Biological Approach: Localization Flashcards
Localization
Every behavior has its specific place in the brain
Nervous System
A system of neurons.
Central Nervous System
Includes brain and spinal cord.
Cerebral Cortex
The brain’s outermost layer is divided into four lobes: frontal, occipital, temporal, and parietal.
Frontal Lobe
Reasoning, impulse control, planning, thinking, and voluntary action; it is the last lobe of the brain to develop fully.
Occipital Lobe
Visual Processing
Temporal Lobe
Processes auditory information, memory, production, and speech comprehension.
Parietal Lobe
Movement, orientation, perception, and recognition.
Corpus Callosum
A fiber that connects the hemispheres of the brain.
Cerebellum
Associated with coordination of movement and balance
Limbic System
It relates to emotions and includes the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, and hippocampus.
Thalamus
The hub for sensory organs; receives the reception and sends messages to other brain parts.
Hypothalamus
Emotion, thirst, and hunger.
Amygdala
Memory, emotion, and fear.
Hippocampus
Learning, memory, and transferring from short-term to long-term memory.
Brain Stem
It is under the limbic system and regulates basic vital processes such as breathing or heartbeat. It connects the brain to the spinal cord.
Paul Broca (1961)
- Broca’s area
- The left frontal area could understand and make grammatically complex sentences.
- Broca’s aphasia: problem producing speech but able to understand it.
- Louis Leborgne (Tan) lost the ability to speak at 30.
- Although Tan’s intelligence was intact, he had trouble producing words.
Carl Wernicke (1974)
- Wernicke’s area.
- Left
- Comprehension of language and words/written and spoken language.
- Wernicke’s Aphasia
Wernicke’s Aphasia
Patients could produce speech but couldn’t understand it
Karl Lashley
Opposed strict localization.
- The technique of measuring behavior before and after a specific carefully controlled induced brain damage in the cortex of rats was used.
- He put rats in mazes repeatedly until they memorized the whole maze pattern.
- Lashley would remove an area from the cortex and then place the rat to test; however, the rats always remembered the maze after removing the parts of the cortex.
- Memory is not localized.
Split Brain Studies
- During the 1960s, scientist Roger Sperry recommended this surgery for nine epilepsy patients. Epilepsy is a series of seizures/overstimulation of neurons.
- Patients had abnormal brains before their operations.
- Cases suffer from population validity problems, meaning the results do not generalize well to persons with normal brains.
Sperry and Gazzaniga (1967)
- Four participants sat in front of a screen and looked at a dot in the middle of it while visual stimuli were presented for one-tenth of a second either to the left or right side of the screen. Various objects were also placed behind the screen so participants could feel them with their hands.
- The occipital lobe could not process the image of the right hemisphere. The hemispheres could not communicate.
- However, when a simple word like “pencil” was flashed to the right hemisphere, the patients could pick a pencil with their left hand.
- When the word “heart” was flashed on the screen so that “he” was shown in the left visual field and “art” in the right visual field, the patients said they saw “art” but pointed (with left hand) to the card with the word “he” on it.
- Some patients were able to spell simple words with their left hand. This shows that the right hemisphere can produce language, but only in the simplest form and in some patients.
