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Learning Final Exam
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Parietal lobe | Location of the somatosensory cortex |
| Temporal lobe | Location of the auditory cortex |
| Occipital lobe | Location of the visual cortex |
| Unimodal association cortex | Also called modality-specific, it receives input from primarily the primary sensory cortex of the specific sensory modality. |
| Heteromodal association cortex | Also called higher-order, it carries out the highest order mental functions that combines different types of information |
| Network of neurons located in different cortical areas | Where more complex memories that involve multiple sensory modalities are stored |
| Medial temporal lobe | Part of the brain known to be necessary for encoding declarative memories, and damage to this part is known to cause anterograde amnesia |
| Anterograde amnesia | A severe impairment in the ability to form new declarative memories |
| Fornix | A band of white tissue in the brain that contains the axons of basal forebrain neurons that project to the hippocampus |
| Frontal cortex in memory encoding | Projects to the hippocampus and may regulate what information gets encoded |
| Basal forebrain in memory encoding | Regulates what information gets stored by altering neural activity in the hippocampus |
| Retrograde amnesia | Loss of memories for events that occurred before the injury |
| Ribot gradient | Retrograde memory loss is worse for events that occurred shortly before the injury than for events that occurred in the distant past |
| More recent memories | The type of memories that are the most vulnerable to retrograde amnesia |
| Standard consolidation theory | The hippocampus and medial temporal lobe structures are required for the initial storage and retrieval of an episodic memory, but their contribution diminishes over time until the cortex is capable of retrieving the memory without hippocampal help |
| Multiple trace theory | When an event is experienced, it can be stored as an episodic memory by an ensemble of neurons in the hippocampus and in the neocortex. The hippocampus keeps track of episodic info for memories |
| Slow wave sleep | A phase of sleep characterized by large, slow oscillations in the brain that are highly synchronized over wide brain areas |
| Importance of slow wave sleep | During slow-wave sleep, networks of neurons in the hippocampus that were active during the day become active again, rapidly and spontaneously replaying activity patterns, suggesting sleep is important for memory consolidation |
| Skill memory | Remembering how to do things |
| Skill | An ability to perform a task that can improve over time through practice |
| Perceptual-motor skill | Learned movement patterns guided by sensory inputs |
| Examples of perceptual-motor skills | Hockey, gymnastics, soccer, darts, ping-pong |
| Cognitive skill | A skill that requires problem solving or the applicaiton of strategies |
| Examples of cognitive skill | Chess or poker |
| Examples of complex skills | Playing a musical instrument, typing an essay on a computer |
| Perceptual component of playing a guitar | Seeing the notes and strings |
| Motor component of playing a guitar | Movements with fingers |
| Cognitive component of playing a guitar | Reading and interpreting the sheet music |
| Perceptual component of typing an essay | Seeing the keys |
| Motor component of typing an essay | Movements with fingers |
| Cognitive component of typing an essay | Reading and conceptualizing ideas |
| Skill memories vs. episodic and semantic memories: skill memory | Difficult to convey except by direct demonstration, tend to be implicit memories, require several repetitions, tend to be long-lasting |
| Skill memories vs. episodic and semantic memories: episodic and semantic memories | Can be communicated flexibly in different formats, are explicit memories that are consciously accessible, and can be acquired in a single exposure |
| Closed skill | A skill that involves performing predefined movements that, ideally, never vary |
| Open skill | A skill in which movements are made on the basis of predictions about changing demands of the environment |
| Closed skill examples | Conveyor belt workers, drills for most sports, gymnastic routines, darts |
| Open skill examples | Games in sports, soccer, ping pong |
| Perceptual-motor skills | The type of skills thought to develop first in humans and that are more prevalent across animal species |
| Power law of practice | The degree to which each new practice session improves performance diminishes; learning occurs quickly at first and then slows down |
| Feedback | Enhances skill learning along with practice |
| Massed practice | Concentrated, continuous practice of a skill |
| Spaced practice | Practice of a skill that is spread out over several sessions |
| Constant practice | Practice involving a constrained set of materials and skills |
| Variable practice | Practice involving the performance of skills in a wide variety of contexts |
| Gradual practice | Incrementally increasing the difficulty as training progresses |
| Ideal practice schedule for ease and high retention | Use variable practice, gradual practice, and spaced practice |
| Serial reaction time task | Measures implicit learning. There are two groups, one that does random trials where participants press keys in an unpredictable order in response to visual cues, and sequential trials where participants press keys in a repeating sequence of ~12 |
