Transcript More Introductory Stuff

More Introductory Stuff
Psychology 3306
Physiological Stuff
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Neurons
Basic unit of the nervous system
 Many parts and terms
 Axons
 Dendrites
 Synapses
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 Sherrington
More gooey wet stuff
Action potential
 Resting potential
 Neurotransmitters
 Receptors
 Inhibition
 excitation
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A physiological basis for simple
ideas?
Sure, think about it
 Light
 Pressure
 Sound
 Etc
 But what about complex ideas?
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Feature Detectors
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Hubel and Wiesel and
cats and Swedish
Kings
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Cells in cortex that
respond to different
line orientation
Truly cool, maybe they
network together to
recognize objects?
More Feature Detectors
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Dave Perrett’s work on
face recogntion in
monkeys
Monkeys have cells in
their cortex that respond
only to a specific monkey!
Sort of like one of those
‘Grandmother’ cells.
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Probably a hierarchical
network
Hughlings-Jackson
Principle
OK cool
So then obvious next question is, what is
the neural basis of learning?
 New synapses?
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Enriched rats
Long Term Potentiation
Maybe
 Looked really promising
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So where do we store these
‘ideas?’
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Hippocampus is very
important
Milner and HM
Can’t create any new
episodic memories
But that is in
humans… what about
interesting species?
Sherry et al, Krebs et al
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Basically figured out
that Hp volume, when
corrected for body
weight, is larger in
Food storers than in
non-storers
Same stuff in Corvids
and Al Kamil’s group
Sherry and Vaccarino, 1989
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Let birds store
Lesioned HP in half of the birds
They still searched
Didn’t find their cache sites though
Hampton, Sherry, Shettleworth,
Khurgel and Ivy (1995)
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HP volume correlates with dependence on
stored food
Some conclusions
I think neuroscience and learning will
probably come together some day
 That said, SOMEBODY has to design the
clever beavhioural stuff, even for wet work
 We are pretty far away from understanding
the neural basis of learning.
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