Participate in Cognitive Neuroscience Experiments

1. Participate in Cognitive Neuroscience Experiments for extra credit! www.tatalab.ca

2. Mental Representations • Here’s one possible way to represent information in a brain… • A “labeled line”: • A “labeled line” • Activity on this unit “means” that a line is present • This one encodes bars or lines

3. Mental Representations • Mental representations can start with sensory input and progress to more abstract forms • texture defined boundaries are representations arrived at by synthesizing the local texture features

4. Mental Representations • Mental Representations can interfere • Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour

5. Mental Representations • Mental Representations can interfere • Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour RED

6. Mental Representations • Mental Representations can interfere • Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour BLUE

7. Mental Representations • Mental Representations can interfere • Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour GREEN

8. Mental Representations • Mental Representations can interfere • Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour RED

9. Mental Representations • Mental Representations can interfere • Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour BLUE

10. Mental Representations • Mental Representations can interfere • Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour GREEN

11. Mental Representations • Mental Representations can interfere • Stroop task: name the colour in which the word is printed (I.e. don’t read the word, just say the colour • The mental representation of the colour and the representation of the text are incongruent and interfere • one representation must be selected and the other suppressed • This is one conceptualization of attention

12. Mental Representations • Representations in neural a neural code aren’t limited to sensory information • Place cells in hippocampus represent location of an animal in a local coordinate system • Spike rate on a place cell is high when the animal is near one spot but trails off when the animal moves away Moser et al. 2008

13. Mental Representations • Representations in neural a neural code aren’t limited to sensory information • Motor Neurons represent intended direction of limb movement • Spike rate increases when monkey is going to make a movement in a particular direction and trails off if the monkey is going to make a very different movement

14. Mental Representations • The cognitive neuroscientists asks: • where are these representations formed? • What is the neural mechanism? What is the code for a representation? • What is the neural process by which representations are transformed?