Lecture 12

Question 1

What do cognitive psychologists study?

Answer 1

Behaviour of people with normally functioning mental systems to draw conclusions about the mind.

Question 2

What do cognitive neuro psychologists study?

Answer 2

The behaviour of individuals whose mental processes are not functioning normally (e.g. after a stroke or head injury)

Question 3

What are the aims of neuropsychology?

Answer 3

Use data from studies of people with cognitive
impairments after brain damage to test or extend
or develop theories about normal cognitive
processing.

Use models of normal cognitive functioning to
better understand and explain the patterns of
cognitive impairment seen in brain injured patients.

Use detailed theories and models of cognitive
processes to guide assessment and diagnosis, and
also the development of evaluation and treatment
programmes

Question 4

What are the 6 key assumptions of cog neuropsych?

Answer 4

1- Brain injured patients can show dissociations of function. e.g. recognising words but not recognising faces
2- We can make inferences about functional architecture by looking at dissociations
3- Double dissociations provide the strongest evidence for independent processes
4-Associations are not particularly useful in cognitive neuropsychology
5- The primacy of case studies.
6- The modularity of the mind.

Question 5

How can a dissociation occur?

Answer 5

• When a performance is normal on one task, but impaired on the other
• Or when performance on both tasks is impaired but they differ from each other significantly

Question 6

What are double dissociations

Answer 6

Provide much stronger support for independence than single dissociations
-Difference in performance can’t be easily attributed to
task difficulty

Question 7

What are the problems with associations?

Answer 7

Classical neuropsych- based on associations rather than dissociations
Co-occurrences of symptoms used to group patients into syndromes (e.g. aphasias)
However, symptoms often occur for anatomical
rather than functional reasons
Associations are fine for localisation (which was the traditional aim) but not useful for understanding the organisation of cognitive processes.

Question 8

What is the logic of case studies?

Answer 8

Potentially valuable information can be lost in averaging across groups
Therefore, argue for intensive individual case studies, where each patient is a unique case requiring separate explanation
Each case is like a separate experiment- separate test of cognitive theory

Question 9

What is modularity?

Answer 9

Cognitive functioning involves the orchestrated activity of multiple cognitive processors or modules.

Question 10

What are the key properties of modules?

Answer 10

– Informationally encapsulated - does its work in ignorance
of, and isolated from, other things going on in the mind
– Domain specific - can only accept one type of input
– Mandatory - can’t be turned on or off

Question 11

How do you use cog neuropsych to look at mental processes?

Answer 11

Visual perception

Question 12

What is a case in Visual perception?

Answer 12

LM

• Stroke produced bi-lateral lesions of occipital cortex
• Could see and identify stationary objects
• but unable to perceive movement
• Saw the world as a series of snapshots
  e. g. could not cross road because couldnt judge movements of cars
  e. g. couldnt pour or coffee

Question 13

What are the two types of perception in visual perception?

Answer 13

Form perception

Movement perception

Question 14

What is the case of Uffz. S

Answer 14

Following head injury, unable to identify once familiar faces
Faces all looked the same
But visual perception of objects was normal

Question 15

What are the two parts within form perception?

Answer 15

Faces and Objects

Question 16

What is the case of JBR?

Answer 16

23 year old
• Herpes simplex encephalitis
• Difficulty naming pictures of only some types of
objects:
Living things: 6%
Inanimate objects: 90%
• Perception deficit specific to inanimate objects

Question 17

What are the two parts within objects?

Answer 17

Animate and Inanimate

Question 18

What is acquired dyslexia

Answer 18

Impaired reading occurring a consequence of brain injury in a previously literate person

Question 19

What is developmental dyslexia?

Answer 19

– Unexpected difficulty in learning to read in the first place.

Question 20

What are the routes to reading outloud?

Answer 20

The non-lexical route and the lexical route

Question 21

What is the non-lexical route?

Answer 21

Used by skilled readers in pronouncing unfamiliar words or invented non-words
Does not involve recognising a latter string as a familiar word.
Apply knowledge of English spelling-sound correspondences to assemble a pronunciation
Left-to-right process
• Will mispronounce words that have irregular spellings
QUAY -> “kway”
COLONEL -> “kollonell”

Question 22

What is phonological dyslexia?

Answer 22

Familiar words read better than unfamiliar words or nonwords.
Errors to nonwords tended to be visually similar real words (lexicalisations)
Could name letters (h=aitch) but not give their sounds (h=huh)

Question 23

What is the lexical route?

Answer 23

A word is recognised as familiar
• Its meaning is accessed
• Its spoken word form is retrieved
• "Reading via meaning" - only applicable to familiar
words.

Question 24

What is interpretation

Answer 24

kjnedfns

Question 25

What is interpretation

Answer 25

Loss of knowledge on how to convert unfamiliar letters into speech - impairment of non lexical route

Question 26

Describe case of AC

Answer 26

67 year old man
History of cardiovascular and cerebrovasculsr disease
Ct scan post stroke revealed lesion in left middle temporal artery
Reading abolished
Also writing
Poor at copying
Anomic

Question 27

Why couldn’t AC do the stuff?

Answer 27

Hypothesis 1: category specific loss of semantic info
Hypothesis 2: problem is just with the word or concept leg
Hypothesis 3: he has lost info about the parts if objects

Conclusion : he has lost all info about the visual properties of objects whilst still rtaining knowledge about their non perceptual properties, and also known about perceptual properties which are not visual

Question 28

What implications does the AC study have on how knowledge is represented

Answer 28

1. Separate memory stores of perceptual and conceptual info

2. Maybe separate stores of visual perception and auditory perception etc etc