Biopsychology Last Min Rev Flashcards
Localisation of function
Different parts of the brain perform different tasks and are involved with different parts of the body
Lateralisation
Some physical and psychological functions are controlled or dominated by a specific hemisphere
Frontal lobe
Motor area which controls voluntary movement in the opposite side of the body
Parietal lobe
Somatosensory area where sensory information is processed from the skin
Occipital
Visual area
Temporal lobe
Auditory area which analyses speech based information
Damage to brocas area
Causes brocas aphasia which is when speech is slow, laborious and lacking in fluency
Damage to Wernickes area
People who has no problem producing speech but had difficulty understanding it (wernickes aphasia)
Evidence of localisation from neurosurgery
Cingulotomy isolates the cingulate gyri which has links to ocd. Dougherty 2002 reported 44 people with ocd who had undergone a cingulotomy and 32 weeks after, 30% had met the criteria of a successful response and 14% partial response
Evidence of localisation from brain scans
Petersen used brain scans to demonstrate how Wernickes area was active during a listening task and Brocas was active during a reading task. A review of long term memory studies show that semantic and episodic memories reside in different parts of the prefrontal cortex
Challenge to localisation of brain function
Lashley removed areas of the cortex from rats that were learning a maze. No area was proven to be more important than any other area in terms of the rats ability to learn, so learning is holistic
Challenge to language localisation
Not just brocas and wernickes area, only 2% of modern researchers believe it is. Advances in brain scans such as fmri mean neural processes can be studied with more clarity than before so language may be more holistic
Hemispheric lateralisation
The idea that two halves of the brain function different and that certain mental processes and behaviours are mainly controlled by one hemisphere rather than the other
Split brain research
Sperry 1968, 11 people with split brain were studied using a special set up in which an image was projected to RVF and the same or different image projected to LVF. In a normal brain info would travel the corpus collosum and present a complete image of visual field. Found when image was RVF they could visualise the image but couldn’t with LVF, they couldn’t verbalise but could select a matching object in a line up. Shows the LH is visual
Evidence for lateralisation in connected brain
Two hemispheres process info different. PET scans identified which brain areas were active during a visual processing task. RH was more active looking at the whole picture and LH for finer details.
