L5 - Brain Damage

Question 1

What three ways can you use to investigate the link between function and brain?

Answer 1

• Behavioural neuroscience with animals and cause lesions, then test the animal with a number of tasks.
• Take healthy people and use brain imaging.
• Studying problems people with brain injury showed/developed

Question 2

What is cognitive neuroscience?

Answer 2

• Study of loss of cog functions after brain injury
• Find out what regions are specialised for functions
• How cog functions are organised
• Impairments could mean disconnect/ no communication

Question 3

What is an Impairment of attention

Answer 3

• Unilateral Neglect: Patients do not notice information one one side of their visual field (other side of injury)
• Tested by cancellation test and copying test: cross the lines, and copy a picture
• Hemispatial neglect: can see things, but attention is not paid to process info fully
• Cannot use cues for that side
• Happens to internal representation too

Question 4

What is Anterograde/Retrograde Amnesia

Answer 4

• R: recent memories are more likely to get lost than those that happened in the past. The recent memories are still being formed and not as reconstructable.
• A: unable to form new memories after injuries

Question 5

What is Organic Amnestic Syndrome?

Answer 5

• Disorientation in time
• Anterograde amnesia, loss of recent memory and impairment of recall/recognition
• Retrograde amnesia but to a lesser extent
• Intact IQ
• Preserved procedural memory

Question 6

How did HM show amnesia?

Answer 6

• Had bilateral surgery for epilepsy
• Selectivity of memory loss, lost LTM but not IQ
• STM spared
• Skills spared

Question 7

What was the case of Clive Wearing?

Answer 7

• English Musician
• Had brain infection which destroyed hippocampus and some of frontal lobe
• Memory only lasts a few seconds now

Question 8

What test shows dissociation between implicit and explicit memory?

Answer 8

• Incidental learning of 6 letter words
• Ex test: Recall as many words as possible, reference to previous event
• IM test: Word stem completion, first word that comes to mind after showing 3 letters, no reference to past events needed, showing influence of previous words

Question 9

Describe Broca’s Aphasia

Answer 9

• Issue with speech production, not fluid
• Understand speech and what they want to say
• Expressive Aphasia
• Frontal lobe

Question 10

Describe Wernicke’s Aphasia

Answer 10

• Issue with speech perception
• Very fluid speech but meaningless
• Knows meaning of words but cannot respond to meaning of spoken words
• Receptive/Fluid Aphasia
• Temporal lobe