Introduction to Cognitive Science

Lecture 8:

Basic strategies:
- Look at it: Histology and modern-day variants
- Poke it: Single unit stimulation and recording
- Electroencephalogram (measuring electrical activity)

Event-Related Potential
- EEGs tend to reflect overall global brain activity
- ERPs are designed to get around this, by averaging many trials together, to cancel out noise!
- E.g. How quickly does the brain process sound? You cannot play a sound and then look at the EEG only.
This is because there is lots of unrelated nonsense. Therefore, you play this over hundreds of times.
Average all responses  event related potential
- This is a great technology for looking at when, not where things happen (it has great temporal
resolution)

MEG & SQUIDs

- MEG = magnetoencephalogram – presents challenges and advantages; the main advantage is better
spatial resolution than EEG (because the skull itself has electrical resistances; skull doesn’t have
magnetic resistance. Electrical and magnetic fields of the same object are orthogonal. Therefore, if we
use MEG – it will be 90 degrees off from an EEG
- Magnetic fields are very weak. Signals are fast and weak. So we need gradiometers which are really fast
and sensitive.

PET (positron emission tomography)

- inject a radioactive tracer into the brain stem
- it accumulates in the brain, especially active parts
- as it decays, it emits positrons
- almost immediately, they hit electrons, producing gamma rays
- detecting these with an array of scanners can reconstruct where positrons were emitted

The Nature of fMRI

fMRI advantages
- completely safe and noninvasive for all
- safe for repeated and extended use
- no special preparation (e.g. eating); but no metal
- great spatial resolutions (approx 1.5 mm, PET = 4 mm)
- signal strong enough to look at individuals
- Anatomical + functional scans in same session
- Bad temporal resolution (1 s, EEGs = ms)
- fMRI measures the corresponding plumbing in the brain around neural firing patterns, NOT the patterns
themselves

How it works: 6 steps

1) Spin!
a. Protons have spin (sort of), and thus orientation
b. Spinning things have angular momentum
c. As they slow, they precess (e.g. tops, gyroscopes)
d. Why is spinning/precession important? Static magnetic fields are very difficult to detect, but
changing fields induce current in coils of wire, and so can be measured!
 e. – the axis of spin moves as angular momentum winds down
2) The ‘magnetic’ part
a. In a magnetic field – such as the bore of an fMRI magnet, the axes of spinning protons will align
themselves based on the field
3) RF Pulses (the ‘resonance’ part)
a. The core magnetic field will align all protons. A big RF pulse perturbs them.
b. Pulse: approx. 10,000 Gauss, 20,000 x Earth, = junkyard electromagnet
c. Resonance is powerful: ‘Resonant frequency’ – The RF pulses send energy the way you’d push a
child on a swing set.
i. The Tacoma Narrows bridge (1940): This was a case where there were periodic winds
flowing through a small valley and they weren’t that strong, so it was like pushing a child
on a swing. We won’t get into aeroelastic flutter.
4) Blood Flow
a. The brain uses lots of oxygen, delivered in oxygen-rich hemoglobin in blood
b. Increased activity  sudden oxygen depletion  over-replenished a few seconds later
c. A BOLD measure: “blood-oxygen-level-dependent”
d. In particular, the local vasculature of the brain is very fine – capillaries in the brain can deliver
blood and hemoglobin with fine precision to particular regions of the brain. There is subtlety in
this, because when you use a part of your brain, it uses up oxygen and as a result, the local
blood supply is replenished a little but is in fact OVER-REPLENISHED – we will measure.
e. Vasodilation – this is similar to what happens in other parts of the body. Your veins pop up when
you exercise a certain part of the body.
f. This has been known for a long time: Angelo Mosso (physician) had patient Bertino (1880) – his
brain was exposed to the air but he was okay; when Bertino was in the hospital and was asked by
Mosso to do certain things and Mosso observed there was an increase in blood
g. What you do is correlated with blood flow
5) Blood & Magnetism
a. Hemoglobin contains iron. Iron is magnetic.
b. Without oxygen to shield it, hemoglobin becomes ‘paramagnetic’, and will take on magnetic
properties in a magnetic field
c. In-rushing blood increases oxygenation, making blood ‘diamagnetic’, and less susceptible to
magnetic fields
6) Measurement
a. The precession yields a changing (and thus measureable) magnetic field. The magnet’s coil can
detect this, with precise spatial resolution.
b. Brain use  Increased blood flow
c. More oxygen & diamagnetic hemoglobin
d. Less susceptibility to the magnetic field
e. Slower proton precession ‘back to normal’
f. Longer precession period
g. Stronger field signal!
*This is how the computation works! You are seeing the visual of this computation.

The scanner – head coil measures magnetic field

fMRI Experiments
1. First an anatomical scan – Mapping out subject’s brain and where everything is [in PET, you can’t do
this!]
2. Then, the experimental trials, typically in ‘repeated epochs’
Diagram: Primary visual cortex vs. Time  how much of this area of the brain is changing over time (low
regions – looking at black screen; spike – look at something) vs. MT (you see that this area is responsible for
detecting motion)  do this across the brain and map out what different brain regions are doing

When you’re doing any sort of brain imaging, the magnetic field will be oriented in a slice across your brain.
You have to figure out where you want your slices and how many of them. These slices can be sagittal or
coronal

fMRI Analysis
An enormous amount of data – GBs/session
Analyzing all of this: More art than science?
E.g. mapping brains onto each other... (You may need to test a dozen subjects and then map their brains onto
each other, but each person’s brain is different!)
The result is a picture – of a computation!
Note the axis of activation in these pictures

Color = tip of iceberg! (You are only graphing a certain threshold to look at the MOST active regions of the
brain; colors depend on magnetic field changes based on blood flow to different regions of the brain)

Fancy results

Now, the logic of how to use fMRI to study what’s going on in the mind…

Subtraction Method
Origin in Cognitive psychology
E.g. how long does it take to perceive color?

Example: You want to find a region of the brain involved in reading words.
Don’t: Just show a bunch of words and see what parts of the brain are active!
Do: Show people words, pseudowords, letter strings, false fonts and do subtraction on each of these regions

Example: the FFA (Fusiform face area)

Don’t just show people faces, but also objects, scrambled faces, animals
It is equally strong when you remove the eyes, when you see cat’s face, etc.

(Impolite Question)
What has this told us about how the mind works that we didn’t already know?
- How the mind works…
- Where the brain works…

Example: Morality (Example of the Subtraction Logic and all of the benefits/pitfalls of fMRI)
Trolley problems:
1. Impersonal (Trolley problem)
2. Personal (Footbridge variation)
What is the morally acceptable thing to do?

Scholl: There is a trend in philosophy that suggests the way we engage in rational analysis to solve philosophy
problems. This study attempts to show that our emotions play a strong role in our analysis.

Morality Notes
- prominent, like most such studies (Science)
- Seems like a great example of cogsci!
 o 1st author = philosophy graduate student
o 2nd author = prominent cognitive neuroscientist
- But what did this really tell us?
o Emotions are involved in some ethical dilemmas.
o Did we really need a brain scanner to tell us that?