Week 4

• aphasia: disorder caused by damage to the parts of the brain that control language
• broca's aphasia: understands well, but have problems producing speech (generate short, broken sentences with pauses)
• broca’s area: responsible for language production capacity
• wernicke's aphasia: have problems comprehending speech and generates irrelevant replies, produces rapid, fluent and seemingly automatic speech with little meaning
• wernicke’s area: mediates language comprehension
• wernicke-geschwind model: specifies the functional roles of different brain areas involved in language processing along with their connections and interactions
• primary motor cortex: commands that originate here send impulses to muscles, causing them to contract and initiate movement (includes muscles of the mouth (for speaking))
• primary visual cortex: where visual information is processed and is active during reading/writing
• primary auditory cortex: sounds striking the ears are first processed 
• arcuate fasciculus: pathway that connects broca’s area and wernicke’s area

  • damage to this part results in an individual’s difficultly in repeating words that he or she has just heard (conduction aphasia)
• angular gyrus: located behind wernicke’s area

  • damage to this part produces alexia (inability to read) and agraphia (inability to write)
• listening and speaking pathway:

  • first processed in the primary auditory cortex
  • output is passed to wernicke's area (where content is processed and understanding is born)
  • passed along the arcuate fasciculus to broca's area
  • passed to primary motor cortex (where commands to move the muscles of the mouth and produce speech is executed)
• reading and writing pathway:

  • start of primary visual cortex (processes inputs that have originated from words on a page)
  • output to the angular gyrus (where the visual representation of what has been read is converted into an auditory code)
  • goes to wernicke's area
  • then broca's area using arcuate fasciculus
  • finally, to the primary motor cortex
• what is the study of human origin, social and cultural influence on human upbringing and behaviour, and the evolution of homo sapiens?

  anthropology
• evolution: a process that involves adaption to changing environments
• comparative cognition: similarities and differences in cognitive abilities between different animal species 
• evolution psychology: evolution of the mind
• behavioural economics: how evolution has shaped the way we make decisions involving money
• theory of natural selection: involves species variability, inheritance of traits through reproduction, and selection due to environmental change
• variation: differences in physical traits of animals (within species and across species)
• inheritance: passing of genetic features to offspring
• selection: a change in environmental conditions that results in differential inheritance of traits in a population
• adaption: the process by which an animal species changes in response to its environment through variation, inheritance, and selection
• survival: whether an organism lives long enough to reproduce
• sexual selection: inheritance based on mate selection and competition instead of a change in the environment
• ecological niche: how a species fits into its environment, encompassing both its physical habitat and its functional role in the ecosystem
• object permanence: the ability to know that an object exists even though it’s not seen
• memory (crucial adaptive capacity): enables animals to remember there they have looked for something 
• foraging: the act of looking or searching for food

  • involves intensive search in a narrow area followed by occasional extensive search across to a distant area
• transitive interference: capacity to understand the set of relations between two pairs of items that differ along a continuum (if A>B and B>C, then A>C)
• cephalization index adjusts for body size

  • a measure of brain size expressed as a proportion of body size
  • should ideally consider only the cognitive brain size 
  • high K values indicate that an animal has a larger-than-average brain for its body size, while a low K indicates the opposite 
• anthropomorphism: ascribing humanlike characteristics to animals
• anthropodenial: blindness to humanlike characteristics of animals
• stimulus enhancement: imitation based on location or behaviour without any inference of desired goals
• evolutionary psychology: our capacities to think, use language, solve problems and strategically coordinate are greater than those of any other animal
• cosmides and tooby refers to the mind as a collection of special-purpose devices or a “swiss army knife”
• concepts are organized using “fuzzy” categories, where items can be more or less representative of a category
• concepts are organized around representative members of a class (typicality effect)

  • suggests that some items are more prototypical and representative of a category, leading to quicker judgements
• cheater detection: the cognitive mechanisms and social strategies that humans (and animals) have evolved to detect and respond to instances of cheating or deception in social interactions
• wason selection task: task designed to measure a person’s logical thinking ability

  • involves applying the abstract rules of logic to a specific example