Exam 3: Methods of Cognitive Neuroscience

How do transcranial magnetic stimulation TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation tDCS) differ? Give a real or hypothetical example of an occasion when one of these methods would be preferable to the other. Explain why.

The field of is based on the idea that perception and thought employ mental representations that undergo transformations as they are used.

The most frequent cause of stroke is occlusion of the normal passage of blood by a foreign substance, such as an embolus.

A patient has an injury to the parietal lobe and has a selective deficit in processing information about the spatial location of visual stimuli. You hypothesize that this region of the brain is distinct in function from other visual areas in the temporal lobe, in which you suspect shape perception information is processed. To establish a double dissociation between the two functions and brain regions, you would need to find another person who had damage to the

What is a mental representation? How are mental representations transformed? Give an example to support each of your two answers.

Which of the following degenerative disorders is believed to have the strongest genetic component?

Some progressive neurological disorders can be caused by viruses like the human immunodeficiency virus HIV) and the herpes simplex virus.

Why are methods that perturb neural function useful to researchers? Give examples of at least two such methods.

Which of the following imaging techniques would be best for visualizing a skull fracture?

Posner and his colleagues had participants view two letters and respond according to whether these letters were both vowels, both consonants, or one of each. Participants were fastest when viewing two physically identical letters, somewhat slower when viewing the same letter in two different fonts, and slowest in the case where two different consonants were presented. This finding shows that

Functional magnetic resonance imaging fMRI) is based on a measurement of

Which of the following imaging techniques can be thought of as a three-dimensional X-ray?

Computational models can vary widely in the level of explanation they seek to provide, and they can range from the cellular/molecular level to the systems level.

The small regions in a three-dimensional grid, approximately 5 to 10 cubic millimeters in volume, that neuroimagers use to map the brain are known as

The particular region of space in which a stimulus must be presented to evoke a response from a given neuron is its

What can you infer about the responsiveness of two neurons in the visual cortex that lie next to each other in V1?

Compare and contrast EEG and MEG. Highlight their similarities and differences in your answer.

A knockout mouse

The Sternberg paradigm illustrates that when a set of letters held in short-term memory is tested with a recognition task, the time needed to respond to a probe item is

Weaver mice are a knockout strain in which Purkinje cells, the prominent cell type in the hippocampus, fail to develop. As a result, these mice are "maze dull."