| Implicit learning | Learning that happens incidentally, without awareness of what has been learned |
| Motor program | A sequence of movement that an organism can perform automatically. They are formed through extensive practice and are desirable because they expend less energy than normal |
| Fitts's 3-stage model of skill learning | 1. Cognitive stage, 2. Associative stage, 3. Autonomous stage |
| Cognitive stage | When an individual must actively think to encode and perform a skill and performance is based on rules that can be verbalized. (Ex. using written instructions to set up a tent) |
| Associative stage | When learners begin to use stereotyped actions in performing a skill and rely less on actively recalled memories of rules. (Ex. Setting up a tent in a fixed sequence without instructions) |
| Autonomous stage | When a skill or subcomponents of the skill become motor programs and thinking too much can impair performance. (Ex. Setting up a tent while carrying on a discussion about politics) |
| Rotary pursuit task | Individuals keep track of a stylus above a fixed point on a rotating disk. Practice decreases the effects of prior experience and increases the genetic influences on learning skills |
| Talent | A person's genetically endowed ability to perform a skill with little effort |
| Transfer of training | Transfer of skill memories to novel situations |
| Transfer specificity | Restricted applicability of skills to specific situations |
| Identical elements theory | Transfer of learned abilities to novel situations depends on the number of elements in the new situation that are identical to those in the situation in which the skills were encoded |
| Learning set formation | The ability to learn novel tasks rapidly based on frequent experiences with similar tasks |
| Skill decay | Loss of a skill due to non-use, usually as a function of time/lack of use and retrospective interference |
| Parts of the basal ganglia | Striatum, globus pallidus, substantia nigra, subthalamic nucleus, dorsal striatum (caudate and putamen), and ventral striatum (nucleus accumbens) |
| Functions of the basal ganglia | Discriminative stimulus and response association learning in operant conditioning, learning, planning, and producing skilled movements, and perceptual-motor and cognitive skill learning |
| Basal ganglia in memory | Involved in initiating and maintaining movement (regulate velocity, amplitude, and direction), and is especially important for non-declarative memory |
| Parkinson's disease | Is caused by clumps of protein that kill dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra neurons. Known for impairments in perceptual-motor skill learning |
| Alzheimer's disease | Categorized by a loss of tissue in the temporal lobe and hippocampi and thinning of the cerebral cortex and widening of the sulci. Known for impairments in declarative memory |
| Hippocampus (rats) | The part of the brain you would lesion if you wanted to impair the ability of a rat to learn an episodic memory |
| Basal ganglia (rats) | The part of the brain you would lesion if you wanted to impair the ability of a rat to learn a perceptual-motor skill |
| Cerebellum (memory) | A part of the brain located below the temporal and occipital lobes which is known to be especially important for perceptual-motor learning, implicit learning, and learning cognitive skills |
| Cerebral cortex (skill learning) | Involved in controlling complex actions |
| Basal ganglia (skill learning) | Links sensory events to responses, and is involved in developing motor programs |
| Cerebellum (skill learning) | Regulates timing and fine tuning of movements, and is involved in developing motor programs |
| Working memory | The active and temporary representation of information that was just experienced or retrieved that is maintained for the short term, available for manipulation or use to complete a task (info maintained for long enough to complete a task) |
| Cognitive control | The manipulation and application of working memory for planning, task switching, attention paying, stimulus selection, and the inhibition of inappropriate reflexive behaviors (the use of working memory as a tool) |
| Working memory (related to short term memory) | Used the term to discuss the use of STM storage, it is a way to use STM as a cognitive tool to do something |
| Chunking | Increases STM capacity, a strategy you could use to get around the fact that we have a limited capacity as George Miller described |
| Atkinson-Shiffrin Multi-Store Memory Theory | Describes how info can be stored in the brain by progressing through 3 stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory |
| Sensory memories | Brief, transient sensations of what you have just perceived when you have seen, heard, touched, smelled, or tasted something. There is a visual sensory memory for everything we see, it just rapidly fades |
| Short-term memory | A temporary memory that is maintained through active rehearsal, control processes are rehearsal, coding (verbal), decision, and retrieval strategies |
| Long-term memory | Permanent or near-permanent storage of memory that lasts beyond a period of conscious attention |
| STM vs. LTM (STM) | Refers to items in our active conscious awareness, rapidly accessed, limited in capacity (~7 items or concepts), forgotten quickly (~15-30 seconds without continuous rehearsal), capacity is dependent upon encoding |
