Intro to cognitive neuropsychology Flashcards
what are neuropsychologists interested in?
the relationship between brain function and behaviour
what do clinical neuropsychologists measure/quantify?
the range of spared and impaired abilities that follow brain damage or brain disease
what do academic/research neuropsychologists try understand?
normal brain function by studying how it goes wrong when different brain areas are damaged
what are both clinical and academic neuropsychologists interested in?
enhancing and understanding recovery of function after injury/disease
What is argued by neuropsychologists that studying the effects of brain damage / disease can show?
- 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
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?
- 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
what is localizationism?
that areas of the brain are independent of eachother and are separate cognitive modules (modular)
what is associationism?
that brain areas are connected in a meaningful way and function together
who are two examples of localisationists?
broca and Gall
who are two examples of associationists?
meynert and wernicke
did people start off being localizationist or associationist?
localizationism
what is broca’s aphasia?
problems with speech production
what is wernickes aphasia?
problems with speech semantics
what was Franz Joseph Gal known for?
Phrenology
what is phrenology?
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
a rise in what types of psychology led to a decline of neuropsychology?
behaviourism and psychoanalysis
how was the rise in behaviourism and psychoanalysis reversed and what by?
reversed by the cognitive revolution due to people becoming more familiar with the function of a computer
how can computers represent the cognitive approach?
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
what is an association study?
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
what is a dissociation study?
in a single case (or group_ performance on task A is impaired but task B is not
what is an issue with dissociation studies and how can they be solved?
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
what is a double dissociation?
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
what are some issues with interpreting associations and dissociations?
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
define a syndrome
a collection (association) of symptoms that often co-occur within individuals
