Cognitive Psychology, 2nd Ed.
Chapter 2
Mind and Brain
• Materialism regards the mind as the product of the brain and its physiological processes, perhaps as an emergent property of these processes.
• Dualism holds that the mind is an immaterial entity that exists independently of the brain, perhaps with interactions between the two.
Functional Neuroanatomy
• CNS includes 1 trillion neurons (1012) with about 1,000 trillion synaptic connections (1015).
• A single neuron in the brain may receive as many as 10,000 synaptic connections with other neurons.
• Massive parallel processing.
Brain Structures and Functions
• Frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes of cerebral cortex—perception, behavior, and cognition.
• Brainstem (hindbrain and midbrain) and forebrain or diencephalon (thalamus and hypothalamus)—homeostasis and basic life support mechanisms.
• Limbic system (cingulate gyrus, fornix, hippocampus and related structures)—emotional responses and cognitive functions of learning and memory.
Brain Structures and Functions
• Frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes of cerebral cortex—perception, behavior, and cognition.
• Brainstem (hindbrain and midbrain) and forebrain or diencephalon (thalamus and hypothalamus)—homeostasis and basic life support mechanisms.
• Limbic system (cingulate gyrus, fornix, hippocampus and related structures)—emotional responses and cognitive functions of learning and memory.
Brain Structures and Functions
• Frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes of cerebral cortex—perception, behavior, and cognition.
• Brainstem (hindbrain and midbrain) and forebrain or diencephalon (thalamus and hypothalamus)—homeostasis and basic life support mechanisms.
• Limbic system (cingulate gyrus, fornix, hippocampus and related structures)—emotional responses and cognitive functions of learning and memory.
Visual Consciousness
• A critical periods for cortical development in cats show that primary visual cortex is necessary for visual consciousness.
• Blindsight in humans: Damage to primary visual cortex eliminates visual consciousness but a second pathway allows accurate discrimination.
Methods of Cognitive Neuroscience
• Lesions and double dissociations
• Electrophysiology—EEG and ERP
• Positron Emission Tomography (PET)
• Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)
Connectionist Models
• Composed of input, output, and hidden layers of simplistic neurons .
• Sigmoid activation function mimics all or none response of real neurons for extreme input values.
• Connection weights represent the knowledge state of the network.
• Back-propagation of error adjusts weights.