive Neuroscience' at Utrecht University. Good luck studying!
Franz Joseph Gall suggested that surface of the head depends on mental skills. He is one of the firsts linking the brain to cognition.
Can modern phrenology be seen as modern cognitive neuroscience?
Diffusion-weighted imaging – measures the direction of water movement by comparing responses to magnetic fields in different directions. Shows neural fibre bundles.
Functional MRI – measures how tissue magnetic interactions change over time. Examines the blood flow and oxygenation. Neural activity changes when subject is exposed to a stimulus.
MRI & fMRI advantages:
Single unit recording: record action potentials from individual neurons
Two types of recording:
There are two types of movement:
The motor system has a hierarchical organization:
Attention is selective. Selective attention refers to the allocation of processing resources, generally at the expense of resources allocated to other stimuli.
Neuroscientific concept: attention is the manipulation of activity of population of cells that process sensory information.
Advantages of attention:
Shifts of attention are useful for many daily tasks, such as finding your keys, playing video games, learning, personality and flexibility and efficiency.
Patients with attentional deficits have damage to the frontoparietal network, causes:
Neglect
Representations: somehow the world is represented in the mind and the brain.
Churchland & Sejnowski: the defining function of nervous systems is representational.
Stored representations are believed to depend on the configuration of weights between units. In neural terms, these weights are the strength of synaptic connections between neurons.
Some memory functions
........Read moreThe hippocampus plays a big role in declarative memory: it is the ‘hub’ of memory.
Medial temporal lobe lesions lead to severe and global amnesia. Remote memories are spared after MTL lesions.
Within the hippocampus, there is spatial encoding by place cells.
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Emotion has a signaling function, for example for a threat to integrity.
Emotions trigger adaptive responses. From evolutionary perspective: we use it for responses that are adaptive.
Emotions are universal, the basic emotions are: happiness, surprise, fear, anger, disgust and sadness.
Our brains may have grown in size because we are social animals.
The orbitofrontal cortex plays a role in social functioning.
Somatic marker hypothesis
........Read morePhonology: the study of the abstract sound patterns of a particular language, usually according to some system of rules.
Syntax: the rules for arranging items into their possible permissible combinations in a language.
Semantics: the analysis of the meaning of a language.
Language is a system of discrete infinity. There is a
........Read moreExecutive functions modulate the activity of other cognitive functions in a flexible and goal-directed manner. They perform a supervisory or regulatory role.
Taxonomy of executive functions:
Intelligence:
........Read moreUtility: psychological value assigned to an outcome.
Prospect theory
Development of traits:
Key factor is selection pressure
Are we dealing with common descent or with convergence?
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