Lecture 18 Flashcards
What is neuropsychology?
The study of the relationship between brain function and behaviour, especially in humans
What is behavioural neuroscience?
Study of the biological basis of behaviour in humans and other animals
Who discovered Broca’s Aphasia and who was the patient that had it?
Paul Broca- patient was Leborgne-had good overall mental abilities and good comprehension, but could only say the word Tan.
What is aphasia?
An impairment of language ability.
What did the video of Sara Scott demonstrate?
Showed how you can have significant recovery after Aphasia.
What types of behavioural assays test human memory?
Corsi block test (spatial STM), mirror tracing task (procedural memory), recency memory task (STM).
What is the Morris Water Task?
Used to assess spatial memory in animals. Find a platform in a pool of water-eventually the rat will find the submerged platform and in subsequent trials, can do this almost immediately. Asses time and distance travelled.
What are the 3 tasks assessed by the Morris Water Task?
Place-learning, matching to place, and land-mark learning
What is the place-learning task and what type of damage impairs this ability?
Subject uses visual cues in the room to locate the hidden platform, hippocampal damage impairs.
What is the matching to place task and what type of damage impairs this ability?
Platform location is moved each day. Must remember where the new location is. Damage to hippocampus AND frontal cortex causes issues (always goes to old location).
What is the land-mark learning task and what type of damage impairs this ability?
Platform is associated with discrete cues (landmark). Damage to striatum makes one unable to identify the cues.
What types of things cause a disruption of behaviour in spatial ability?
Aging, dementia, hippocampal damage, frontal cortex injury.
What is SeaHero Quest?
The worlds largest dementia research experiment (over 2.4 million downloads). While you play the game, anonymous data is sent to research scientists measuring sense of direction and navigational abilities.
How accurate are different age groups on the flare task in seahero quest?
19 year olds: 74% accurate. 75 year olds: 46% accurate.
What is some of the data on different countries that has been collected on SeaHero Quest?
People in Nordic countries, North America, Australia, and New Zealand have best spatial navigation
Men performed better than women, gender gap narrows in nations with greater gender equality
Greater Gross Domestic Product of a country results in better navigation.
What is the Skilled Reaching Task?
Designed to assess movement in a rat-reach through slot to obtain food pellet. Movement broken down into segments-used to look at compensation for brain damage. (stroke recovery etc)
What are the steps in the modification of brain and assesement of behaviour?
1) Develop and test a hypothesis about what the role of brain is in behaviour. 2) development of animal models of neurological and psychiatric disorders.
What are some of the methods of studying the brain?
1) Disabling/decreasing function (lesions, TMS, opogenetics, DREADDS
2) Enhancing function: Electrical stimulation, TMS, optogenetics, DREADS
3) Measuring activity (single unit recording, fMRI, EEG)
What is clarity?
Makes the brain transparent so you can see the organ as a whole.
What did Karl Lashley do and why?
Was the first person to use the ablation technique to study an engram (changes in the brain that results with memory).
How did Karl Lashley test his idea?
Trained rats on several behavioural tasks (mazes), then made cortical lesions of different sizes and locations
What were Karl Lashleys findings?
Number of errors an animal makes depends on the SIZE of the lesion.
What is Karl Lashley’s Theory of Equipotentiality?
Memories are not stored in a specific region of the brain.
What were some of the issues with Karl Lashley’s findings?
1) Techniques available (ability to lesion, ignored anything below the cortical circuit)
2) Task he chose (highly complex)
3) where he was looking (only damaged surface of brain)
What are some of the advances that have been made in lesioning?
We can now damage areas below the surface, and damage the brain more selectively
What is a neurotoxic lesion?
Lesion produced by the infusion of a chemical that selectively targets neurons or specific types of neurons- allows us to create animal models of human diseases
What is stereotaxic surgery?
Fixes the head in place-allows us to create animal models of human diseases
What is Bregma?
The junction of frontal and parietal lobe
What are some issues with lesioning?
Irreversible, damage surrounding tissue, potential degradation of connected areas, compensation
What are some temporary (reversible) lesions?
Infusion of local anesthetics, cortical cooling techniques.
