Introduction to Cognitive Psychology - 1.5

Question 1

What is typically measured in a cognitive neuroscience experiment?

Answer 1

Brain activations are measured while people perform cognitive tasks

Question 2

What did (Petersen, Fox, Posner, Mintun, & Raichle, 1988) used to measure which brain areas are active while participants involved in a semantic (meaning) association task?

Answer 2

PET scan

Question 3

What does PET scan stand for?

Answer 3

Positron Emission Tomography

Question 4

(Petersen, Fox, Posner, Mintun, & Raichle, 1988) PET scan study

PROCEDURE

semantic meaning association task

Answer 4

• In this task, participants were asked to name a verb that is meaningfully related to a particular object word that is presented on a computer screen or through headphones.
• For example, they could say “eat” when they were presented with the word “cake,” or “hit” when presented with the word “hammer.”

Question 5

(Petersen, Fox, Posner, Mintun, & Raichle, 1988)

PET scan study

Procedure trick strategery related to what?

Answer 5

Subtraction method developled by Donder (isolate the time for making a decision from the time needed to perceive the light flashes and make a motoric response)

Question 6

What will happen during this procedure?

Answer 6

• Different areas of brain activate with different processes at the same time carrying this task
• Trick is to isolate the different elementary operations e.g perception of object word, coming up with association and preparing motoric output so that can be linked to specific brain area

Question 7

What is the four task conidtions in (Petersen, Fox, Posner, Mintun, & Raichle, 1988) PET scan study?

hierarchical design study

Answer 7

• 1. asking participants to just watch a fixation point on a computer screen.
• In the second task condition, participants were either passively viewing, Listening to words
• In the third task, condition participants were asked to repeat the word they had seen or heard.
• participants were asked to generate an appropriate verb in response to the noun presented.

Question 8

What is this hierarchical design study shown by Petersen, Fox, Posner, Mintun, & Raichle, 1988) PET scan study add in each task condition?

Answer 8

Add one or two extra cognitive operations

Consequently, the brain areas involved with these added operations can be made visible by means of subtraction

subtraction (isolate time for making a decision from the time needed to perceive something and make a motoric response)

Question 9

What does this figure show?

(Petersen, Fox, Posner, Mintun, & Raichle, 1988)

PET scan study

Similarly, subtracting PET scan (1) from PET scan (2b)

Answer 9

• show the brain areas that are involved with auditory word processing.
• the actual result of these two separate subtractions showed no overlap in brain activations at all (Petersen et al., 1988).
• suggesting that there is both a visual route and a phonological route for word processing
• contrasted with earlier suggestions that visual words first need to be phonologically coded (sounded out in your head) before they can be understood

Question 10

What does this figure show?

PET Scan

subtracting PET scans from task condition 3 from PET scans from task condition 4

Answer 10

• show brain areas involved making semantic associations and selecting appropriate words
• These elevated two active area brain areas
• One of these brain areas was located at the left frontal side and was presumably associated with semantic association processing.
• The other brain area that became visible was localized more centrally and more towards the back of the head. This particular brain area was believed to be part of a system engaged in the selection of action.

Question 11

What does this figure show?

PET Scan

subtracting the PET scans from task condition 2 (a and b) from those from task condition 3

Answer 11

show the brain areas associated with vocal repetition of the presented words.