week 12

• Reflexes


  Involuntary responses to stimuli
• Instincts


  Automatic, but their resulting behaviors are more complex
• Habituation


  Occurs when an organism reduces its response to unchanging, harmless stimuli
• Sensitization


  Occurs when repeated exposure to strong stimulus increases response to other environmental stimuli
• Classical conditioning


  Organisms learn that stimuli act as signals predicting occurrence of other important events
• Long-term memory


  Holds unlimited amounts of information for unlimited periods
• Semantic memory


  Contains basic knowledge of facts and language
• Episodic memory


  Relates to personal experiences
• Procedural memory


  Stores information about motor skills and procedures such as riding a bicycle, using a software program, or cooking your favorite meal.
• Retrograde amnesia


  Inability to remember things prior to injury
• Anterograde amnesia


  Inability to remember new things after injury
• Amnesic syndromes appear to be split into two broad types on the basis of their gross anatomical origins.

  • Diencephalic structures
  • Temporal lobes of the cerebral cortex
• Language


  Central to human social and cognitive processes
• Aphasia


  Total or partial loss of ability to produce or comprehend spoken language, most cases result from cerebrovascular accidents (strokes).
• Broca's Aphasia


  A condition marked by the production of slow, laborious speech accompanied by good comprehension, poor repetition, and poor naming
• Conduction Aphasia


  A condition characterized by fluent speech and good comprehension but poor repetition and naming, believed to result from damage to the arcuate fasciculus and underlying structures.
• Global Aphasia


  Patients lose essentially all language functions., including both language production and comprehension.
• Alexia


  Deficit in reading or pure word blindness
• Agraphia


  Deficit in writing or inability to write, results from damage to motor areas responsible for making skilled movements
• Dyslexia


  Unexpected difficulty in reading fluently, strongly influenced by genetics, often involves poor phonological awareness
• Reflexes 


  These behaviors are produced by prewired neural connections or reflex arcs.
• Reflexes 


  Have the advantage of producing rapid, reliable responses, but their inflexibility can be a disadvantage when the environment changes.
• Instincts 


  Most instinctive behaviors involve mating or parenting behavior.
• Learning, or a relatively permanent change in behavior (or the capacity for behavior) due to experience, provides organisms with the most flexible means for responding to the environment
• Associative 


  Occurs when an organism forms a connection between two features of its environment.
• Associative 


  Classical conditioning, which allows organisms to learn about signals that predict important events, falls into this category.
• Nonassociative


  including the processes of habituation and sensitization, involves changes in the magnitude of responses to stimuli rather than the formation of connections between specific elements or events
• Habituation


  A reduction in response to a repeated stimulus
• Sensitization


  A type of learning in which experiencing one stimulus heightens the response to subsequent stimuli
• Classical conditioning


  A type of associative learning in which a neutral stimulus acquires the ability to signal the occurrence of a second, biologically significant event
• Classical conditioning


  • Possible Underlying Mechanisms in Vertebrates
  • Participation of the amygdala in classically conditioned fear responses in rats
  • Participation of circuits in the cerebellum, including the interpositus nucleus, in the conditioning of skeletal reflexes such as the eyeblink
  • Participation of forebrain structures in trace conditioning
• Information processing models of memory


  Assume that information flows through a series of stages on its way to permanent storage in memory, not only do these models provide a helpful framework for thinking about memory, but they also predict the participation of different brain structures in each stage of processing.
• Although memory commonly refers to the storage and retrieval of information, there is no absolute boundary between the processes of learning and those of memory
• Learning and memory are best viewed as occurring along a continuum of time.
• Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of Memory


  What model is this

  
• The Atkinson-Shiffrin Model of Memory According to the information processing model proposed by Atkinson and Shiffrin, information is processed in a sequence of steps.
• Sensory Memory 


  Holds large quantities(capacity) of information for several seconds (last up to 1 or 2 seconds).
• Short-term memory


  Holds limited quantities of information (Small (5-9 items) capacity) for limited periods of time(last up to 15-18 seconds).
• Long-term memory 


  Hold unlimited amounts of information for unlimited periods of time.
• Information that does not move to the next stage for processing will be permanently lost.