`Contents`

List of Figures

Figure 1.1

Sequence of events between presentation of the stimulus and the behavioral response in Donders’s experiments: (a) simple reaction time task; and (b) choice reaction time task. The dashed lines indicate the reaction times Donders measured—the time between the light flash and pressing the button. Note that the mental responses were not measured. Inferences about the mental response were made based on the reaction time measurements.

Figure 1.2

Top: Simplified computer flow diagram; bottom: Broadbent’s flow diagram of the mind.

Figure 1.3

Results of some physiological research on the mind. (a) Location of Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas; (b) A neuron and some nerve fibers as visualized by Cajal. (c) Modern records of nerve impulses from a single neuron. The rate of nerve firing increases as stimulus intensity increases, from top to bottom. (d) An electroencephalogram (EEG) recorded with scalp electrodes. (e) fMRI record. Activity is determined for each voxel, where a voxel is a small volume of the cortex, indicated here by small squares. Colors, not shown here, indicate the amount of activity in each voxel.

Figure 2.1

Human brain showing locations of structures and areas that are referred to in this book.

Figure 2.2

(a) Section of a nerve fiber showing positively charged sodium (Na) and potassium (K) ions inside and outside the neuron. More sodium ions are present outside and more potassium ions inside. (b) Watching ion flow at one place along the nerve fiber, you see sodium flowing in, followed by (c) potassium flowing out. This flow creates the nerve impulse, which travels down the fiber.

Figure 3.1

(a) DF, who suffered damage to the temporal lobe of her brain, was able to “mail” a card through a slot by rotating it to the correct orientation as she moved it toward the slot. (b) However, she couldn’t perform the static orientation task, which involved matching the orientation of the card to the slot without moving the card toward the slot.

Figure 3.2

The monkey cortex, showing the ventral, or what pathway from the occipital lobe to the temporal lobe, and the dorsal, or where/how pathway, from the occipital lobe to the parietal lobe.

Figure 3.3

A series of tests to determine the degree of extinction for different pairs of stimuli. The number below the left image indicates the percentage of trials in which the image was identified by a patient who usually shows neglect of objects in the left side of the visual field. (a) Ring on left, flower on right; (b) flower on left, ring on right; (c) spider on left, ring on right.

Figure 3.4

(a) Participant in Libet’s experiment. (b) The electrical signal recorded from the brain. D indicates the time that the person said they had made the decision to move their finger. M is the time that the movement occurred. “Readiness potential” indicates the early part of the electrical signal that precedes D.

Figure 3.5

Explanation of the readiness potential proposed by Miller and Schwarz. (a) The readiness potential. (b) What occurs if awareness of the decision-making process jumps from 0 to 100 in a step function. (c) The more gradual awareness process proposed by Miller and Schwarz, in which awareness increases slowly, eventually reaching a threshold, indicated by the dashed line, which is where the person indicates that they are conscious of making a decision.

Figure 4.1

Eye looking at a book. The solid lines projecting from the book into the eye determine the book’s image on the retina. The lines projecting out from the retina determine other possible objects that could cause the same image on the retina.

Figure 4.2

The display in (a) is usually interpreted as being (b) one rectangle in front of another rectangle. It could, however, be caused by (c) a rectangle and an appropriately positioned six-sided shape.

Figure 4.3

The multiple personalities of a blob: (a) the blob; (b) the blob as a bottle; (c) the blob as a shoe; (d) one blob is a car, the other, a person crossing the street. The blob takes on different identities depending on the context in which it appears.

Figure 4.4

(a) Indentations made by people walking in the sand. (b) Turning the picture upside down turns indentations into rounded mounds. (c) How light from above and to the left illuminates an indentation, causing a shadow on the left. (d) The same light illuminating a bump causes a shadow to the right.

Figure 4.5

(a) Information from the receptors, flowing up, meets information representing the brain’s model, flowing down. The difference between them, which is the prediction error (PE), is sent up toward the brain to provide information to make corrections to the model. (b) In the normal woodland scene, there is no difference between the signal from the receptors and the model, so there is no prediction error. (c) When something unexpected happens, the receptor information and the model do not match, so there is a prediction error.

Figure 4.6

Scan path of an observer freely viewing a picture. Fixations are indicated by dots, and saccadic eye movements by lines.

Figure 4.7

The basic principle behind why we don’t see a smeared image when we move our eyes from one place to another. To make the eyes move, a motor signal, MS, is sent from the motor area to the eye muscles. Simultaneously, a copy of this signal, the corollary discharge, CD, is sent to the brain area responsible for perception. When the eyes move, a visual signal, VS, indicating movement of the scene across the retina, is sent to the area responsible for perception. However, the corollary discharge meets this signal and inhibits perception of the smeared image caused by movement of the eye. Note that this is a highly simplified diagram, as there are multiple pathways and areas involved in both the motor and perceptual aspects of this process.

Figure 4.8

Steps leading to depositing a dollop of ketchup on a hamburger. The person (a) reaches for the jar with her right hand, (b) grasps the bottle, (c) lifts the bottle, and (d) positions the bottle over the hamburger and delivers a “hit” with her left hand to dispense the ketchup. (Photo credit: Bruce Goldstein.)

