1. More Introductory Stuff
Psychology 3306

2. Physiological Stuff Neurons Basic unit of the nervous system
Many parts and terms
Axons
Dendrites
Synapses
Sherrington

3. More gooey wet stuff Action potential Resting potential
Neurotransmitters
Receptors
Inhibition
excitation

4. A physiological basis for simple ideas?
Sure, think about it
Light
Pressure
Sound
Etc
But what about complex ideas?

5. 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?

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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?

9. 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

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

11. Hampton, Sherry, Shettleworth, Khurgel and Ivy (1995)
HP volume correlates with dependence on stored food

12. 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.