key biopsych studies Flashcards
What did Herasty find about females?
Herasty found that females could have a larger wernickes and brocas area suggesting that they have a larger language capability demonstrating gender differences.
The localisation of function theory suffers from beta bias.
What did Paul Broca discover?
Paul Broca studied Leborgane who suffered from epilepsy and could only say the word TAN. His left frontal lobe was damaged, suggesting that the area that was responsible for speech production was located there. When scanned using modern technology, the damage was shown to be more specific, however the area of the cause remained the same.
Case study of EB
Had a large part of his hemisphere removed, leading to linguistic abilities being lost however after a rehabilitation program, his language ability improved until there was no problems demonstrating the brains functional recovery and plasticity ability as the homologous right hemisphere compensated for the damage.
What did Karl Lashley find?
Karl Lashley removed areas of the cortex in rat brains and placed rats in a maze. He found that there was no specific area involved in learning and that complex functions are found all over the brain. This supports the holistic theory
Gazzaniga
A women had her corpus callosum severed and was shown a picture of a nude women in her left visual field. She giggled but could not explain why. This was likely due to her right hemisphere processing the information she felt but she could not explain why as the information was not passed to the left hemisphere.
Costa, Brauna, Birbaumer
Used ERP’s to record male and females reaction to nude pictures of both sexes. Males stated they were aroused by pictures of female pictures whereas women stated they felt neutral to both. However ERP scans showed that they had higher brain response to the opposite sex. Useful for testing self report research.
How does Maguire et al support plasitcity?
Conducted on UK taxi drivers vs non taxi drivers
Looked at regions of the brain important for spatial awareness and found that there was more gray matter in the posterior hippocampus due to their experiences in travelling and remembering the roads which alters the shape of the brain structure
Dragan skl et al
Medical students had their brains scanned before and after the final exams. It was found that there were structural changes found within the posterior hippocampus related to gaining knowledge before the exam
Bezzola et al
40 hours of golf training produced changes in the neural representation of movement in 40-60 year olds. fMRI showed that they have reduced motor cortex in activity due to having more effect neural pathways.
Shows that neural plasticity does continue throughout adulthood
