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Book Summary for Cognitive Neuroscience
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This is a summary of the book chapters for cognitive neuroscience course. Includes chapters; 1, 2, 5, 10, 11
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Chapter 1- Cognition can be described as a set of processes that perceive and process stimuli,
store and retrieve information, and decide upon and execute actions to achieve
goals.
● Introspection vs Empiricism
- Plato: Nativist- all knowledge is ready at birth, to be remembered later.
- Rationalists- logic, introspection, and intuition lead to knowledge. NATURE
- Aristotle: Empiricist-all knowledge stems from observation.Data&hypothesising
leads to knowledge. NURTURE
● Foundation of modern psychology
- William James: Very influential psychologist-philosopher
- Associationism-activation of part of memory activates associated elements. Can
spread to another memory
● Start of experimental psychology
- Herman Ebbinghaus: Studied his own memory. 3-Syllable learning task(learn, delay,
test, relearn/ free recall). Basic principles: (asymptotic) learning curve, (exponential)
forgetting curve, distributed vs massed practice, savings (relearning becomes easier each
time).
- Ivan Pavlov: Studied learning in animals(dogs).Classical conditioning.
Deconditioning is also possible, then the bell will lose its meaning.
- Edward Thorndike: Instrumental conditioning: subjects learn that actions lead to
+/- consequences. Law of effect: strengthen behavior that leads to positive, weaken
the ones that lead to negative. Survival of the fittest (certain actions either get
selected or die out).
● Behaviorism (Early 20th Century)
- Behaviorism advanced the scientific understanding of behavior in important ways,
including the development of stimulus-response learning paradigms that remain
widely used. It also grounded psychology firmly in an objective experimental
approach
- Though the focus of behaviorists on learning from rewards led them to ignore other
cognitive functions
- John Watson
- B.F. Skinner: ‘Radical Behaviorism’ Skinner box: learning environment for rats.
Outcomes are so opposite that it results in effective and fast learning.
- Operant conditioning-rats
- led to an explosion of interest in methods for reinforcing or discouraging
specific behaviors
● Cognitive Science
- George Miller (1950s)
- people are able to represent only 7 unique items at oen time, span of
“immediate memory”
, - memory for Miller was not a passive representation of sensory stimuli,
but an active recoding of the information stimuli created
- hardware for computers-encoding info in bits etc etc
- mind as computer
- Chomsky
- He argued that behaviorism could never explain the structural and
generative properties of mental phenomena such as human
language. He showed that the inferences drawn by behaviorists could
not eliminate psychological states: on the contrary, their experiments
couldn’t account for even simple elements of real-world behavior
● Neuroscience
- Nervous systems are found in all but the simplest animals. The field of neuroscience
is concerned with how the nervous systems of humans and other animals are
organized and function
- By the 19th century, physicians had become particularly interested in the functional
properties of the cerebral cortex (war wounds/damage to cerebrum leading to
different effects)
- Franz Joseph Gall: different parts of the cerebral cortex – the size of cerebral cortex
could be mapped by measuring bumps on the overlying skull
- Phrenology: mapped the skulls– from these measurements, they constructed
detailed maps that assigned different functions and traits to different parts of
the cortex
- not relative that much these days but now known as localization of
function
- Ramon y Cajal: in the second half of the 19th century – the identification of neurons
as separate cells. This finding implied that cognitive processes are carried out by
large populations of neurons
- parallel and indeed earlier work on the electrical properties of neurons showed that
signals are transmitted long distances along neuronal axons by action potentials
- Chemical substances that neurons use to stimulate the cells they contact,
neurotransmitters, are now known to be released by the terminals of neural axons
at specialized contacts called synapses, where the transmitters then bind to receptor
molecules on target neurons and other cells, thus altering the membrane potential of
the cell contacted.
- Charles Sherrington- reflex circuitry in experimental animals
- Wilder Penfield- applied weak electrical currents to the exposed cerebral cortex of
the patient during neurosurgical sessions - to different parts.
