More Introductory Stuff

Psychology 3306

Physiological Stuff

• Neurons– Basic unit of the nervous system– Many parts and terms– Axons– Dendrites– Synapses• Sherrington

More gooey wet stuff

• Action potential• Resting potential• Neurotransmitters• Receptors• Inhibition• excitation

A physiological basis for simple ideas?

• Sure, think about it• Light• Pressure• Sound• Etc• But what about complex ideas?

Feature Detectors

• Hubel and Wiesel and cats and Swedish Kings– Cells in cortex that

respond to different line orientation

– Truly cool, maybe they network together to recognize objects?

More Feature Detectors

• Dave Perrett’s work on face recogntion in monkeys

• Monkeys have cells in their cortex that respond only to a specific monkey!

• Sort of like one of those ‘Grandmother’ cells.– Probably a hierarchical

network– Hughlings-Jackson Principle

OK cool

• So then obvious next question is, what is the neural basis of learning?

• New synapses?– Enriched rats

• Long Term Potentiation– Maybe– Looked really promising

So where do we store these ‘ideas?’

• Hippocampus is very important

• Milner and HM• Can’t create any new

episodic memories• But that is in humans…

what about interesting species?

Sherry et al, Krebs et al

• Basically figured out that Hp volume, when corrected for body weight, is larger in Food storers than in non-storers

• Same stuff in Corvids and Al Kamil’s group

Sherry and Vaccarino, 1989• Let birds store• Lesioned HP in half of the birds• They still searched• Didn’t find their cache sites though

Hampton, Sherry, Shettleworth, Khurgel and Ivy (1995)

• HP volume correlates with dependence on stored food

Some conclusions

• I think neuroscience and learning will probably come together some day

• That said, SOMEBODY has to design the clever beavhioural stuff, even for wet work

• We are pretty far away from understanding the neural basis of learning.