Ch. 1 - The foundation of neuropsychology Flashcards
Neuropsychology
Focus on highlight psychological processes in relation to the brain mechanisms that subservience these processes.
Two sub-diciplines of neuropsychology
Cognitive neuropsychology: look at certain brain mechanisms based on behavior.
Clinical neuropsychology: more applied part, assessment of behavior in patient that have suffered from brain damage.
Hippocrates
Psychological disorders should be treated as any other disease–> locus in the brain, instead of the heart
Galen
Dysfunction of the brain could affect behavior –> humoral theory of disorder, and the brain function correlates with the four humors (blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm)
Descartes
Pin pointing certain part in the nervous system.
focused on consciousness
Theory: pineal gland was the locus of consciousness, where all the external input came together.
mind-body dualism
Gall
Phrenology (localization of processes)
Claimed that the skull bumped out a bit where the larger brain regions were, so the more it mattered, the larger the area was.
the first to distinguish between grey and white matter.
Flourens
surgical procedures in birds; the degree of lesions as predictive to the degree of impairment.
Anterior
front
Dorsal
toward the surface of the back
Posterior
Back
Superior
Surface of the head (on top)
Ventral
Surface from stomach
Inferior
Lower part from face
unilateral
One side of the body
Bilateral
Both sides of the body
Ipsilateral
From the same side
Contralateral
Opposite side of the body
Alexia
Loss of the ability to read from text
Agnosia
Loss of ability to recognize objects, persons, sounds, shapes or smell in spite of interacts sensory function
Apraxia
The inability to carry out certain motor acts on instruction without evident loss of muscle tone
Fodor
Modularities. Domain specific in that they only process very particular types of input information: color, shape, movement, faces and so on.
Lesion
Cutting
Ablation
Removal
To measure the brain structure?
MRI, CT
Any damage to the brain
To measure the brain functioning?
fMRI, PET, MEG, EEG
Test battery
a series of tests
Astereognosis
An agnosic condition in which objects cannot be recognized by touch alone
