biological psychology Flashcards
Name the lobes in the brain?
Occipital Lobe, Parietal Lobe, Frontal Lobe, Temporal Lobe.
which types of connections are carried by neurons over the corpus callosum
homotopic, heterotopic
what is the purpose of the Wada test?
to give the researcher a picture of the patients level of hemispheric specialisation of language and memory function.
how is the Wada test carried out?
one hemisphere is introduced to sodium amytal and is put to sleep. The researcher then tries to establish which aspects of speech, language and control are intact in the absence of the anaesthetised hemisphere. They can also show a set of cards of pictures and words to recognise and remember. After the anaesthetic wears off, the doctor can test for the patient’s level of recall and recognition memory.
how/why/when is callostomy done
it is a drastic procedure of splitting the corpus callosum. this is done to severe epileptic patients
how does the hemifield experiment exploit the visual pathway. and what are the results?
it shows a picture on either side of a screen for a second in order for only one of the visual hemispheres to see it. LEFT hemisphere produces a verbal report, the RIGHT hemisphere doesn’t. RIGHT hemisphere has perceived and processed the stimulus: It can direct the left hand to draw or pick up the stimulus object
what does the block test show.
the left hand is able to do the task. which means the right hemisphere is specialised to carry out the spatial information-processing tasks
what smiling defficiency results from Parkinson’s disease
Masked face appearance
what happens to smiling if there is damage to the RH
the patient can smile spontaneously as the Basal Ganglia pathway is intact. however when asked to smile (voluntary smiling) his right side smiles but the left side does not. the RH commands the left side to smile but it cannot send the command to the LH to smile so the right side does not smile.
how do we know that LH and RH differ in big picture vs detail processing?
from split brain patients suggests that global analysis is more efficiently conducted by the RH, and local analysis is more efficient in the LH
how does human LH contribute to decision-making under uncertainty? How does its function differ from RH?
when presented with a sequence of circles and squares that appear seemingly random. The LH will focus on the matching approach. Whereas the RH will focus on the maximising approach.
what is the matching approach
The participants try to work out how often they get each shape, and guess that shape just that often. This is reasonable, but has the potential for high error rates because the series is random.
what is the maximising approach
Maximising strategy: The participants work out that circles are occurring rather more frequently than diamonds, and then guess circle all the time. This seems lazy or dumb, but it assures an 80% hit rate once one gets going with it.
how and why does LH contribute to memory errors?
in a memory task with OLD vs NEW judgements, the RH outperforms the LH because the LH engages in categorising OLD stimuli and mistakenly accepts NEW items as OLD when there are similarities between them.
what is a CT scan
Computerised Tomography
