Localisation Of The Brain

Question 1

What is localisation?

Answer 1

Idea that specific areas of the brain are associated with specific internal mental(cognitive)processes

Question 2

What is the hemisphere?

Answer 2

A side of the Brain either left or right

Question 3

What is lateralisation/hemispheric lateralisation?

Answer 3

Two halves of the brain are functionally different
Different mental processes and behaviours are mainly/soley controlled by one hemisphere.

Question 4

What does contralateral brain mean?

Answer 4

Where the right hand of the brain deal with the left hand side of the brain and visa versa

Question 5

What is the corpus callosum?

Answer 5

A large bundle of nerve fibres that connects the hemispheres

Question 6

What is the cerebral cortex?

Answer 6

Outer layer of hemisphere
Highly devoloped
Separates us from animals

Question 7

What is the frontal lobe?

Answer 7

Speech,thought and learning and descision making

Question 8

What is the parietal lobe?

Answer 8

Controls sensory information such as touch,temperature,pain,movement and numbers

Question 9

What is the occipital lobe?

Answer 9

Visual information

Question 10

What is the temporal lobe?

Answer 10

Hearing language and memory

Question 11

What is the motor cortex?

Answer 11

Back of the frontal lobe
Responsible for planning and executing voluntary movements in the opposite side of the body

Question 12

What is the somatosensory cortex?

Answer 12

Located at the front of the parietal lobe
Processes sensory information such as touch,pressure,pain and temperature

Question 13

What is the visual cortex?

Answer 13

Located at the back of the occipital lobe
Occurs when nerve impulses from the eye are transmitted to the brain via the optic nerve
Right visual cortex= input from left visual field
(Visa versa)
Processes visual information such as object location,colour shape and movement

Question 14

What is the auditory cortex?

Answer 14

Located in temporal lobe
Responsible for analysing and acoustic information such as features of sound including volume tempo and pitch

Question 15

What is Broca’s area?

Answer 15

Located-left hand frontal lobe
Responsible for speech production

Question 16

What is brocas aphasia?

Answer 16

-Slow laborious speech and difficulty producing grammatical sentences
-Although their understanding of speech is relatively good

Question 17

What is Wernickes area?

Answer 17

Located -in left temporal lobe
Responsible for speech comprehension(interpreting words in order to obtain meaning/undertanding)

Question 18

What is wernickes aphasia?

Answer 18

Damage to area which causes bad understanding often producing sentences that are fluent but meaningless

Question 19

What brain scan evidence was found to support localisation?(

Answer 19

Peterson et al-
Used brain scans to demonstrate how wernickes area was active during a listening task
Broca’s area was active during a reading task
Suggesting areas have different functions.

Question 20

What was tulving et al experiment?(brain scan evidence)

Answer 20

Studying long term memory
Revealed semantic and episodic memory reside in different parts of the prefrontal cortex

Question 21

What are lobotomies?(neurosurgery)

Answer 21

Destroying areas of the brain to control aggressive behaviour.

Question 22

What did Dougherty et al?(neurosurgery)

Answer 22

44 patients with OCD underwent a cingulatomy
32 weeks follow up 1 third showed a successful response

Question 23

What case study study evidence supports localisation?

Answer 23

Phineas gage
Caught in an explosion which resulted in a meter length pole being hurled through his head and tearing out his frontal lobe
Gage survived but became
-short tempered
-rude
-aggressive
Suggests frontal lobe may be responsible for regulating mood-supports localisation.

Question 24

What are the limitations of localisation of the brain?

Answer 24

Holistic theory contradicts the localsstion theory
It claims that rather than one specific region being responsible for a specific function several areas of the brain work together to perform a specific function

Individuals with Brain damage can be rehabilitated-functional recovery(cognitive functions are relocating them to an undamaged area

Question 25

What is the Lashley experiment?

Answer 25

Memory in rat Brains was located in several different regions thereby questioning the validity of the localisation theory
However because it was conducted with rats it may have a very different brain functionality compared to humans

Question 26

What did Sperry investigate?

Answer 26

Investigated with a Series of experiments with 11 split brain patients who had their corpus callosum severed in order to control the servere epileptic seizures they had been experiencing

Question 27

How did sperry carry out his experiment?

Answer 27

He compared their findings to a control group who had their corpus callosum in tact
Recorded the participants performance on a range of visual and tactile tasks
Sperry asked participants to look at black dot in the centre of a screen using a tachistoscope (displays an image for a very short amount of time)
Presented items to either the left or right visual fields or both visual fields
Participants were then asked to complete a series of tasks on the visual information they had been shown

Question 28

What were the results of Sperrys experiment?

Answer 28

Split brain patients
Left eye goes to right hemisphere-can only write it down or draw it but cannot verbalise it
Right eye goes to left hemisphere-can verbalise it