Week Three Flashcards
Lesion studies
Study people whose brains have been damaged in some way.
High spatial resolution imaging techniques..
include MRI and PET. These allow us to look at patterns of brain function while people are completing activities.
Bruce and Young Model
Claims that the mind has a face processing system with a number of sub components including facial expression, understanding identity, etc.
causation
condition in which one event causes another event.
criteria for identifying a causal relationship
cause must be related to the effect.
change in the IV must preceed changes in the DV.
no other plausible explanation
Gilad et al determined
that photonegative faces are rarely discerned.
that the eye area is essential to making matches of faces to people we know.
johnson et al…
experimented on infants only 30 minutes after birth and tried to determine their recognition of faces.
used rackets and measured the degree to which the infants tried to follow the faces.
Found that they were more likely to follow the face than the blank paddle.
The visual cortex
is retotopically organised, meaning that the different parts of the retina are mapped onto a part of the brain where the mapping of the light is transferred to the brain. People with deficits here were blind in some visual fields but could see in others.
lesions studies and dissociation
investigated if brain damage in a particular domain impacted cognitive functioning.
prosopagnosia
face blindness
caused by deficits in the occipito-temporal regions
problems with lesion studies
- patients are rare
- damage to the brain is often not localised.
PET
Position emmission therapy
patient is infused with a adio-isotope
the radioactive decay is used to measure cerebral bloodflow which then allows us to map the neural activity in the brain.
cannot be used for longditudinal studies as it is radioactive.
MRI
magnetic resonance imaging
magnetic field created by the MRI is strong enough to cause ions to align with the direction of the field.
high temporal techniques
EEG (real time resolution of the brain) and MEG
pyrimidal neurons
the main excitatory neurons that exist in the cortex.
