Lecture 13

Question 1

Patient WR

Answer 1

Executive function
Dysexecutive syndrome
No decrease in intelligence
Deficits in...
...Planning
...Working memory, temporal sequencing
...Anhedonia - didn't take pleasure from life
...Inappropriate affect - decreased emotional response

Question 2

Disinhibition syndrome

Answer 2

aka environmental dependence syndrome
Cannot resist interacting with environment
Example of woman who saw a syringe and injected someone with it

Question 3

Oddball task

Answer 3

Given a train of stimuli, some are “targets” and require a response, some are “novel” and should be ignored
Targets activate dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
Novel stimuli do not
However, task is switched - now, attend to the novel stimuli
Now, targets are irrelevant and novel stimuli activate dPFC

Question 4

Tower of Hanoi puzzle

Answer 4

Requires planning

Left anterior frontal lesion patients performed poorly on this task

Question 5

Wisconsin Card Sort task

Answer 5

Card task that involves changing rules
Patients with frontal lobe lesions do poorly - they cannot adjust to the changing rules of the task, perseverate with old rules

Question 6

Are PFC patients better at some tasks?

Answer 6

Some “outside the box” tasks, yes

Question 7

Recency memory

Answer 7

Patients with PFC lesions do poorly in remembering what came most recently

Question 8

Source memory

Answer 8

Patients with PFC lesions do poorly in remembering where they learned a particular fact (despite remembering the fact itself)

Question 9

Cells involved in working memory

Answer 9

dlPFC fired during monkey working memory task

Question 10

Role of vlPFC in distraction

Answer 10

Proposed to protect the dlPFC from distraction in working memory tasks
Face task with working memory saw activation in the vlPFC proportional to the amount of distraction