Figure 5.1

A picture similar to one used in an experiment in which eye movements were measured as participants heard a sentence while looking at the picture. Hearing the word “eat” in the sentence “The boy will eat the cake” generates a rapid prediction so the listener’s eyes arrive at the cake before hearing the word “cake.” This prediction does not occur in response to “move” in the sentence “The boy will move the cake.”

Figure 5.2

N400 ERP resonse to the words a (solid line) and an (dashed line) when added to the end of the sentence “There was a nice breeze so the girl went outside to fly …” The word an, which has a low cloze probability, generates a larger ERP, which can be conceptualized as an “error response.”

Figure 5.3

Time course of brain activity measured on the surface of the skull in response to sequences of equally spaced beats, indicated by the arrows. Numbers indicate spacing, in milliseconds, between each beat. The fastest tempo (about 152 beats per minute) is at the top, and the slowest tempo (about 77 beats per minute) is on the bottom. The brain oscillations match the beats, peaking just after the beat, decreasing, and then rebounding to predict the next beat.

Figure 5.4

Syncopation explained. (a) The top record shows a simple melody consisting of four quarter notes in the first measure. The middle record (b) shows the same melody, with each quarter note changed to two joined eighth notes. The count below this record indicates that each quarter note begins on the beat. This passage is therefore not syncopated. (c) Syncopation is created by adding an eighth note at the beginning. The count indicates that the three quarter notes start off the beat (on “and”). This is an example of syncopation. (d) Brain response to nonsyncopated melody (dashed line) and syncopated melody (solid line).

Figure 5.5

(a) The musical phrase heard by participants in Patel and coworkers’ experiment. The location of the target chord is indicated by the downward-pointing arrow. The chord in the music staff is the “in-key” chord. The other two chords were inserted in that position for the “nearby-key” and “distant-key” conditions. (b) ERP responses to the target chord. Top, in key; middle, near key; bottom, far key. Greater deviations from the “correct” key generate larger responses. The response record shown lasts one second.

Figure 5.6

Left: Location of some structures in the “mentalizing network”: TPJ = temporal parietal junction; PFC = prefrontal cortex. Right: Location of some structures in the “mirror network”: STS = superior temporal sulcus; IPS = intraparietal sulcus; PMC = premotor cortex. There are also mirror neurons in other areas of the brain. (In contrast to other brain depictions in this book, the frontal lobe is on the right here.)

Figure 5.7

A still from the animated film used by Heider and Simmel. In the film, the three “characters”—Big Triangle, Small Triangle, and Circle—moved around and sometimes interacted with each other.

Figure 5.8

The Sydney Opera House from different viewpoints. Beginning with the view on the bottom right, moving clockwise around the pictures reveals views that would be seen from a boat sailing clockwise around the Opera House. More than one viewpoint is necessary to understand this structure. (Photo credit: Bruce Goldstein.)

Figure 6.1

The connectome. Nerve tracts in the human brain determined by track-weighted imaging. The color version of this figure more clearly differentiates the various nerve networks.

Figure 6.2

Determining functional connectivity with resting-state fMRI. The resting-state activity measured by fMRI is shown for the reference location in the left motor cortex, and for six other locations in the brain. The right motor location is on the other side of the brain. The numbers above each record indicate the correlation with the reference location. Correlations for the right motor cortex (0.74) and somatosensory cortex (0.86) are high, indicating good connectivity. These three locations are part of the somato-motor network. The other locations are not highly correlated and thus are outside of the network.

Figure 6.3

Six major brain networks determined by the resting-state method. Note that all these networks increase activity in the highlighted areas during a task and decrease activity when at rest, except the default mode network, which decreases activity during a task and increases activity when there is no task. See table 6.1 for brief descriptions of these networks.

Figure 6.4

(a) A simple graphical network showing nodes and the edges that connect the nodes. (b) Functional connectivity between areas, shown in anatomical space, with their locations corresponding to their locations on the brain. The strength of connection is indicated by the thickness of the edges. (c) Functional connectivity shown in functional space. The strength of connection is indicated by the distance between nodes, with shorter distances indicating stronger connections. (d) A functional network that contains four modules, each of which serves a specific function.

Figure 6.5

Effects of eating/caffeine on functional connectivity structure. (a) Network measured on Tuesday, after fasting and no caffeine; (b) Network measured on Thursday, after eating and caffeine. The somato-motor and visual modules are mentioned in the text.

Figure 6.6

Dynamic changes in functional connectivity, beginning two seconds after person is presented with an object word (like “brick”) in the alternate uses task. The black dot is a location in the default network. The other dots are located in various other networks outside the default network. It is clear from these plots that rapid changes in connectivity take place over an eight-second period.

Figure 6.7

What the participant in Schmälzle’s experiment saw in the monitor. The hand on the bottom represents the participant. Left: At the beginning, the ball is passed among all three characters. Right: Later, the participant is left out.

Figure 6.8

Functional connectivity networks for (a) younger adults (20–34 years) and (b) older adults (65–89 years). Modules are identified by different shadings of the small circles, which show up better in the color version. The ellipses indicate how the areas occupied by two different networks are expanded in the older adults.

List of Tables

Table 1.1

Physiological Methods for Studying Mind and Brain

Table 5.1

The Many Faces of Prediction

Table 6.1

Six Common Functional Networks Determined by Resting-State fMRI

Table 6.2

Changes in Functional Connectivity Described in this Chapter