| STM vs. LTM (LTM) | Not currently in consciousness, accessed more slowly, unlimited in capacity, forgotten more slowly |
| Baddeley Model of Working Memory | How the STM works, goes into detail on control processes. Includes the central executive, phonological loop, and visuospatial sketchpad |
| Visuospatial sketchpad | Working memory that holds visual and spatial images for manipulation |
| Phonological loop | Working memory that maintains auditory memories by internal (subvocal) speech rehearsal |
| Central executive | Monitors and manipulates working memory buffers, providing cognitive control of working memory |
| Central executive manipulations | Adding to and deleting from items in the buffers, selecting among items to guide behavior, retrieving info from LTM, and transferring info to LTM |
| Working memory place model | Known as "multi-store" models of memory because they imply the existence of two or more different places for memories to be stored. Like an exhibit with a bunch of different rooms that each have different paintings |
| Working memory state model | Have been referred to as "unitary-store" models of memory because they imply that there is only one place for memory, although the memories can be in various states. Like one large gallery room with one painting lit up |
| Delayed non-match to sample task (DNMTS) | Test for familiarity and visual memory that involves remembering an object seen at the trial's start. Visuospatial working memory is assessed with short delays |
| How to improve working memory | Use both visuospatial sketch pad and phonological loop, stop maxing out working memory with unnecessary multitasking, chunk items by grouping them with a concept, and create a third working memory buffer (like a planner) |
| Cognitive control behaviors | Controlled updating of STM, goal setting and planning, task switching, and stimulus attention and response inhibition |
| N-back test | Participants must press a button when the target appeared "n" spots before in a series of numbers, letters, or shapes (e.g. 2-back or 5-back). Measures controlled updating of STM |
| Self-ordered memory task | With a grid of cards, the participant points to one picture on the card. The process repeats until they point to all 6 items without repeating any. Measures controlled updating of STM |
| Tower of Hanoi | Move a set of disks stacked smallest to largest to a third pole so they are still stacked smallest to largest, moving one disk at a time and only being able to stack small disks on top of large disks. Measures goal setting and planning |
| Wisconsin card sorting test | Participant is shown a card and has 4 possible cards to match it with, they try to match it and are told "correct" or "incorrect", and they keep sorting but then the rule will change but they only know it changed based on feedback. Measures task switching |
| Stroop task | Requires participants to name the color a text is printed in and not read the written word. Measures stimulus selection and response inhibition |
| Prefrontal Cortex (PFC) | Damage to this part of the brain would greatly impair cognitive control of working memory/executive function |
| Parts of the PFC | Orbital prefrontal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, and lateral prefrontal cortex (split into the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) |
| Right | The hemisphere known to play a greater role in maintaining information in the visuospatial sketchpad |
| Left | The hemisphere known to play a greater role in maintaining information in the phonological loop |
| Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC) | Sustained neural activity in this part of the brain is known to be critical for controlling working memory despite environmental distractions. Acts as the central executive in Baddeley's model of working memory |
| Ventrolateral Prefrontal Cortex (VLPFC) | Is important for maintaining buffers, mostly in terms of rehearsal. The DLPFC manipulates information, but it likely communicates with this part of the brain which then maintains the information |
| Learning | The process by which changes in behavior arise as a result of an organism's experience interacting with the world. |
| Memory | The organism's internal record of past experiences, which are acquired through learning. |
| Empiricism | All the ideas we have are the result of experience. |
| Nativism | The bulk of our knowledge is inborn (or native). |
| Classical conditioning | Pairing a neutral stimulus with an unconditioned stimulus to eventually result in an automatic response to the neutral stimulus. |
| Operant conditioning | organisms learn to make responses to obtain or avoid outcomes; the organism's behavior is instrumental in determining whether the consequences occur |
| Independent variable | The variable that is manipulated, the variable "I" can change. |
| Dependent variable | The measurable effect, outcome, or response in which the research is interested. |
| Extinction | The process of reducing a learned response to a stimulus by ceasing to pair that stimulus with a reward or punishment. |
| Generalization | The transfer of past learning about a stimulus to a novel similar stimulus. |
| Law of effect | The probability of a particular behavioral response increased or decreased depending on the consequences that followed. |
