2.3.2 contemporary study Flashcards
What is our contemporary study
schmolck et al
What was the aim
to find out if semantic long-term memory is linked to a particular part of the brain. If so, patients with lesions schmolck that part of the brain should underperform at tests of semantic long-term memory. schmolck focused on damage to the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus and looked in detail at the performance of patient HM
(he aim to investigate whether a particular part of the brain is associated with semantic long-term memory)
What was the procedure
The independent variable was the extent of brain injury, the dependent variable was the scores on the cognitive test and it was a naturalistic experiment
they use the matched pairs design, each healthy control was attached against a brain damage patient.
The sample: 14 participants in total. Three had a damaged hippocampus, three had a damage for viral infections and eight were controls.
she had a set of 48 drawings: 24 animals, 24 objects, which were all further subcategorised into eg six land animals. She then had each participant complete nine tasks e.g. shown a picture, had to define it by the theme and asked to sort it into living or man-made categories. They were all tape-recorded and checked by 40 writers who checked each recording for reliability and also look for grammatical errors because this is a sign of semantic memory difficulties
What were the results
HM scored in between MTL and patients and other MTL patients. Overall: controls: 99%, MTL excluding HM: 100, MTL +: 78%
Positive correlation between severity of brain damage and mistakes on the test
what was the conclusion
That there is correlation between temporal lobe damage and semantic memory difficulties.
That there is correlation between hippocampus damage and episodic memory loss but not semantic memory.
Therefore semantic and episodic memory are located in different parts of the brain.
HM was an anomaly. This could’ve been because of his unique brain damage, his background as he was from a low socio-economic background due to his school time which he missed due to his seizures
evaluate schmolck et al
generalisability: small sample of participants, only six therefore any anomalous results wouldn’t be averaged out. burst smoke identified HM as an anomaly. Participants are very rare and therefore if you tried to generalise to the general population, the sample doesn’t have good population validity. Half of the participants had an illness such as herpes and therefore may not be generalisable to the population
Reliability: nine standardised tests, with 48 standardised items. This makes it very repeatable. As he recorded all of the conversations, I meant that it has high reliability because I can be checked by other people. Use of 14 raters means it has high interrater reliability is. However the participants are very rare and therefore is not as replicable
Applications:Informing future research about cognitive psychology, as it identified at the hippocampus is associated with episodic memory and temporal lobe is associate of semantic memory. Also brain surgery: this is because it can indicate what damage can cause and therefore can be used to inform with a brain surgery is needed. From sample HM wouldn’t have had a surgery had known it would’ve left his memory deficits
validity: MRI scans showed that temporal lobe showed activity when using semantic memory but there was a lack of ecological validity as it was a lab experiment with an artificial environment and an artificial test
ethics: as the participants had memory loss they couldn’t give informed consent as they would forget the purpose of the experiment and therefore they received presumptive consent. However it could be argued that the experiment was worth it because of the greater good as it has informed research it should help future patience with memory loss
