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Psychology Notes Individual Differences (2nd year) Notes

Spatial Memory And Ability Notes

Updated Spatial Memory And Ability Notes

Individual Differences (2nd year) Notes

Individual Differences (2nd year)

Approximately 12 pages

The notes cover interpersonal decisions, prosocial behaviour (romantic and parental love), spatial memory & ability, and research methods used to understand individual differences.
Evidence from research is provided, and a detailed essay plan for research methods is included.

These notes are informative, to the point, and easy to follow. They are drawn from a wide range of sources utilising additional course reading and independent reading....

Available here

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Individual Differences (2nd year) Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

SPATIAL CELLS

Place cells Hpx proper Tell the animal where it is in a familiar environment
Head direction cells Presubiculum and entorhinal cortex Tell the animal which direction it is pointing in
Boundary cells Subiculum and entorhinal cortex Tell how close it is to a boundary in a particular direction
Grid cells Entorhinal cortex Provide the metric for the map in some environments

Place cells

O’Keefe and Dostrovsky, 1971: found that cells fire relative to rat’s position in space

Lever et al., 2002: found that all the places in the environment are represented so allows for the formation of a cognitive map for that environment

Place cells firing together signal a specific location in a specific spatial context

Head direction cells

Map contains information about places connected by directions and distances

O’Keefe and Nadel, 1978: predicted that the hippocampus would contain directional information

Taube et al., 1990: found that the hippocampal formation contains cells that fire when the head is in a particular direction irrespective of location

Boundary cells

Barry et al., 2006: found that cells in entorhinal cortex and subicular cortex are exclusively tuned to spatial location

Respond to the presence of an environmental boundary at a particular distance and direction from organism

Grid cells

Hafting et al., 2005: found that each cell has a grid-like firing field which tessellates the whole environment

The basic unit of organisation in grid cells seems to be fields forming evenly-spaced equilateral triangles e.g. each cell represents the environment, but this is divided into equilateral triangles in each cell

Based on self-motion cues, i.e. where I should be based on my movement

Neuroimaging

Maguire et al., 1998: asked subjects to take the shortest route from A to B after learning the layout of a virtual town, while hippocampal activity was measured using a PET Scanner

  • Ps who gave accurate trajectory response had increased activity in right hippocampus

  • Successful/accurate trials and successful navigators was correlated with increased blood flow in the right hippocampus (r=0.56 for successful trials)

  • Activity in the parietal lobe also correlated with successful navigation (r=0.43) – parietal lobe is associated with egocentric navigation

Hartley, 2003: studied ind diff in navigation by comparing performance on wayfinding (novel route finding in 1 virtual town) and route following (well-learned route in a new town)

  • ...

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