PSYC 318 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Karl Lashley, Donald O. Hebb, Deep Learning

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 318
• Professor: Jonathan Britt

Document Summary

Using our brains changes the way that it is wired and functions. When speaking of memory, we can speak of: memory traces: theoretical, psychological construct used to study underlying structure of, memory engram: the hypothetical permanent change to the brain that accounts for the memory existence of (long-term) memory. He hypothesized that lesioning the cortex will impair memory (and that the more that the more you lesion, the worst the memory: lashley"s maze: the rat makes more and more mistakes the more he lesions the cerebral. This idea cortex fit with the broader concept of holism (gestalt) - the idea that natural systems and their properties should be viewed as wholes, not as collections of parts. Function of the brain is an emergent property to the whole network: memories might be distributed among the vast number of neurons in the cerebral cortex. A critique: the problem is that the maze is too complex, rats may use different strategies.