Lecture 11 - Cognitive Neuropsychology

Question 1

Define unilateral neglect.

Answer 1

• Unilateral neglect
– Patients don’t seem to notice (be able to attend to) information contralateral to the injury

• Cancellation test
• Copying test

– Do we attend to locations or to objects?
– No explicit knowledge, but evidence that
neglected information is processed
• E.g., priming

Question 2

Define retrograde amnesia.

Answer 2

Forgetting what happened prior to injury.

Question 3

Define anterograde amnesia.

Answer 3

Unable to form new memories after injury.

Question 4

Define Broca’s aphasia.

Answer 4

• Understands meaning of questions
• Knows what he wants to say
• Able to say individual words (no simple motor impairment)
• Great difficulty assembling utterances
• Impoverished speed limited to single words/short utterances such as “ don’t know”

Question 5

Define Wernicke’s aphasia.

Answer 5

• Very fluent speech production but meaningless
• Problem with understanding?
• Knows meaning of words/objects i.e. knows how to use them
• Poor at responding to meaning of spoken words
• Problem with producing meaningful speech

Question 6

Define semantic dementia.

Answer 6

• Progressive, selective loss of semantic knowledge (meaning) in any modality
• Profound loss of word meanings: evident in comprehension & production (empty speech)
• Inability to recognise objects (agnosia)
• Other cognitive abilities (e.g.,episodic memory) and other aspects of language (syntax, phonology, pragmatics) seem to be much better preserved.

Question 7

Define category specific impairments.

Answer 7

• Category-specificimpairments
– E.g., patients unable to name only body parts
– Impaired knowledge for living things, with unimpaired knowledge of non-living things?
• Different places in the brain for different categories?
• Different types of defining attribute important for different categories?
– E.g., physical versus functional attributes
• Different organisation of knowledge for different categories
– E.g., living things might share more features (be more similar to each other) than nonliving things

Question 8

READ PAGES 117-119

Answer 8

(make notes if you want or just teach yourself on whiteboard)

Question 9

READ PAGES 233-237

Answer 9

(make notes if you want or just teach yourself on whiteboard)

Question 10

READ PAGES 306-310

Answer 10

(make notes if you want or just teach yourself on whiteboard)

Question 11

READ PAGES 386-391

Answer 11

(make notes if you want or just teach yourself on whiteboard)