Participate in Cognitive Neuroscience Experiments

for extra credit!www.tatalab.ca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?