Lecture §
- Infancy through childhood
- Can children learn before birth? How?
- What kind of Memory do infants have?
- What is the language learning sensitive/critical period?
- Before 12 years of age, after lose the ability to master due to phonetic discriminations
- What is the difference between children language learning and adult language learning
- Children: learn and categories from exposure, gradually categories exposed inputs
- Adult: apply predisposed categories based on previous experience
- Adolescent, adulthood, old age
- What is the developmental feature for adolescence? Why?
- WM and central executive function
- Synaptic changes: strong synaptogenesis in Frontal Lobe, pruning throughout adulthood
- Myelination: not complete until around 18, especially for frontal cortex
- Modulation: increase in dopamine inputs from the midbrain to frontal cortex
- What is the manifestation of age in brain?
- Brain deterioration
- Decrease neuronal density, synaptic density, moss of brain matter
- Loss is uneven, frontal cortex show substantial loss
- Genetic basis of learning and memory
- Tyron Rats
- Restricted: both poor
- Normal: significant gap due to intelligence differences
- Enriched: tiny gap due to intelligence differences
- Epigenetic: G
- Gene “turn on” due to environmental canges
- Addiction
- Definitions
- Addiction: strong habit (compulsion) that is maintained despite known harmful consequences
- Drug abuse ≠ addiction (depend on legality and dose)
- How did addiction turn into comulsive
- Reinforcement
- Must have had a high level of positive reinforcement while taking it the first time
- Incentive Salience:
- Dopamine may be the physiological basis for “wanting” or “motivation”
- Drug addiction to be excessive amplification specifically of psychological ‘wanting’, especially triggered by cues, without necessarily an amplification of ‘liking’
- Biological
- Addictive drugs all lead to increased DA release in the nucleus accumbens (ventral striatum)
- Tolerance
- Tolerance: reduced reaction to drug, so that larger doses are required to achieve original effect
- Habituation: links between what happens in the brain during habituation and what happens through tolerance
- Operant Conditioning: Experienced crack cocaine users show conditioned compensatory response to placebo crack
- Conditioned compensatory response
- A CR that is the opposite of the UR
- Automatic response that is opposite to the effect of alcohol or substance usage.
- Withdrawal
- Withdraw: After taking a drug for a prolonged period of time (whether addicted to that drug or not), a period of withdrawal occurs, during which the opposite effects of the drug are experienced
- Negative reinforcement associated with continued use to avoid withdrawal