Studies Flashcards
Paul Broca (Broca’s area)
- He discovered Broca’s area while treating a patient called Tan
- Tan could understand spoken language but was unable to produce any coherent words and could only say ‘Tan’
- After Tan’s death, Broca conducted a post-mortem on Tan’s brain and discovered that he had a lesion in the frontal lobe
- Led Broca to conclude this area was responsible for speech production
- People with damage to this area have Broca’s aphasia, which results in slow and inarticulate speech
Carl Wernicke (Wernicke’s area)
- He found that patients with lesions to Wernicke’s area were still able speak, but were unable to comprehend language
- Wernicke’s area is found in the left temporal lobe and it is thought to be involved in language processing/ comprehension
- People with damage to this area struggle to comprehend language, often producing sentences that are fluent but meaningless (Wernicke’s aphasia)
Peter et al
-Used brain scans to demonstrate how Wernicke’s area was active during a listening task and Broca’s area was active during a reading task
Tulving et al
Semantic and episodic LTMs reside in different parts of the prefrontal cortex
Dronkers et al
- conducted an MRI scan on Tan’s brain, to try and confirm Broca’s findings
- found that whilst there was a lesion in Broca’s area, there was also evidence to suggest other areas may have contributed to the failure of speech production
Phineas Gage
- Gage caught in explosion which caused a meter long metal pole to be hurled through his head and tearing out his frontal lobe
- His personality changed from gentleman to rude and aggressive
- Suggests the frontal lobe may be responsible for regulating mood
Kuhn et al
- They compared a control group with a video game training group that was trained for 2 months for at least 30 mins a day on Super Mario
- They found a significant increase in grey matter in various areas including the cortex, cerebellum and hippocampus
- This increase was not evident in the control group
- The researchers concluded that video game training has resulted in new synaptic connections in the brain areas involved in spatial navigation, strategic planning, working memory and motor performance- skills that were important in playing the game successfully
Maguire et al
- They found that the posterior hippocampal volume of London taxi drivers’ brains was positively correlated with their time as a taxi driver and that there were significant differences between taxi drivers’ brains and those of controls
- This area of the brain is related to spatial and navigational skills
- London taxi drivers complete a test known as ‘the knowledge’, which requires them to know all roads and quickest route within a 6 mile radius of charing cross
Medina at al
Prolonged drug use has been shown to result in poorer cognitive functioning as well as an increase risk of dementia
Sperry (Study)
-11 ppts
-Studied a group of individuals who had their corpus callosum severed, which allowed Sperry to investigate if the 2 hemispheres were specialised for certain functions
-Images or words would be projected to the right or left visual field
-Under ‘normal’ circumstances the information would be shared over both hemispheres
-Finding 1: Images presented in the left field could not be described verbally
-Finding 2: In the left field they could identify them by touch and they could draw them using their left hand
-Finding 3: When shown composite words where half would be shown in each visual field, ppts would use their left hand to write the word in their left visual field but would say the word in their right visual field
Finding 4: Matching faces- the right hemisphere seems dominant in facial recognition
-When presented with artwork in which faces were created using items such as fruit the left hemisphere would identify individual items whereas the right would identify a face
Sperry (Conclusion)
- The left hemisphere is dominant in terms of speech and language
- The right hemisphere is dominant in terms of visual-motor tasks
Siffre (Outline/study)
- Siffre’s Cave Study
- S went into a cave for 2 months to test the effects it had on his own biological rhythm
- He did it a 2nd time for 6 months with no natural light
- His free running circadian rhythm settled under 25 hours
- This shows that our circadian rhythm will maintain a regular cycle, even in the absence of external cues
Aschoff and Wever
- Ppts spent 4 weeks in a WW2 bunker with no natural light
- All but 1 ppt displays similar results to Siffre (Circadian rhythm settled at 24-25 hours)
- These findings suggest that our natural circadian rhythm is somewhere between 24 and 25 hours
Evan and Marain
- The risk of heart attack is greatest during the early morning hours after waking
- Therefore, chronotherapeutic medications have been developed with a novel drug delivery service where the medication is taken before going to bed but the drug isn’t released until the vulnerable period the next morning
Russell et al
- The menstrual cycle became synchronised with other females through odour exposure
- Sweat samples from 1 group of women were rubbed onto the the upper lip of another group
- Despite the 2 groups being separate, their cycles synchronised which suggests cycles can be affected by pheromones
- Which have an effect on people nearby rather than on the person producing them