| Learning curve | A graph of the changes in behavior that occur over the course of learning. |
| Latent learning | Learning that is unconnected to a positive or negative consequence and that remains undetected until explicitly demonstrated at a later stage. Learning is not apparent until there is an incentive to display changed behavior. |
| Hypothesis | Testable statement about the relationship between two or more variables |
| Neuroscience | The study of the nervous system and its functions. |
| Nervous system | An organized group of cells specialized for electrochemical communication that detect the chemical and physical environment, integrate and store information, and mount an appropriate response to stimuli that is most advantageous to the organism |
| Myelin | A fatty protein coating from glial cells that speeds up action potentials or electrical signaling in neurons |
| Synapse | The small space between the axon terminal of one neuron and the dendrite of another where chemical communication takes place |
| Neurotransmitter | Chemical messages released by a neuron that allow a neuron to affect another cell |
| Action potential | Brief changes in the distribution of charge across the plasma membrane due to charged particles (ions) moving through proteins called channels |
| Central nervous system | CNS, consists of the brain and spinal cord |
| Peripheral nervous system | PNS, consists of motor and sensory neurons that connect the brain and spinal cord to the rest of the body |
| Neuron | "Excitable" cells responsible for information transfer |
| Glia | Cells in the nervous system that support, nourish, and protect neurons |
| Presynaptic neuron | The cell sending the signal, ultimately releasing neurotransmitters |
| Postsynaptic neuron | The cell receiving the signal, where the neurotransmitters bind to receptors |
| White matter | Mostly myelinated axons |
| Gray matter | Mostly cell bodies and unmyelinated axons |
| Hebbian plasticity | Neurons that fire together wire together. Neurons that fire together form stronger synapses and an incomplete stimulus could trigger activation of the whole network of neurons in the cortex |
| Long-term potentiation | LTP, a process in which synaptic transmission becomes more effective as a result of recent activity |
| Sensitization | Experiences with an arousing stimulus lead to stronger responses to a later stimulus |
| Habituation | A decrease in the strength or occurrence of a behavior after repeated exposure to the stimulus that produces that behavior |
| Dual process theory | The theory that habituation and sensitization neural processes are independent of each other but operate in parallel |
| Priming | A phenomenon in which prior exposure to a stimulus can later affect the ability to process a similar or related stimulus |
| Perceptual learning | Learning in which repeated experiences with a set of stimuli make those stimuli easier to distinguish. It may involve purposeful training, but can also occur without training |
| Spatial learning | The acquisition of information about one's surrounding |
| Cortical plasticity | The capability to change the organization of sensory cortices and the receptive fields of sensory cortex neurons as the result of experience |
| Critical period | A period in early life where deprivation or atypical experiences cause adverse effects that cannot easily be reversed by providing the appropriate experience later |
| Somatosensory homunculus | The "little man" caricature. Cortical neurons that receive sensory are arranged in an orderly fashion by body part, and the amount of dedicated cortex indicates how innervated that body region is |
| Receptive field | Region of sensory space (e.g. on the skin or part of the visual field) or range of sensory stimulus (e.g. 0.5 - 1 kHz tones) over which a sensory stimulus can alter a neuron's firing rate |
| Prediction error | The mismatch or difference between what was expected and what actually occurred |
| Skinner box | A chamber for operant conditioning that is designed so that reinforcement or punishment is automatically delivered when an animal makes a particular response |
| Shaping | An operant conditioning technique in which successive approximations to the desired response are reinforced |
| Extinction | The outcome no longer occurs no matter what response the animal makes which leads to a decrease in responding in the presence of the discriminative stimulus |
| Chaining | An operant conditioning technique in which organisms are gradually trained to execute complicated sequences of discrete responses |
| Reinforcer | A consequence of behavior that leads to increased likelihood of that behavior in the future |
| Punisher | A consequence of behavior that leads to decreased likelihood of that behavior in the future |
| Primary reinforcer | Outcomes that naturally satisfy a biological need (e.g. food, water, sleep, or sex) |
| Secondary reinforcer | A reinforcer that initially has no biological value but that has been paired with a primary reinforcer (e.g. money) |
| Continuous reinforcement schedule | A reinforcement schedule in which every instance of the response is followed by the reinforcer |
| Partial reinforcement schedule | A reinforcement schedule in which only some instances of the response are followed by the reinforcer |
| Delay discounting | The progressive reduction (or discounting) of the subjective value of a reward the longer it is delayed |
