DP2 - The Cerebral Cortex part 2 Flashcards
Four lobes of the cerebral cortex
-Frontal lobe
-Parietal lobe
-Occipital lobe
-Temporal lobe
Frontal lobe 3 main functions
-Association Area - higher mental functions
-Primary Motor Cortex - controls voluntary movement
-Broca’s Area - (left frontal lobe) - speech production
Frontal lobe Association area (3 points)
-Involved in higher mental functions including thinking, organising and planning, abstract reasoning, judging and deciding.
-People with damage to the frontal lobe have difficulty coordinating complex sequences of behaviour, as well as difficulty with making and carrying out plans. Difficulty displaying appropriate emotional responses in social situations (e.g. Phineas Gage)
-Associated with the expression of emotional behaviour and with certain personality characteristics, especially those that relate to temperament.
Primary motor cortex (3 points)
-Directs and controls voluntary movements of skeletal muscles.
- [Various locations on the motor cortex are responsible for generating movement of certain parts of the body] e.g.-
Motor cortex in left frontal lobe controls voluntary movements on right side of body and vice versa.
Areas at top of motor cortex control lower parts of the body and vice versa. - [Amount of motor cortex devoted to a body part is related to the precision of movement, not to the size of the body part.] e.g - lips and fingers have precise movement, therefore more relation.
Parietal lobe 2 major functions
Association area - spatial ability
Primary somatosensory cortex - receives and processes information from sensory receptors in the skin.
Parietal lobe Association area (2 points)
Processes sensory information felt by your body as it moves. This enables us to monitor our body’s limb position in space.
Integrates visual information, this includes visual attention and spatial reasoning. This enables us to determine the spatial positions of objects.
Parietal lobe Association area damage (what happens and what is does)
Damage to right parietal lobe can cause spatial neglect:
-an attentional disorder in which the sufferer fails to notice or attend to stimuli on the left side of their body
-sufferers do not consciously see, hear, or feel stimuli on left side of their body
What may a person with spatial neglect do? (3 points)
-Continually fail to notice anything on the left side of the body
-Behave as if their left side of the world doesn’t exist
-Only shave right side of their face or only dress the right side of their body
Primary Somatosensory Cortex location
Located at the front of each of the Parietal Lobes, just behind and parallel to the primary motor cortex
Primary Somatosensory Cortex characteristics (3 points)
-Receives and processes sensory information from the various sensory receptors in the skin and skeletal muscles throughout the body
-This sensory information includes touch, pressure, pain, temperature, muscle movement and position
-Various locations on the somatosensory cortex receive sensations of touch from specific body parts
(left receives from right, below receives from above vice verser)
Occipital lobe primary function
The processing of visual information
Occipital lobe 2 main functions
Association Area – enables meaningful visual perceptions
Primary Visual Cortex – information from the two eyes is received and processed.
Occipital lobe association area characteristics (1 point)
Visual stimulus interacts with other information from other association areas in the other lobes enabling us to think visually, and to remember visual images.
Occipital lobe Primary Visual Cortex characteristics (1 point)
Receives and is responsible for the initial processing of visual information from the two eyes
Visual cortex processes (2 points)
-Information from the left visual field inputs from the right half of each eye
-Information from the right visual field inputs from the left half of each eye
