Lecture 11 Flashcards
Is cognitive neuropsychology necessary for the development of effective therapies?
Yes - once you know the structure of the brain better and the exact location of the brain you can target therapies so they would be most effective (lesser 1989)
No - not many therapies have come from neuro psychology because they are more interested in documenting the cases and localising parts of the brain than repairing their patients (caramazza 1989)
No - most therapies don’t seem to have much impact on the majority of most treatment programmes (Wilson & Patterson 1990)
Which two researchers wrote the paper a marriage of two equal partners? What’s it about?
Riddoch & humphreys (1994)
About how cognitive neuroscience and rehabilitative therapies help each other
Why are creating specific theories easy and useful for neuro? (2)
The whole aim of neuro is to understand the behavioural deficit, this leads to an explanation of it and the ability to predict why the deficit occurs and who else is likely to show this. These two aspects are foundations of theory making and very useful when you are trying to treat someone.
Case studies are not normally generalisable because they are in isolation.but in the framework of a theory lots of different case studies that might only relate In the fact that it effects reading ability can be linked together and generalised to others
What does the diagram between neuro and rehabilitation look like?
Data from patients to evaluate the theory
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Neuro Rehab
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Provides a theory on which therapy is based
Neuro is very good for diagnosing and characterising a deficit, how can its extensive knowledge of location and effect of lesions causing the deficit help rehabilitation? (3)
Design therapies to target the particular stage in processing on where the lesion is. So Come up with a step by step model of how we see and then see which stage they are deficient in
Guide therapy, suggesting which materials and how often training should go on to be most effective for plasticity etc
Evaluation of the therapy is useful because it relates specifically back to the theory behind it
How does rehab help neuropsychology improve their theories?
What four bits of data does rehab give back to neuro?
Rehab provides data So the patients age, gender, motivation Degree of brain damage Degree of plasticity Level of support they have.
Why is level of support important but often forgotten by neuropsychologists?
If a patient is isolated then they might be less motivated and therefore no cognitive therapy would work, important so you don’t revise the theory when it might be right but the patient isn’t receptive
Also important because you might be able to add a motivational component to the therapy and make it a combo one.
What is an example disorder in which we see cognitive theory and therapy come together? By which researcher ?
Hemianopic dyslexia
Schuett et al (2008)
In hemianopic dyslexia where do you normally find the lesion in the visual pathway?
Tend to find it on one half of the optic tract, normally it is blindness of the right visual field which means the left hemisphere. Which is important for language and therefore reading Receives no information
What deficits do those with hemianopic dyslexia show?
Impaired word identification
Reading deficits: slow reading, omissions, guessing, disorganised eye patterns
From the deficits shown by hemianopic dyslexics which is the one that they based their theory and therefore therapy on?
They believed that the disorganised eye movements compared to the ordered ones that you see in controls was responsible for their poor reading ability. Therefore their therapy aimed to train the patients in eye movement strategies
What was the goal of the training procedure?
Help patients make quicker, shorter and more efficient reading related eye movements
What was the training procedure ?
Single words were presented, ranging from 3-12 letters long
They were originally presented for 1second and gradually decreased to 300ms
Patients were asked to look at the middle of the word and saccade all the way to the end of the word so they perceived the word wholly.
Provided with feedback if the word was correct
How many sessions and how long were they?
11 sessions that are 45 minute in length
What were the results of the study?
Pre treatment average reading speed was 100 words, post treatment there was an almost 50 % increase
This improvement remained in the 6month follow up
