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.