eval hemispheric lateralisation Flashcards
Eval laterilsarion in the connected brain
One strength is research showing that even in connected brains the two hemispheres process information differently.
For example green fink et al used pet scans to identify which brain areas wee active during visual processing task. When participants with connected brains were asked to attend to global alerts of an image regions of the RH were much more active.
When required to focusing on finer detail the septic areas of the LH tended to dominate.
This suggest that at least as far as visual processing is concerned hemispheric lateralisation is a feature of the connected brain as well as the split brain .
eval ada
Lateralisation is likely to provide an adaptive function – it would not have evolved and been maintained if it didn’t have some value.
It is probably that it allows an animals to be able to perform two tasks simultaneously with greater efficiency i.e. it enables multitasking.
Research by Lesley Rogers et al. (2004) showed that chickens with a lateralised brain could find food while watching for predators whereas chickens reared in the dark, whose brain was not lateralised, could not do this.
on the other hand ada
On the other hand, neural plasticity could also be seen as adaptive, i.e. there is a benefit to an individual (in terms of survival and reproduction) for their brain not to be too fixed in structure in case of injury. For example research has shown, following damage through illness or trauma, that some functions can be taken over by non-specialised areas in the opposite hemisphere. For instance, language function can literally ‘switch sides’ as the brain adapts (Holland et al. 1996).
This seems to suggest that lateralised functions are flexible rather than fixed, and this would be an adaptive characteristic of the nervous system.
This shows that lateralisation is the first preference (i.e. something worth having if you can) but ultimately plasticity is more important because it deals with brain damage.
Eval research support
One strength is support from more recent split brain research luck et al showed that split brain participants actually perform better than connected controls on certain tasks.they were faster at idnetifying the odd one but in an array of similar objects than normal controls. NB LH better costive strategies are watered down by the inferior RH
This supports sherry’s earlier findings that the left brain and right brain are separate
eval issues
One limitation of sprees research is that causal relationships are hard to establish.
Compared to neurotypical control group but none of them had eplisply which is a confonding variable. Differences could be because of eplisy rather than split brain
