Matt Roser L1 Flashcards
What is the difference between the sagittal, coronal, and horizontal planes?
s = side to side
c = front to back
h = top to bottom
What is the front part of the brain recognised as?
Rostral or Anterior
What is the back part of the brain recognised as?
Caudal or posterior
What are the sides of the brain recognised as?
medial or lateral
What is the top of the brain recognised as?
Dorsal or superior
What is the bottom of the brain recognised as?
Ventral or inferior
What is a fissure?
A really deep sulcus
What are the 4 lobes of the brain?
Frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal
Name the cortexes in the frontal lobe:
prefrontal, premotor and primary motor
Name the cortexes in the parietal lobe:
Primary somatosensory and somatosensory association
Name the cortexes in the occipital lobe:
Visual association and primary visual
Name the cortexes in the temporal lobe:
Auditory association and primary auditory (hidden)
What is the endocrine system responsible for?
Hormone release throughout the body, from cells located in various organs (Stomach, intestines, kidneys and brain)
What are hormones?
Chemical signals which cause long-term changes in state e.g. adrenaline and insulin.
What is the endocrine system controlled by?
The hypothalamus and pituitary gland in the brain
Causes of brain damage (6):
Trauma, Stroke (vascular accidents), Tumors, Degenerative/infectious diseases, Epilepsy/neuropsychiatric disorders and neurosurgery
Name 5 common neuropsychological deficits
Agnosia (attaching appropriate meaning to object-sense data), aphasia (language), apraxia (action), amnesia (mnemonic ability) and ataxia (coordination)
What is a selective deficit?
A deficit in one function without deficits in others
What should behavioural testing tell us about a patient’s deficits?
What function is compromised and what functions are spared.
What is a limitation of single dissociation?
Performance might be affected by a different factor than the one being tested
Why are double dissociations better than single dissociations?
Rules out the generic difficulty of tasks etc.
What are the limitations of patient studies? (5)
Assumption of modularity (plasticity + processes), lesions are extensive and varied (lack of pure deficits/same legions/recuperative history), Lesions don’t tell the whole story, individual differences in functional anatomy, poor temporal resolution and experimental control.
What are the benefits of patients studies? (4)
Show areas of necessary cognitive functions (double dissociation), show consequences of deficits, cost and time effective
How can lesion studies pool results?
Using lesion overlay maps
What is an MRI’s magnetic field noted as?
B0
When protons are under B0, what happens to them?
They align parallel or antiparallel to the force, with a small majority aligning with B0.
What is B0 defined as?
Net magnetisation vector
Protons spin, what is this otherwise known as?
procession or nuclear spin
How can the speed/frequency of a proton’s axial spin be calculated?
Larmor equation
When a proton is under the influence of an MRI machine, what does a pulse do?
It disrupts the proton and forces it into a 90 or 180-degree alignment
When a radio frequency pulse is turned off, what happens to a proton?
The proton realigns with the magnetic field and releases electromagnetic energy which the MRI detects
How does an MRI differentiate between different tissues?
By measuring how quickly protons release electromagnetic energy after a pulse is turned off
What is mapping secondary-order structures?
Looking at sulcal/gyral symmetry between both sides of the brain
What can MRIs measure over time?
grey matter volume and commissural myelination
What does BOLD stand for?
Blood Oxygen Level Dependent
Steps of BOLD response (5):
- Neural activity increases
- Initial dip in haemodynamic response function (HRF)
- Blood flow overcompensates
- Blood flow peaks after about 6 seconds
- returns to baseline
What happens to cortical regions that offer increased signal, and why do they offer it?
They receive greater blood flow and show stronger signal due to different magnetic properties
What are two assumptions of cognitive subtraction experiments?
You can insert a component process without disruption and that task difficulty is constant
What FMRI uncovered? (3)
- Identified functional areas such as the fusiform face area + anterior cingulate.
- Corroborated findings from other methods
- Allowed study of localised function for undamaged brains
What are the new directions of FMRI? (2)
Functional-connectivity analyses - correlation between activations in different areas
Dynamic causal modelling - which best fits observed data
The Brodman-area map is a map of brain regions as defined by their?
Cytoarchitecture
What is the lateral fissure called?
The Sylvian fissure
To find activity in the brain specific to the processing of faces we could contrast what?
Viewing faces vs viewing pictures of scrambled faces
What do blobs of colour in an FMRI paper represent?
Areas in which signal change was significantly predicted by the model of the task
Evidence of dissociability of two cognitive components is weakened by what? (2)
Individual variance in cognitive performance and individual variance in lesion and injury extent
One benefit of the lesion method in human participants?
Can reveal unexpected insights through observation - patients in everyday life
