Plasticity and Function Recovery after Trauma - Evaluation Flashcards
What are two confounding variables that may lower the validity of any research into plasticity and functional recovery?
Age and Education.
What is a research for plasticity?
Maguire et al.
London text drivers.
How did Maguire study the brains of London text drivers?
Using an MRI
What did Maguire find when she did an MRI of London taxi drivers?
There was more grey matter in the hippocampus than the control group.
What is the hippocampus associated with that is relevant to Maguire’s study?
Development of spatial and navigational skills.
What test must London cabbies take?
The Knowledge.
What was a significant difference in cabbies that had been doing it for a long time compared to not?
The longer they had been doing the job, the more pronounced the structural difference.
How does Maguire’s text driver study suggest plasticity of the brain?
They are using their hippocampus to navigate and this got bigger, and the longer they had been developing their skills, the larger it got.
What is a strong point of Maguire’s study?
It had a control group which allows use o say that there is a significant difference between taxi drivers and others.
What is a weak point of Maguire’s study?
We can’t be sure that the difference is due to the ‘knowledge’ as it wasn’t tested before, they could have been taxi drivers because of their already existing difference.
However this is unlikely because of the positive correlation between experience and structure.
What Issues and Debates can you use for plasticity and/or functional recovery?
1) Biologically reductionist - oversimplifying it.
2) Culture bias - beta bias.
3) Nature-Nurture - In both it seems to be about nature yet in both there is a study that seems to suggest environment so it is interactionalist (Maguire and Schneider)
