Week 1 Flashcards
What is neuropsychology?
How the brain works to produce the higher mental functions that broadly come under the headings of cognition, emotion and movement.
What is clinical neuroscience?
Focused on identifying the underlying molecular and neural substrates of psychopathology and neurological disease.
Neuropsychology and clinical neuroscience is a multidisciplinary approach. What disciplines are scientists involved in to help our understanding of brain functioning and pathology?
-molecular genetics
-neurobiology
-neuropsychology
-neuroimaging
-neurophysiology
-communication disorders
-pharmacology
-neurology
and more
What are the two broad roles of clinical neuropsychologists?
- assess through clinical testing to describe the psychological and behavioural impairments.
- Describe the patients strengths and weaknesses to give advice concerning the patients management and rehabilitation.
What is not the clinical neuropsychologists goal?
To describe where the brain damage is located, as this can be better done with neuroimaging or brain scans.
What is the role of experimental neuropsychologists?
Asses brain impaired patients and also persons without brain impairment in order to model and further understand how the brain functions work.
Clinical neuropsychologists assess and treat people with brain disorders that affect:
- memory
- learning
- attention
- language
- reading
- problems solving
- decision making
Because neuropsychological conditions can worsen or improve with time and treatment, neuropsychological assessment can provide a _______ to compare changes over time.
What can this in turn do?
Baseline.
This can predict and enhance social, educational and vocational outcomes. It involves clinical interview and a range of individual tests.
What is the extreme localisationist position, as a historical perspective of neuropsychology and clinical neuroscience?
That each part of the brain performs a difference and separate function
What is the extreme holistic position, as a perspective of neuropsychology and clinical neuroscience?
Sees the whole brain as being involved in all mental functions.
What was Franz Josef Falls extreme localisationist perspective?
That the brain consists of a number of separate organs, each responsible for a basic psychological trait such as courage, friendliness, or combativeness.
(Developed Phrenology and Gall’s twenty-seven attributes).
What does Gall’s basic theory of phrenology tell us?
That if a given brain area is enlarged, then the corresponding area of the skull will also be enlarged.
Although now discredited, what are two positive influences that came out of Gall’s localisationalist thinking?
- Drew attention to the possibility that localisation could exist (injury specific effects)
- Diagnostic and treatment tool. In late 18th century insanity was seen as ‘possession by the devil’, cruel treatment in asylums.
Who produced the first piece of actual scientific evidence supporting localisation position?
Paul Broca (motor speech specifically located in the posterior, inferior region of the left temporal lobe).
The two clinical cases that Paul Broca brought forward to demonstrate the effects of damage to the left posterior frontal lobe demonstrated what, for which they otherwise appeared completely normals?
- paralyses on right side of body
2. motor speech deficits
What did Broca describe as the condition of aphasia?
An inability to talk because the musculature of speech organs do not receive appropriate brain signals.
- A decade after Broca’s discovery, Carl Wernicke accounced that the understanding of speech was located in what places of the brain?
- Wernicke noted that no ______ accompanied a loss of speech comprehension caused by damage to this area, only the _____ was disrupted.
- What did this present as in the patient?
- What did Wernicke call this?
- the superior, posterior aspects of the temporal lobe
- motor deficits, ability to understand speech
- the patient was still able to talk, but his speech made no sense and sounded like some unknown foreign language
- Fluent aphasia
Who was the foremost early advocate of an alternative to localisation theories, and what did he instead believe?
- Pierre Flourens
2. That the loss of function depends on the extent of the damage, not the location of the lesion
What is the equipotentiality position?
That although basic sensorimotor functions may be localised in the brain, higher cortical processes were too complex to confine to any one area.
Who was one researcher who supported the equipotentiality position and what did he find?
- Karl Lashley
- Impairment in maze running in the rate was directly related to the amount of cortex removed. Specific area removed made little difference
From his experiments, Karl Lashley formulated his famous principle of:
mass action: behavioural impairment is directly proportional to the mass of the removed tissue
Lashley also emphasised the multipotentiality of brain tissue. What was this?
That each part of the brain participates in more than one function.
Hughlings Jackson observed what to develop his integrated theory of brain function
That higher mental functions are not unitary abilities, but consist of more basic and simpler skills.
According to Hughlings Jackson, the loss of one function:
Can be traced to the loss of any one of a number of basic abilities or functional systems.
Who is widely regarded as the “father of neuropsychology”?
Alexander Luria
Alexander Luria conceived each area in the central nervous system as being involved in one of three basic functions, which Luria labelled as units. These are:
- unit for regulating tone and waking and mental states
- unit for receiving and analysing and storing information
- unit for programming, regulation and verification of activity
What did Alexander Luria’s principle of pluripotentiality emphasise?
He assigned a specific role to each area of the brain BUT any given area can be involved in relatively few or many behaviours.
What are 4 ways in which we can interpret a single study on locaisation, to challenge the theory?
Can be interpreted as:
- the lesion of a centre
- a disconnection between two centres
- partial damage to a network of areas
- dysfunctional neurotransmitter system
