The Complex Mechanism Underlying Cognitive Processing

A fresh human brain does not resemble the stereotypical fixated human brain typically seen in textbooks or diagrams. Instead, a fresh human brain is rich in vasculature, extending across the entire surface of the brain. The brain, in a sense, is greedy, requiring twenty percent of the oxygen coming from the lungs and twenty percent of the blood pumped by the heart. Recently, the brain’s greediness has led to advances in medical brain imaging technology. The PET scan maps the amount blood flow through specific areas of the brain, allowing researchers to localize particular functions to precise areas of the brain. In the TED talk, Dr. Allen explains the function of the cerebellum, temporal cortex, and frontal lobe – areas of the brain whose functions were determined using PET scan.

Holladay, April. "How Does Human Memory Work?" How Does Human Memory Work? USATODAY.com, 15 Apr. 2007. Web. 04 October 2015.

Divine precognition is a phase of clairvoyance that brings knowledge of future events without relying on any physical senses. While clairvoyance is an awareness of past or future events that happen at a distance, precognition is knowing about events that will take place soon. For instance, you may be shown forthcoming events while you are in a dreaming state, during meditation or via flashes of clarity.

Though we may not realize it nor want to acknowledge it, Cognitive Psychology is a part of every human 's daily life. Cognitive Psychology is the scientific study of the mind as an information processor. In a simpler definition, it is the study of how our minds interpret and process things that we either are informed of or something we take into thought. Cognitive Psychology is a part of our attention process, language use, our memory for both long and short term, perception, problem solving, creativity, and the way we think. Each of these different features are a part of how we perceive information, think, remember, and use the information we gather. Through this branch of psychology, researchers are able to observe the relationship

Due to this, it has been deemed difficult to determine which deficit is the consequence of which part of a lesion. To overcome this problem, other methods are being used to aid in the visualisation of memory processes in the healthy parts of the brain. These come in the form of functional neuroimaging studies using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). These studies have allowed researchers to target specific memory processes using targeted psychological experiments. However, with all psychological experiments, there are limitations to using neuroimaging equipment. PET and fMRI attain their signals from local changes in blood flow or metabolism correlated with neural activity rather than from brain waves (or signals). The local vascular changes affect the distribution of an injected radionuclide (e.g. O15) in PET or magnetic properties that are blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) in fMRI. The indirect measure of neural activity limits the temporal and spatial fidelity of activations.

The brain plays the most important role in assisting to achieve and complete these cognitive functions. Several structures compose the brain, and many have a key role in the completion of cognitive functionality. The

The study demonstrates that functional connectivity profiles from functional magnetic resonance imaging studies can accurately and consistently identify individual subjects between scan sessions and also task and rest conditions. Data from 126 subjects of six fMRI sessions provided by the Human Connectome Project were used for the primary data set. Each subject was scanned over 2 days (3 sessions each day): consisting of a resting-state session, a working-memory task, and a motor task on the first day; costing a resting-state session, a language task, and an emotion task on the second day. Functional connectivity was mapped in a functional brain atlas consisting of 268 nodes covering the brain. Identification was performed across pairs of scans comparing

They performed the same procedures each slide and image the same and also only utilized neurons from Layer III. Only analyzing cells from Layer III helped delete any potential alterations or differences found between the various cortex layers. Another strength was that the researchers utilized two different measures, HSD and GLR that were complementary to each other. GLR helps explain the allocation of different neurons in the ROI by using a relative amount that helps to reduce the consequences of shrinkage and other irrelevant factors that don’t pertain to the study. While there were various strengths detected in this article, there were also numerous weaknesses noted as well. The first weakness was the sample size. The researchers included only 19 subjects in their experimental group, which is a relatively small sample size. Utilizing a large sample could help confirm whether or not the results seen in this experiment are actually characteristic of the general population. Another weakness was that the experiment had a large variability in age within the human subjects. To try and rectify this issue, the researchers removed the 3 oldest human subjects from their analysis, as advanced age may have changed their frontal lobe causing the results to be skewed. This decreased their sample size even more so, which may have decreased the validity of their

