Consciousness

Question 1

Lesion studies: Blindsight

Answer 1

Partial blindness due to lesion in the occipital cortex

• Partial visual stimuli inside the blind field
• Above chance when forced to guess if there is anything there
• Above chance when move eyes to its location`

Question 2

Blindsight: Patient DF

Answer 2

Stimuli not seen by the occipital cortex but seen by other intact visually responsive areas

Question 3

Lesion studies: Prosopagnosia

Answer 3

Showed patients familiar and unknown faces and record brain wave

• Patients at chance recognizing familiar faces
• Brain wave (P300) more intense for familiar than unfamiliar faces

Question 4

Lesion studies: Neglect (Marshall & Halligan, 1988)

Answer 4

Patients preferred the intact house over the house on fire

Question 5

Lesion studies: Neglect

McGlinchey-Berroth et all., 1993

Answer 5

Picture-word priming

• Task: is this a word or nonword?
• Chair yes a word; chiar not a word
• If shown a table and bunny the word is perceived faster because it relates to table

Question 6

Masked priming

Answer 6

Subjects often unaware of briefly presented and masked stimuli

• Whalen et al., 1998
• Unaware of subliminal messages
• No conscious response to the image on left
• Subject only consciously perceive the neutral face, but fear response (to the fearful face was detected in the amygdala

Question 7

Binocular Rivalry

Answer 7

Different images projects to each eye

• Do not see a blend
• See either one or the other, percept flips

Question 8

Conscious perception of faces

Answer 8

When faces is perceived: the fusiform face area increases activity

Question 9

Conscious perception of houses

Answer 9

When house is perceived; the parahippocampal place area increases activity

Question 10

Conscious perception of motion

Answer 10

Area MT (middle temporal lobe) is activated when the moving stimuli are taken away, but only when people report consciously perceiving motion (motion aftereffect)

Question 11

Conscious perception of auditory hallucination

Answer 11

Patients with schizophrenia

- Increases during hallucination

Question 12

Attentional blink

Answer 12

Pay attention to 2 successive targets

• If target 2 falls within 200-500 ms of target 1’s presentation: “blink out” - subjects unaware of target 2
• Target 1 occupies attention for 200-500 ms
• Target 2 is still processed (e.g., lead to semantic priming and N400 brain wave), but it does not reach awareness -> attention is the key