Neuropsychology

Frontal lobes

Planning and organisation

Decisions making

Impulse control

Parietal lobe

Recognise faces

Perception of world

Sense of touch

Occipital lobe

Processes visual info

colours

Spatial processing

Cerebellum

Motor skills

Balance and coordination

Spinal cord

Connects brain to the body so messages can be passed

Temporal lobe

Control hearing

Auditory info

Creates speech and understands it

Memory

Amygdala

Processing Center for Fear-flight vs fight

Motivation

If damaged-lose motivation and fearless

PFC

Anterior part of frontal lobe

Response inhibition

Attention regulation

Brocas area

Speech production and orchestrates complex muscle movements

If damaged - trouble speaking

Left hemisphere

Controls movement of right leg and arm

Control right visual fields

Language and speech

Right hemisphere

Controls left leg and arm

Controls left visual fields

Sperry aims and procedure

To investigate extent of hemisphere function

11 participants

Lab experiment

Tactile and visual tasks

Sperry results and conclusion

Info presented to right visual fields and placed in right hand could be described in speech

Info presented to left visual fields and placed in left hand could not be described in speech and could only make wild guesses

Left hemisphere is involved in language

Sperry GRAVES

• Not generalisable as only 11 Ps so small sample size

• Standardised procedure in lab experiments

• Helped a lot of research into hemispheres

• Lab e and artificial tasks so doesn’t reflect real life

• Paptkemts nad already undergone surgery however info found caused distress

Sex differences in brain

Female usually excel at language as their language Center is larger

Females are more even brained so better at communication

Males are left brain dominant

CNS

Made up of brain and spinal cord

The synapse

The chemicals neurotransmitters in vesicles gets released into synaptic cleft and bind to receptor sites

Visual agnosia

Disorder where you can see perfectly well but don’t understand what you see

Damage to parietal lobe

Prosopagnosia

Disorder where you are unable to recognise faces even though they can be seen like close family and friends

Damage to fusiform face area

May find all faces the same

PFC Damage

Makes it difficult for people to control emotions and personality changes

Becomes more aggressive and impulsive

Damasio (gages skull) AP

Discover if areas other than fronts, lobe has been damaged by building 3D model of gages skull

Iron rod was 3cm diameters and 109 cm long

20 entry points and 16 exit points

Damasio RC

Likely damage in both hemispheres

Bar passed through eye socket so damage to left brain white matter

Unable to pass neural msgs in this part of his brain

Confirmed damaged areas based on personality changes

Damasio GRAVES

Only one patient so not generalisable

Reliable as scientific methods of 3D computer modelling that is modern

Allows predictions to be made about behaviour changes

Info was gathered over 150 years ago so may not be valid