Physiological

Dement & Kleitman

Sperry

Maguire

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  • Created by: Farhin
  • Created on: 13-02-14 13:10

Dement & Kleitman

AIM: to investigate the relationship between eye movements and dreaming.

The study had 3 hypotheses:
1. There will be a significant association between REM sleep & dreaming.
2. There will be a significant positive correlation between the estimate of the duration of dreams & the length of eye-movement
3. There will be a significant association between the pattern of eye movement & the context of the dream

METHOD: lab experiment with repeated design
SAMPLE: 9 participants were 7 males & 2 females.  5 were studied intensively, the other four just to back up the findings

Participants were told to abstain from alcohol & caffiene on the day of the study. An EEG was used to amplify and record the signals of electrodes which were attached to the participants face and scalp.

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Sperry

Background: Human brains are divided into hemispheres; a left hemisphere & a right hemisphere. This division of tasks between the hemispheres is called lateralisation of function. They are joined by the corpus callosum.

AIM: to investigate the effects of hemisphere deconnection & to show that each hemisphere has different functions
METHOD: quasi experiment
SAMPLE: 11 'split-brain' patients

One task was to blindfold one of the participant's eyes & asking them to fixate with the other on a pointon a screen. They would then project a stimulus on either side of the fixation point. The time is so small to ensure that the participant does not have time for eye movement as this would 'spread' the information across both sides of the visual field & therefore across both sides of the brain.

Another involved asking patients to respond to tactile information. This involved presenting a stimulus to one of the hands of a split-brain patient so the participant could not see the stimulus & then asking the participant to name it

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Maguire

Background: The hippocampus is a brain structure. It is located in the medial temporal lobe & belongs to the limbic system.This is the set of brain structures that forms the inner border of the cortex

AIM: to investigate whether changes could be detected in the brains of London taxi drivers & to further investigate the functions of the hippocampus in spatial memory
METHOD: quasi experiment
SAMPLE: 16 right-handed male licensed London taxi drivers

All of the taxi drivers were described as having healthy general medical, neurological, and psychiatric profiles. The scans of the 50 control participants were selected from the structural MRI scan database. Both the mean age and the age range did not differ between the taxi driver and control groups

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