Sierra's presentation and Schater's Seminar

Sierra's Presentation:
Article One:

• We infer rather than perceive the moment we decide to act.
• We have a neurological prep before and action - conscious will is not an instigator of choice.
• 'W' is the time participants select on the basis of available cues.
• Eagleman - the critical cue for judgement of intention is perception of the response.
• Experiment one: Dot going around the clock, participant was supposed to report the number when they made the choice to press the button.
• W is probably based on the time of response (rather than motor response or prior brain events)
• Experiment 2: wanted to make sure experiment one wasn't specific to auditory cues, and it wasn't.
• Intention causing actions are backwards according to this, its actually actions that cause intentions.
• Movements of decision come from perceived movements of action.

Article two:

• attending to a certain thing increases oxygen to that level - attentional spotlight
• 2 conditions attending to the action movements, or attending to the urge to move.
• greater activation during the first condition in areas like:
• PreSMA
• Dorsal Prefrontal cortex (intention to move?)
• IPS - interparietal sulcus
• Patients with parietal lesions - no distinction between the I and the M condition. 
• There are separate brain areas between attending to intention and movement.
• We don't think about thinking a thought, we may not be the authors of our own thoughts.

Schater's Webinar and Slideshow

• Bartlett (during behaviorism) quotation:  memory as a constructive process, i.e. linking bits and pieces of info from different sources. Memory is not reproduction, but construction.
• Why would memory be constructive, are there advantages?
• economy of storage - we don't need to know every detail, but the gist. The bad side of that is that it can lead to memory errors.
• Episodic memory: the ability to recollect our experiences. But episodic memory is also important for the future as well as the past, because we imagine the future (constructive)
• amnesic patients - medial temporal lobe damage
• Can't make new lasting memories, but also have trouble imagining their personal futures.
• Patient KC could not remember his past - he had hippocampal damage, but also couldn't think of what he'd do tomorrow.
• There is a correlation between remembering the past and imagining the future.
• This is supported by individual differences studies
• also be remembering and imagining studies - study for younger and older people, evidence of this link.
• The parts that are involved are the medial temporal love - hippocampus, frontal lobe, parietal lobes too, - implicated in both past and future tasks.
• Hypothesis: imagining and remembering both use the same information.
• A flexible recombination of details from past events
• but that makes us more likely to make errors, but also imagine the future.
• The major questions :  How does hippocampus contribute? How do we interpret the correlation between imagining and remembering?
• They ask participants both about imagining and remembering, but they are really in the same brain areas when compared to a control group.
• but levels may vary - stronger for future or stronger for memory.
• Hippocampus (a particular part) engages more during imagining the future than remembering the past.
• So, they are trying to test this experimentally - recombination
• For more experimental control, first they had participants generate a memory pool.
• Experimenters mix these memories up, and have you imagine the future or imagine something in the past (vs. a control)
• they want to know if its critical for future or just imagining in general.
• All the core networks come online, but the front part of of the hippocampus was still most closely tied to imagining than remembering.
• Age-related changes in the past and future events (article in moodle)
• Recalling events - younger people have more internal and less external memories, and its the same when they are imagining.
• Still, younger people have more internal details, and old have more external details for imagining and recalling.