Neuropsychology is the study of brain-behavior relationships (Barkley, 1983). It is the scientific study of the association between the different structures and physiological processes of the nervous system and the behavior of organisms (Barkley, 1983). The focus of this particular field in psychology is not just pertaining to humans as research on infrahumans consistently provides simple scientific information and data from which research ideas on humans will be drawn/ concluded from (Barkley, 1983). For example, research that was conducted on rats involved giving amphetamines to the rats with given closed head injuries yielded the option of exploring the use of stimulant drugs in helping the recovery of adults and children that have experienced accidental closed head trauma (Barkley, 1983). The field includes the study of developmental changes of the nervous system and it’s behavioral parallels as well as the effects of experimental and also accidental changes of the nervous system on the behavior of an individual (Barkley, 1983).

We get our sense of meaning from the way we experience the brain’s hierarchical processing system. All these things we experience (Emotion, personal history, culture and religion) influences the brain’s interpretation of meaning. The prefrontal cortex interprets emotional signals of change by appraisal, reality testing, and explanation.

Title: Evaluate experimental and brain-imaging techniques and consider what they tell us about the brain and cognitive behaviour in typical and atypical individuals.

Q1. Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of lesion studies compared to in vivo neuroimaging methods of neuroscience. Lesion studies, which produce data, localize human brain function by studying the correlation between a behavioural disorder and the location of brain injury. They are particularly invasive as it involves removing part of the brain while making comparisons before and after the lesion and consequent deficits are noted. Lesion studies are often carried out when brain surgery is required, for example to remove parts of the brain where epileptic seizures are known to originate.

These procedures involved in cognitive neuroscience require high levels of control, therefore are usually conducted in a laboratory setting, thus producing quantitative data that can be easily analysed, (Eysenck and Keane, 2010). Nevertheless, the techniques vary in the precision with which they identify the brain areas active when a task is performed (spatial resolution), and the time course of such activation (temporal resolution).Therefore, several procedures often need to be combined to compensate for limitations, (Sternberg and Wagner, 1999).

Prior to the early 1970s the prominent idea of how memories were formed and retrieved revolved around the idea of processing memory into specific stores (Francis & Neath, 2014). These memory stores were identified as sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory. In contrast to this idea, two researchers named Fergus Craik and Robert Lockhart proposed an idea linking the type of encoding to retrieval (Goldstein, 2015). This idea is known as the levels of processing theory. According to this theory, memory depends on the depth of processing that a given item is received by an individual (Goldstein, 2015). Craik and Lockhart stressed four points in supporting their theory. First, they argued that memory was the result of a series of analyses, each level of the series forming a deeper level of processing than the preceding level (Francis & Neath, 2014). The shallow levels of processing were believed to hold less importance and are defined as giving little attention to meaning of an item. Examples of which include focusing on how a word sounds or memorizing a phone number by repeating it over and over again (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The deeper levels processing involve paying close attention to the meaning of an item and relating that meaning to something else, an example of which would be focusing on the meaning of a word rather than just how the word sounds (Francis & Neath, 2014) (Goldstein, 2015). The second point Craik and Lockhart

This essay will be focused on two different approaches to cognitive psychology: Cognitive Neuropsychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. Cognitive Neuropsychology is concerned with the patterns of cognitive performance and emphasis on the cognitive effects of brain-damaged patients who suffered lesions, injuries or diseases, providing vest information on normal human cognition. (Eysenck and Keane 2015, p.5) Whereas cognitive neuroscience involves in-depth study of our brain and behaviours. As the brain contains numerous neurones and is so complicated, the cognitive neuroscience emphasis on the biological side of the brain and focuses on the lobes that are divided from the cerebral cortex.