CHAPTER SUMMARY
location of the voxels that provided information
the computer used to determine that two different
participants were looking at “tools.”
Do these results mean that a computer could
determine what you are thinking by analyzing
your brain’s pattern of activation? At this point,
being able to determine whether someone is look-
ing at an apartment or an igloo is far from being
able to tell that you are thinking about what you
did on your summer vacation. Nonetheless being
able to make predictions about what category of
object a person is looking at is a huge advance,
especially when we consider that just 50 years
earlier the state-of-the-art discovery was neurons
that respond most vigorously to oriented bars
(Figure 2.18).- What is distributed processing? How was it described in the text, beginning
with how information about faces is localized in the brain? What is “particu-
larly signifi cant” about faces? - How was distributed processing illustrated by the example of the rolling red
The Physiology of Perception and Action
- What does it mean to say that a tree, or other object, is represented in the
brain? How did early researchers describe this representation in terms of fea-
ture detectors? - How do current researchers describe the neural code for faces? Be sure you
understand specifi city coding, grandmother cells, and distributed coding. What
is the distinction between distributed coding, as described in this section, and
distributed processing that was described earlier? - Describe recent experiments that have been able to demonstrate a form of
“mind reading” by monitoring brain activity.
TEST YOURSELF 2.2
● FIGURE 2.24 The red areas indicate the location of voxels for two
of Shinkareva’s participants, which provided information that they
were viewing “tools.”Participant A Participant B Bruce GoldsteinCHAPTER SUMMARY
- Cognitive neuroscience is the study of the physiological
basis of cognition. - Ramon y Cajal’s research resulted in the abandonment
of the neural net theory in favor of the neuron doctrine,
which states that individual cells called neurons transmit
signals in the nervous system. - Signals can be recorded from neurons using microelec-
trodes. Adrian, who recorded the first signals from single
neurons, determined that action potentials remain the
same size as they travel down an axon and that increas-
ing stimulus intensity increases the rate of nerve firing. - The idea of localization of function in perception is sup-
ported by the existence of a separate primary receiving
area for each sense, by the effects of brain damage on
perception (for example, prospoganosia), and by the
results of brain imaging experiments.
5. Brain imaging measures brain activation by measuring
blood flow in the brain. Functional magnetic resonance
imaging (fMRI) is widely used to determine brain activa-
tion during cognitive functioning. One result of brain imag-
ing experiments has been the identification of areas in the
human brain that respond best to faces, places, and bodies.
6. Research on brain-damaged patients by Broca and
Wernicke provided evidence for localization of func-
tion for language. Based on the patients’ symptoms, they
identified two different conditions, Broca’s aphasia and
Wernicke’s aphasia, as involving problems in language
production and language understanding, respectively.
These two conditions were associated with damage to
different areas of the brain.
7. Recent research has resulted in modification of the
Broca/Wernicke model. Behavioral research has shown
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