Lecture 15 - Temporal and Occipital lobes

Question 1

Occipital is the only lobe in the brain that

Answer 1

Occipital is the only lobe in the brain that serves one sensory function which is vision
Other lobes of the brain are zones of multimodal conversion (all of the sensory systems contribute)

Question 2

Damage to the occipital lobe

Answer 2

could cause blindness or blindsight. If you have little bits of tissue damage everywhere such as with carbon monoxide poisoning you get apperceptive agnosia

Question 3

Temporal lobe lateral surface

Answer 3

Lateral surface: superior, middle and inferior temporal gyrus

Question 4

Temporal lobe medial surface

Answer 4

Medial surface: medial temporal lobe (mostly related to memory and memory processing)

Question 5

Effects of damage to the superior temporal gyrus

Answer 5

Auditory region of the brain
Deafness (A1 damage, ‘deafhear’)
Wernicke’s Aphasia (damage to ventral auditory stream involved in building up the sound that you hear
Auditory agnosia (damage to other areas)

Question 6

Effects of damage to the middle and inferior temporal gyrus

Answer 6

Ventral visual stream is here 
Achromatopsia 
Akinetopsia 
Ventral simultagnosia 
Associative agnosia

Question 7

Effects of damage to the right medial temporal lobe

Answer 7

Non verbal region
Copying ok
Visual memory impaired (recall)
Non-verbal memory impairments caused when there is damage

Question 8

Effects of damage to the left medial temporal lobe

Answer 8

Verbal
Hearing is ok
Verbal memory is impaired
e.g. recall of events in a passage they read/hear is impaired

Question 9

Patient HM

• removal of …
• amnesia type(s)

Answer 9

Reduced number and intensity of seizures

Case study
Take out medial temporal lobe causes both of these two types of amnesia

Reterograde amnesia
Temporally graded retrograde - remote memories are good and intact but recent memories such as the ones HM made just before his surgery are wiped out by removal of the medial temporal lobe
unable to recall events that occurred before the development of the amnesia, even though they may be able to encode and memorize new things that occur after the onset.

Anterograde amnesia
Recent memories wiped out, no new memories form
Anterograde amnesia refers to a decreased ability to retain new information

Question 10

Reterograde amnesia

Answer 10

Reterograde amnesia
Temporally graded retrograde - remote memories are good and intact but recent memories such as the ones HM made just before his surgery are wiped out by removal of the medial temporal lobe
unable to recall events that occurred before the development of the amnesia, even though they may be able to encode and memorize new things that occur after the onset.

Question 11

Anterograde amnesia

Answer 11

Recent memories wiped out, no new memories form

Anterograde amnesia refers to a decreased ability to retain new information

Question 12

Medial temporal lobe damage

Answer 12

Despite profound memory impairments, patients with MTL damage do have some pared memories

Question 13

Spared memories of medial temporal lobe damage shown through …

Answer 13

Mirror drawing - do not recall having done the task before but show improvement

Tower of Hanoi
Stacking things in a particular number of moves/order
They make mistakes but improve over time, despite anterograde amnesia and this shows that there are multiple memory systems in the brain
Do not remember doing the task before

Question 14

Multiple memory systems …

Answer 14

Everyone pretty much agrees that there are declarative and non declarative memories
Declarative = remembering you have done a task before
Non-declarative = skill based things - seemed to be spared in medial temporal lobe damage
Medial temporal lobe is key for declarative type memories

Question 15

Declarative memory

Answer 15

Declarative = remembering you have done a task before

explicit memory, facts and events

Question 16

Non-declarative memory

Answer 16

Non-declarative = skill based things - seemed to be spared in medial temporal lobe damage

Skills and habits, priming, simple classical conditioning, nonassociative learning

Question 17

Medial temporal lobe is key for what type of memory

Answer 17

declarative type