PSY 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Phineas Gage, Frontal Lobe, Change Blindness

• School: Villanova University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 1000
• Professor: slotter

Document Summary

Phineas gage: 25 year old railroad construction worker in vermont, an explosion shot a tamping iron through his head, but he survived. He could still walk and talk immediately. He became short tempered and irreverent: the brain underlies personality, frontal lobe is especially important in personality,, social behavior, and impulse control. Corpus callosum: 200 million nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres. Contralateral control one hemisphere makes the opposite side of the body function. Hemispheric lateralization the hemispheres specialize in different things: left: verbal processing, language, speech reading, writing. This is the most extreme example of lateralization: right: nonverbal processing, spatial, musical visual recognition. In extreme epilepsy, treatment sometimes includes cutting the corpus callosum. Patie(cid:374)ts (cid:272)a(cid:374) still u(cid:374)(cid:272)tio(cid:374), (cid:271)ut i(cid:374)for(cid:373)atio(cid:374) does(cid:374)"t (cid:272)ross fro(cid:373) o(cid:374)e side to the other: split brain task: testing the hemispheres shows different words or objects to each half. Attention what you focus your attention on: how we select what information to ignore or process further.