Intro to cognitive neuropsychology

Question 1

what are neuropsychologists interested in?

Answer 1

the relationship between brain function and behaviour

Question 2

what do clinical neuropsychologists measure/quantify?

Answer 2

the range of spared and impaired abilities that follow brain damage or brain disease

Question 3

what do academic/research neuropsychologists try understand?

Answer 3

normal brain function by studying how it goes wrong when different brain areas are damaged

Question 4

what are both clinical and academic neuropsychologists interested in?

Answer 4

enhancing and understanding recovery of function after injury/disease

Question 5

What is argued by neuropsychologists that studying the effects of brain damage / disease can show?

Answer 5

• the necessity of brain areas to psychological functions

-show a unique pattern of spared and impaired psychological functions that cannot be observed in studies of healthy individuals

Question 6

how can this point ‘show a unique pattern of spared and impaired psychological functions that cannot be observed in studies of healthy individuals’ be disputed?

Answer 6

• would have to be certain that damage is isolated to the just that part of the brain, as brain regions are part of a network

-plasticity of the brain means it can reorganise itself following injury so that it does not have a function missing, has adaptability

Question 7

what is localizationism?

Answer 7

that areas of the brain are independent of eachother and are separate cognitive modules (modular)

Question 8

what is associationism?

Answer 8

that brain areas are connected in a meaningful way and function together

Question 9

who are two examples of localisationists?

Answer 9

broca and Gall

Question 10

who are two examples of associationists?

Answer 10

meynert and wernicke

Question 11

did people start off being localizationist or associationist?

Answer 11

localizationism

Question 12

what is broca’s aphasia?

Answer 12

problems with speech production

Question 13

what is wernickes aphasia?

Answer 13

problems with speech semantics

Question 14

what was Franz Joseph Gal known for?

Answer 14

Phrenology

Question 15

what is phrenology?

Answer 15

that specific areas in the brain are only used for a certain function and if you use a certain function more regularly then the area of brain tissue allocated to it increases

Question 16

a rise in what types of psychology led to a decline of neuropsychology?

Answer 16

behaviourism and psychoanalysis

Question 17

how was the rise in behaviourism and psychoanalysis reversed and what by?

Answer 17

reversed by the cognitive revolution due to people becoming more familiar with the function of a computer

Question 18

how can computers represent the cognitive approach?

Answer 18

information processing - cognitive function is based upon a series of mental operations on information representations. The idea of modularity, that different processing stages are done in different brain areas etc

Question 19

what is an association study?

Answer 19

where you can see if performance on task A and task B are associated eg between two cognitive deficits or between a cognitive deficit and the site of brain damage

Question 20

what is a dissociation study?

Answer 20

in a single case (or group_ performance on task A is impaired but task B is not

Question 21

what is an issue with dissociation studies and how can they be solved?

Answer 21

cannot conclude that tasks are modular because the tasks may not have been matched on difficulty, eg recognising words may be harder than recognising faces

can be solved by using a double dissociation

Question 22

what is a double dissociation?

Answer 22

where you find another patient who instead of being impaired on A and not. B, they are impaired on B and not A (opposite of first patient)

this produces stronger evidence of modularity of the two functions and cannot just be due to task difficulty

Question 23

what are some issues with interpreting associations and dissociations?

Answer 23

associations do not allow us to conclude causality

correlations between A and B may be spurious (Caused by an external factor, C)

simultanagnosia - that one task may be harder than another task, that brain damage may only effect harder tasks more than easier tasks etc

Question 24

define a syndrome

Answer 24

a collection (association) of symptoms that often co-occur within individuals

Question 25

what does the association of symptoms within syndromes imply about cognitive processes?

Answer 25

association of symptoms implies that they have a common underlying pathophysiological/cognitive processes

Question 26

what is computational modelling?

Answer 26

models the effects of lesioning a neural network model to simulate the effects of brain damage, essentially creates a virtual patient

Question 27

how can computational models be manipulated and what can this show?

Answer 27

by adding noise, removing components and testing what the model does

the model can then make errors which are similar to human performance

Question 28

how can animal studies help within cognitive neuropsychology?

Answer 28

can show causal effects of brain damage to a particular dysfunction within a certain pathway

Question 29

what is TMS and what can it be used for?

Answer 29

Transcranial magnetic stimulation

creates reversible ‘virtual’ brain lesions or used to investigate connectivity between brain areas

Question 30

What task did DF show a severe impairment in?

Answer 30

explicit matching task - was asked to match the orientation of the card to the slot

Question 31

What task did DF not show a severe impairment in?

Answer 31

Action task - asked to insert the card in the slot, she produced the correct action without hesitation

Question 32

What is DF an example of for visual form agnosia?

Answer 32

Evidence for functional independence