NEUR30003 Lecture Notes - Lecture 30: Animal Cognition, Frontal Lobe, Malus
13 Aug 2020
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Lecture 12. 1: rational thought (prefrontal cortex and reason) Social functions tend to be mediated by medial-ventral parts of prefrontal cortex. Much of our conscious mental activity relates to abstraction. Models and analysis how things work. Working memory: eg. remembering a phone number, remembering and applying rules. Memory of the future: planning, goals, temporal structuring of behaviour (delayed gratification) How things work: analysis, estimation, strategy, hypothesis, calculation, decision. Dorsolateral pfc damage: distractibility, impulsiveness, perseverative errors (keeping going with strategies that aren"t working) Studies analysing parts of brain while dreaming. Dreams are unreality don"t conform to rules that we know. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex deactivated during dreams: so, it might have a role in reality checking. Anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala activated: amygdala fear (dreams often have highly emotive content, anterior cingulate cortex generation of what it feels like to be happy, satiated, etc. (the feeling) ** everything forward of central sulcus = to do with action (pfc, motor cortex)
