PSYC10003 Lecture 6: Behavioural Neuroscience: methods for studying the living brain (Mind, brain and behaviour 1 MBB1)
14 Jun 2018
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MBB1 – Lecture 6
Methods for studying the living brain
Clinical neuropsychology
• attempts to explain normal brain-behaviour relationships by assessing how the
system breaks down after damage
• endeavors to isolate functional modules based on patterns of dissociation and
association
o this provides a way to describe the functional modules of perceptual and
cognitive processing that have been affected by the damage, and those that
have been spared
• an analogy faulty television → sound vs picture: one broken tv has sound but no
visual, another is opposite
o we can deduce that sound and picture are controlled by different processes
Broca’s aphasia – disorder of spoken language
• had patients with characteristic language loss
o could make lip, tongue and mouth movements normally and could
uderstad hat as said to the, ut ould’t ouiate through
speech
• after patients died, they were found to have lesions in the posterior part of the
inferior gyrus in the left hemisphere
o Broca concluded that this area must be responsible for expressive language
o This regio is o alled Broa’s area
• We ko that eause they did’t hae issues ith laguage oprehesio, the
areas responsible for producing language and comprehending it are different
• Also called non-fluent aphasia
o apraxia of speech (slow, laborious, non-fluent), loss of grammatical function
words, anomia (difficulty finding appropriate words)
Wernicke’s aphasia – disorder of language comprehension
• Patients who lost the ability to comprehend speech, but were not deaf
o Remained fluent in speech, though much of what they said was meaningless
▪ Few content words, nonsense speech
▪ Melody or prosody of speech remains normal (rising and falling tones
to convey meaning or emotion)
▪ Often unaware of their impairment
• Damage to left heisphere, ut i a loatio posterior to Broa’s area, i the
posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus
o Makes sense as this is where the primary auditory cortex is
Discovery of 2 types of language impairments following damage to 2 distinct areas
• Example of contribution of clinical neuropsychology to our understanding of normal
brain function
• The fact that there is a dissociation between processes associated with speech and
comprehension suggests that these abilities represent distinct functional modules of
the mind
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