| Generalization | The transfer of past learning to novel events and problems |
| Discrimination learning | The process by which animals or people learn to respond differently to different stimuli |
| Primary motor cortex (operant conditioning) | Precentral gyrus, sends motor commands to neurons in the spinal cord |
| Dorsal striatum (operant conditioning) | Plays a critical role in operant conditioning, specifically the ability to learn associations based on feedback about reinforcement and punishment |
| Orbital frontal cortex (operant conditioning) | Receives inputs that convey the full range of sensory modalities plus visceral sensations. Outputs travel to brain areas, including the striatum, where they can help determine which motor responses are executed. It codes for specific predicted outcomes |
| Hedonic value | The subjective "goodness" of a reinforcer, or how much we "like" it |
| Motivational value | Means how much we "want" a reinforcer and how hard we are willing to work to obtain it. It best describes the function of dopamine in the brain |
| Incentive salience hypothesis | The role of dopamine in operant conditioning is to signal how much the animal "wants" a particular outcome. That is, how motivated the animal is to work for it |
| Episodic memory | Memory for personal experience of specific autobiographical events; it includes information about the spatial and temporal contexts in which the event occurred |
| Semantic memory | Memory for facts or general knowledge about the world, including general personal information |
| Declarative memory | A broad class of memories, both semantic and episodic, that can typically be verbalized or explicitly communicated in some other way |
| Non-declarative memory | Includes skill memory and other types of learning that do not fall under either the episodic or semantic memory categories and that are not always consciously accessible or easy to verbalize |
| Implicit memory | Memory that occurs without the learner's awareness: conscious awareness of learning a skill can occur but it's not necessary for these memories to form |
| Explicit memory | A category of memory that includes semantic and episodic memory and that consists of memories of which the person is aware: you know that you know the information |
| Source monitoring errors | Occur when we remember info but are mistaken about the specific episode that is the source of that memory |
| False memory | Memory for events that never actually happened, and can occur when people are prompted to imagine missing detail |
| Proactive interference | Disruption of new learning by previously stored information |
| Retroactive interference | Disruption of old (previously stored) information by more recent learning |
| Receptors | Proteins in the cell membrane that produce a change in the cell in response to a chemical messenger binding to the receptor |
| Neural circuitry underlying gill withdrawal reflex | First, the tactile stimulus of the siphon activates sensory neurons. Then sensory neurons synapse and excite motor neurons that innervate the gill. If the motor neuron is excited above threshold, it will fire and excite the muscles that contract the gill |
| Glutamate | The neurotransmitter the siphon sensory neuron releases in the gill withdrawal reflex |
| How does neural signaling change during habituation of the gill withdrawal reflex in sea slugs? | Less glutamate is released because fewer synaptic vesicles fuse with the pre-synaptic membrane. There is a decreased electrical response, so neurons don't reach the threshold and fire. Decreased neurotransmitter release. |
| Serotonin | The neurotransmitter the facilitating interneuron releases |
| Positive Prediction error | CS predicts nothing or too little, but US unexpectedly occurs or is unexpectedly strong, causes an increase in learning to associate CS and US (conditioning) |
| Negative prediction error | CS predicts US, but no US occurs, causes a decrease in learning to associate CS and US (extinction) |
| Variable effect of punishment | Punishing a cat for jumping on the counter while preparing its food may cause it to jump on the nearby table instead. It may be better to reinforce sitting by the food dish instead. |
| Positive reinforcement | The response causes a reinforcer to be added to the environment; over time, the response becomes more frequent |
| Positive punishment | The response causes an undesirable element to be added to the environment; over time, the response becomes less frequent |
| Negative reinforcement | The response causes an undesirable element to be subtracted from the environment; over time, the response becomes more frequent |
| Negative punishment | The response causes a desirable element to be subtracted from the environment; over time, the response becomes less frequent |
| Fixed-interval (FI) schedule | A reinforcement schedule in which the first response after a fixed amount of time is reinforced |
| Variable-ratio (VR) schedule | A reinforcement schedule in which a specific number of responses, on average, must occur before a reinforcer is delivered |
| Fixed-ratio (FR) schedule | A reinforcement schedule in which a specific number of responses must occur before a reinforcer is delivered |
| Variable-interval (VI) schedule | A reinforcement schedule in which the first response after a fixed amount of time, on average, is reinforced |
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