Affective Blindsight Flashcards
What are the first steps of visual processing?
- Vision begins in the retina, starting as dots and becoming more complex as it travels back in the brain to the striate cortex
- It is then interpreted into meaningful pictures as signals travel forward to the associative
Areas
What does damage to different areas of the vision system cause?
Different types of blindness
How is the visual field represented retinotopically in the first cortical region?
inverted both along the top down and left right axes (swaps sides)
If a patient damages upper left side of visual area of brain, where would they see a blind spot in their vision?
Lower right side
What does bilateral damage to visual cortex cause?
Double hemianopia - complete blindness
Why would a person have no damage to optic nervous system, eyes or retina but experience blindness?
Lesions to the cortical region
What are the 4 signs of cortical blindness or hemianopia?
- No blink response to threat
- Opto-kinetic reflex may be absent
- No alpha rhythm on posterior region (no open/closing of eyes)
- Photic reflex often persists
What is Anton’s syndrome?
Denial of blindness (anosognosia)
Associated with cortical blindness
With cortical blindness, (posterior lesions)) what other area may be affected?
If the lesions are large, the 2 hippocampus might be affected
Possible amnesia also
In what 4 steps can recovery from cortical blindness occur?
- Presence/absence of light
- Primitive movement
- Contours
- Colours
Helen the monkey had lesions and cortical blindness but was still able to do what?
Navigate her way around obstacles
Patient DB had an operation in the right occipital area and presents left hemianopia which develops into an inferior left quadrantopia. What is3 things is DB able to do?
- Orient his gaze towards stimulus in his blind field
- Locate and point to stimulus
- Can tell if stimulus is horizontal or vertical
When tested patient DB who had cortical blindness and said he could not see anything could actually detect above chance what?
X or O
The presence of movement
Geometric shapes
Colours
Direction of movement
Spatial frequency
Flicker
When there is no striate cortex (cortical blindness) what is the alternative system proposed by Weiskrantz to explain why images can be detected?
The input to the superior colliculus is processing the information
10% of fibres project to the superior colliculus
What is the geniculo-striate pathway to sight?
Retina-LGN-V1-V2-temporal and parietal regions