Take Notes

Deficits in object recognition: Agnosias

Appreceptive agnosia (ventral-stream disorder)
Prosopagnosia
Deficit in the ability to recognize faces
o Bilateral lesions from multiple strokes etc.
o Specific to visual doman
o Normal sensory function
Congenital prosopagnosia: may involve a gene mutation
that disrupst the developmental.
Face Processing Regeions
On phone
Ar eFaces Special? Fusiform Face Area
Face-specific hypothesis
o Faces activate the FFA
o FFA importanat for processing invariant facial
properties (while STS for processing more dynamic
facial featrues)
Expertise hypothesis
o Faces are only special bc we have so much
experience w them
o Fusiform response increases as expertise develops
o Supportive evidence: afce recognition relies on.
Dissociations between face and Object Processing
Supports the hypothesis that the brain has
functionally.
Other Category-Specific Systems
 Face recognition: fusiform face area, occipital face area,
and superior temporal sulcus
Places and scenes: parahippocampal area and posterior
parietal cortex
Other body parts: exxrastriate body area and fusiform
body area
Mind Reading: encoding, decoding, predicting
Encoding
o How stimulus features are represented in neural
acitivity
o Predict resulting BOLD activity
Decoding (mind reading)
o Predicting the stimulus that is being viewed when a
particular brain state is observed
BOLD activity is used to predict the observed
stimulus
An accurate hypothesis of how info is
represented in the brain (feature space) is
needed
Useful to identify locked-in syndrome patients
CH. 7 ATTENTION
Attention
The process by which certain info is selected for further
processing.
The anatomy of attention
Main subcortical region:
o thalamus: reflexive attention
Main cortical regions:

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 o Fromtal cortex
o Posterior parietal
When attention fails
Balints syndrome
o Only one or a small subset of available objects is
precieved at the same time, although patients acan
see each object when presented individually
o Bilateral damage to posterior parietal and occipital
corticies
o Problems w object based attention
Unilateral spatial neglect (or simply neglect)
o Reduced attention to one (usually left) side of the
scenes and objects, as if they do not exist
o Damage to the right parietal, temporal, and/or
frontal corticies, as well as subcortical structures
o Object/scene-based neglect
o Affects external and interally generated obects.
Selective attention
Overt vs covert attention
Helmholtzs experiment
We can enhane perception if we focus our attention on a
location in the visual field
However, enhancing perectpion in one part of the visual
field takes place at the expense of other areas
Voluntary (endogenous) attention
Voluntary orienting driven by the subects goal
Reflexive (exogenous) attention

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 .
Attentional limited capacity
brain has limit on amount of info it can process
simultaneouslyBottle.
Early selection: broadbents model (1958)
all stimuli are processed..
treismans attenuation model
unattened channel is not completely blocked from higher
ananlysis, but is rather degraded or attenuated
one inut selected for full processing, and other inputs
undergo partial processing
late selection
attentional filtering occurs relatively late in stimulus
processing
attended and ignored.
Divided attention: cerry-cocktail party effect
dichotic listening
what could be heard in unattened ear
o if a voice is present
o man or woman
o voice becomes a tone
o own name
visual search
pop out search
o defined by a signle feature
o pre-attentive
o not affected by numbr of items

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 conjunction
.
Dorsal and ventral attention systems
dorsal attention system
o primaryily concerned w spatial attention
o involved in voluntary attention
ventral AS
o non-spatial aspects of attention and orientation
o exercises stimulus-driven control
o engaged by unexpected stimuli or stimuli that
change nexpectedly
o .
CH. 8 ACTION
Motor system: hierarchical structure
uppoer motor neurons
o issue motor commands that activate local circuits
and lwoe r motor neurons
basal ganglia and cerebellum
lower motor neurons
.
The spinal cord
all connections to arms and legs originate in spinal cord
sc alone is capable of complex movement patterns
Centeral Pattern Generatorsneurons that can produce
rhythmic motor patterns without motor and sensory
feedback from limbs and other muscle targets

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 o Feedback is still needed for learning and fine-tuened
movements
Subcortical motor structres: brainstem, cerebellu, basal
ganglia
Brainstem
o Origin of 12 cranial nerves essential for critical
reflexes
o Many of these nuclei send direct projections down
the spinal cord thorugh extrapyramidal tracts
Basal ganglia-action control
o Initiation and execution of internally generated
movements, and linking one action to the next
Cerebellum-coordination of movement, balance
o By correcting unanticipated errors in ongoing motor
processing in the motor and premotor corticies
Basil ganglia disorders
.
Cortical motor structures
Primary motor cortex
Secondary motor cortex
o Premotor cortex
o Supplementary motor cortex
Prefrontal cortex
Association motor cortex
o Parietal cortex
Frontal lobe motor structures
Primary motor cortex

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 o Voluntary movement; somatotopic representation of
he body; origin of corticospinal pathway; hemiplegia
Premotor cortex
o Externally guided action;novices
o Representations linked to the movement itself
Supplementary motor cortex
o Internally-generated actions
o Spontaneous well-learned actions
Prefrontal cortex
o Selection of action, maintenance of goals and
responses
o Perseveration and utilization behavior
Posterior parietal cortex
Provides.
Pyramidal and extrapyramidal tracts
Cortical control: pyramidal tracts
o Originates mostly in the primary motor cortex
o Crosses over in the brainstem to regulate the
contralateral side of the body
o Regulates fine movemtn of distal parts
Subcortical control: extra-pyramidal tracts
o Originiate in subcortical structures
o Bilateral body parts
o Bodth contralateral and ipsilateral
o Regulate large and coordinated movements of
proximal body parts
A hierarchial view of action

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 Highest level=conceptual level
o Abstract representation of the action
goal;goals/plans/intentions;semantic associations
Intermediate level=response system level
o Possible action/response to achieve a goal
o More basic/concrete representation such as the
recognition and location of objects
Lowest level=implementation level
o Actual commands to implement a particular
action.
Mirror neurons
Neurons in the premotor cortex and other areas (parietal
lobe) that respond to an action
Activated obt hwhen producing action and when
observing a similar acion produced by someone else
Essential for understanding he actions produced by
others
Important ofr imitation and learning new skills, and
understanding others intentions