Intro lecture Flashcards
Cognitive neuroscience
Study of the neural mechanisms of mind and behaviour
Mind
Internal states and processes that are not directly observable –> inferred from observable, measurable behaviours
Behaviour
Any form of action in a living organism –> directly observable
Correlation research
Analyzes relationships between pairs of variables
Experimental research
Experiments apply manipulations to a specific variable of interest, while controling other variables.
Any differences in the outcomes measure can be attributed to this manipulation
2 designs
- Between-groups design
- Within-subject- design
Between - group design
- Each participant is randomly allocated to a group
- Each group receives one experimental condition
Within - subject design
- Each participant receives all experimental conditions
Phrenology
- Early 19th century
- Early attempt at mapping brain functions
- Proposed that the brain was organized into 35 distinct regions –> each region subserved a specific function
Broca’s aphasia
- Broca studied patients with difficulty producing voluntary speech, but who could understand spoken language
- All had lesions in a specific part of the left frontal lobe
Fluent aphasia
- Carl Wernicke studied patiens who had impaired speech comphrension, and produced fluent but disordered speech
- They had common lesions in left posterior temporal lobe
Brain mapping
- Korbinian Brodmann studied the organization of neurons in cortical grey matter –> based on the patterns, he parcellated the neocortex into 48 Brodmann areas
EEG
Hans berger made the first EEG recording from a human patient in 1924 and called it an elektrenkephalogram
He characterized alpha rhythm and its suppression by a faster beta rhythm when the participants opened their eyes.
Mental chronometry
Franciscus Donders studied how quickly it takes to react to a stimulus, which tells us about how much processing is necessart to produce the reaction (reaction time)
