IB Psychology Bio ATB Studies| questions and answer 2023/24

IB Psychology Bio ATB Studies| questions and answer 2023/24 Scoville and Milner (1957) - The original case study of HM, who had experienced many seizures so had surgery on his hippocampus. The seizures got a little better but he then had essentially no memory. After in-depth studies, they were able to attribute the hippocampus to memory formation. After performing the star mirror test, they were also able to establish different categories of memory (implicit and explicit). Corkin et al. (1997) - H.M. suffered from amnesia b/c most of his hippocampus and some surrounding areas (viewed later with an MRI) had been removed during an operation, with the intention to end his epilepsy. He was unable to form new explicit memories. An MRI showed that specific memory processes are dependent on the hippocampus and those adjacent cortical structures. The MRI scan confirmed a relationship between damage to the medial temporal lobes (inc. the hippocampus) and his amnesia. Although a tiny part of the hippocampus remained it was not enough to support normal memory function. Maguire et al. (2000) - Aim: To investigate whether or not the hippocampus plays a role in human spatial memory Procedure: London taxi drivers with a range of age and experience were the participants because their work requires the extensive use of spatial navigational skills, matched pairs design: participants were age and gender matched with a control group, and two different types of MRI scanning were used to assess how the brains of the taxi drivers differed from the control group. It was a quasi-experiment Results: showed significantly more grey matter in both left and right hippocampi of the taxi drivers compared to the control group Evaluation: •No researcher bias •No ethical implications •Only observed males •Only observed 16 matched pairs •Nature vs. Nurture debate: did the driving influence the change in the hippocampus, or did their larger than average hippocampus lead them to become taxi drivers? Rogers and Kesner (2003) - Aim: establish role of acetylcholine in formation of spatial memory and retrieval Experiment: 2 conditions were tested -Scopolamine (acetylcholine antagonist) -Saline solution (placebo) 30 rats run Hebb Williams maze and were observed to see how long it would take them to learn the maze Encoding of maze was assessed by average number of errors made on first five trials on day one compared to the last day Retrieval assessed by average number of errors in first five trials on day two Results: Scopolamine group took longer to learn maze and made more mistakes, seemed to have no effect on retrieval More acetylcholine hurts retrieval -physostigmine causes disruption of retrieval by disrupting consolidation process -scopolamine disr