Brain imaging

Question 1

what is structural brain imaging?

Answer 1

spatial configuration of brain tissue (e.g skull, grey and white matter, cerebrospinal fluid)

Question 2

what techniques does structural brain imaging use ?

Answer 2

CT and MRI

Question 3

what is functional brain imaging?

Answer 3

changes in physiology while functioning (e.g blood flow)

Question 4

what techniques does functional imaging use?

Answer 4

PET and fMRI

Question 5

How is a CT image of the brain produced? What are some of the uses?

Answer 5

• tissues of different density differ in the level of X-ray absorption
• used to detect bleeding, blood clots, skull fracture, changes in brain cavities
• grey and white matter contrast isn’t great

Question 6

How do white matter, grey matter and cerebrospinal fluids have different brightness in a structural MRI ?

Answer 6

• In white matter, t1 is shorter than in grey matter

- white 〰️ grey 〰️ cerebrospinal fluid

Question 7

How is the flow of blood in the brain tracked using PET?

Answer 7

Track blood flow using radioactive tracers

Question 8

How is the BOLD signal generated?

Answer 8

Blood oxygenation level-dependent, arises in the fact that neural activity is accompanied by changes in the level of oxygenated and de-oxygenated blood in the vicinity

Question 9

When an fMRI image shows certain brain areas ‘lighting up’ when certain psychological operations are being carried out, what in fact does this ‘lighting up’ show?

Answer 9

Differences in brain activation between different task conditions

Question 10

How did Shaywitz et al demonstrate that women have more bilateral phonological functioning than men?

Answer 10

• by doing the letter case judgement and the rhyme judgement task
• The activation is strongly lateralised in males but much more bilateral in females

Question 11

How does a semantic priming experiment wit and how do we learn that the RH may have a role in semantics aspects of language processing using this paradigm?

Answer 11

• LH is good for associative pairs
• RH Is good for semantic priming
• RH has a profound role in language and language would be poor without semantic links

Question 12

Give some examples of how we use physical metaphors in abstract thinking

Answer 12

• She hugged me warmly
• the project is moving along
• lift my mood