- monitoring the resulting sensations allowed Penfield to create a systematic
map of the somatosensory cortex
- the same approach revealed the organization of the motor cortex, as well as
some of the structural organization of the frontal lobes
- Clinical neuroscience has now shown that neurological conditions such as
Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease reflect specific cellular problems, while
psychiatric disorders such as depression arise from neurotransmitter dysfunction,
which has led to the development of a plethora of drugs that have proved to be
effective treatments.
,● Neurobiological Approach
- The ambitions of cognitive neuroscience go well beyond creating maps of brain
function - neural correlates
- Current research combines information about brain structure and function to create
neurobiologically grounded models of cognition.
- Cognitive neuroscience seeks to create biologically grounded models of cognitive
function
- cognitive neuroscience models can inform and constrain prior cognitive
science models, and point out new directions for neuroscience research.
● Methods
- The experimental and methodological diversity allows cognitive neuroscientists to
explore a given topic in many different ways
- Using multiple methods provides two critical advantages: convergence and
complementarity
- Convergence describes the approach of combining results from multiple
experimental paradigms to illuminate a single theoretical concept
- When the same result is observed across a range of experimental
tasks then that commonality leads to a stronger inference than could
be drawn from any one experiment
- Convergence is often facilitated by meta-analytic methods
- Cognitive neuroscience also benefits from the complementarity of its
research methods, each of which provides a different sort of information about
brain function
- Because brain function is expressed through many diverse
physiological changes, cognitive neuroscientists use a welter of
research methods that provide insight into different aspects of
physiology:
- functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI),
electroencephalography (EEG), positron emission tomography
(PET), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), single-neuron
recording, neurological disorders, lesion studies, assessments
of behavior, and others.
- None of these techniques provide a complete accounting of
brain function
- Each technique carries distinct strengths and limitations, so the results
obtained from multiple techniques are much more compelling than
results derived from only a single approach
, Chapter 2
- Neuroscience-based approaches can be divided into two broad categories:
- (1) studying changes in cognitive behavior when the brain has been perturbed
in some way
- (2) measuring brain activity while cognitive tasks are being performed
- Wilder Penfield - developed procedures for treating patients with severe epilepsy by
destroying the brain tissue in the re- gions where the seizures originated
- Using focal stimulation, he was able to create maps of the sensory and motor
cortices of the brain.
- Penfield found that the layout of these cortical representa- tions followed the
general somatotopic relationships of the different parts of the body
- That is, adjacent body parts generally had adjacent cortical
representations, which together gave rise to a representational map of
the entire body termed a homunculus (meaning literally “little man”)
● Brain Perturbations That Elucidate Cognitive Functions
- Perturbations imposed by stroke, trauma, or disease
- A major advantage of this approach is that if damage to a brain area or system
disrupts a cognitive function, it is likely that the damaged region is involved in some
critical way in the performance of that function.
- Major limitation of clinical-pathological correlations in humans is that the brain
damage is the result of many factors that are not under the control of the
experimenter.
- Moreover, the distribution of brain regions supporting cognitive functions
varies among individuals, making it difficult to generalize results.
- The region of overlap among a group of patients more accurately defines the
part of the brain relevant to the cognitive function at issue
- Another way researchers have defined the relationship between brain damage and
resulting deficits in cognitive functions is by making restricted electrolytic or surgical
lesions in experimental animals, including non-human primates.
- This approach allows the researcher to control the location and extent of brain
damage, limiting it to specific functional areas.
- Lesion studies, whether in humans or in animals, also present problems of
interpretation.
- The mammalian brain is a highly interconnected structure. If one area of the
brain is lesioned, other areas of the brain innervated by the damaged area
may, from the loss of input, also cease to function normally.
- Such effects, known as diaschisis, can lead to wrongly attributing the lost
functionality to the lesioned area rather than to the downstream area.
- Pharmacological perturbations
- Signaling between neurons involves the release of and response to neurotransmitter
molecules at synapses.
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