Chapter 9

Question 1

Executive functions

Answer 1

Meta-abilities necessary for appropriate social functioning and everyday problem-solving for example the deployment of attention, self-regulation, insight, planning and goal-directed behaviour

Question 2

The three broad categories of lobes of the frontal lobes

Answer 2

Motor cortex (area 4), premotor cortex (area 6 and some of area 8), and prefrontal cortex (areas 9 and 46)

Question 3

In what do the premotor areas play an important role?

Answer 3

Control of limb, hand, foot and digit movements as well as influencing the control of face and eyes.

Question 4

Frontal lobe damage, frontal lobe syndrome, dysexecutive syndrome, executive dysfunction refers to alteration in which 3 skills?

Answer 4

1. Drive: Fails to complete tasks on time, despite knowing that the task needs to be undertaken
2. Impaired social skills: patients are frequently described as behaving inappropriately in social settings.
3. Lack of insight: patients do not monitor their own behaviour or the reactions of others and this may hamper rehabilitiation (they do not accept that they perform poorly)

Question 5

Which part of the brain is involved in sustaining attention?

Answer 5

The right frontal lobe

Question 6

What cognitive abilties are impaired or worse than normal in people with damaged frontal lobes?

Answer 6

Sustaining attention, inhibiting automatic responses, abstract thinking, like sorting items, failure to shift away from wrong hypotheses (stuck-in-set tendency), cognitive estimation tasks, goal-oriented problem-solving

Question 7

stuck-in-set tendency

Answer 7

still sticking to a rule, despite it was shifted or the patient received negative feedback

Question 8

Perseveration

Answer 8

An inability to shift response strategy, characteristic of frontal lobe patients.

Question 9

Difference between intra-dimensional shift and extradimensional shift in frontal patients

Answer 9

Intra-dimensional: transfer a rule involving a stimulus dimension such as colour or shape to a novel set of exemplars of the same stimulus dimension -> Able for frontal patients
Extradimensional: Shift response set to an alternative, previously irrelevant dimension -> Frontal patients were impaired

Question 10

Disinhibition

Answer 10

Impaired respnse inhibition, an inability to suppress previous incorrect responses observed in patients with frontal lobe epilepsy

Question 11

efficient errors and random errors

Answer 11

how the name implies:
efficient errors: trial-and-error process whereby they keep track of past incorrect rules to obtain the correct new rule quickly
random errors: random trial without using contextual information from before -> 52 percent of frontal lobe epilepsy patient used random errors

Question 12

Contention scheduling

Answer 12

When two routine activities clash, contention scheduling prevents to select through lateral inhibition

Question 13

Supervisory attentional system

Answer 13

A term used by Norman and Shallice to describe a system that can heighten a schema’s level of activation, allowing it to be in a better position to compete with other schemas for dominance and thus increasing its probability of being selected in contention scheduling.-> similar to Baddeley’s central executive

Question 14

The five types of situations that would involve the operation of the supervisory attentional system according to Norman and Shallice

Answer 14

1. situations that involve planning or decision-making
2. situations that involve error-correction or troubleshooting
3. situations that require less well-learned responses or require the involvement of a new pattern of actions
4. situations that are considered to be dangerous or technically difficult
5. situations that require us to suppress a strong habitual response or to resist temptation

Question 15

Why do tasks that require novel responses or cognitive estimates are problematic to perform for people with frontal lobe impairments?

Answer 15

Because there is no routine procedure that allows the patient to produce an appropriate response

Question 16

Kimberg and Farah elaborated on the idea that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is crucial for working memory. How is this form of memory called in that model and what does impairment lead to?

Answer 16

representational memory: The strength of associations among working memory representations are weakened, specifically those representations of goals, environmental stimuli and stored declarative knowledge. Representations are unaffected, but the associations among different representations.

Question 17

Burgess (1998) grouped symptoms of patients with dysexecutive symptoms into 5 groups, what are these?

Answer 17

2 are relate to emotional and personality changes

3. inhibition or the ability to suppress a habitual response, assuming that impulsivity and disinhibition are the behaviural consequences
4. Intentionality, which is related to the creation and maintenance of goal-related behaviour
5. Executive memory, which is related to confabulation and inability to recall the correct order of events

Question 18

The 3 supervisory processes found by Stuss and Alexander (2007) related to different region within the frontal lobes

Answer 18

1. Energization - initiation and sustaining a response (superior medial region of the frontal lobes (FL))
2. Task-setting - setting up stimulus-response relationships, such as early stages of learning to drive a car (left lateral region of FL)
3. Monitoring - checking a task over time and adjusting behaviour as appropriate (right lateral regions of FL)

Question 19

Miyakes 3 postulated executive functions:

Answer 19

1. shifting between tasks, 2. updating and monitoring working memory representations 3. inhbition of dominant responses

Question 20

Are Miyakes 3 executive functions (shifting, updating/monitoring, inhibition) more nature or more nurture

Answer 20

Totally heritable: 99 percent