schmolck's study

• aim: to investigate the effect of brain damage on semantic memory by comparing normal people to brain damaged patients such as HM.
• o   6 participants with amnesia: 3 with medial temporal lobe damage, 2 with hippocampus damage, and HM who was a case study with 8 participants in the control group.
• o   Went through 9 tests, tests based on 24 objects and 24 animals which were all further categorised into groups. 7 were semantic tests and 2 were made by the researchers.

  o   For tests 8 and 9, the number of correct statements and incorrect statements calculated, they assigned a quality score (0-4) to each definition.

  o   Frequency of errors in test 8 recorded, including incomplete or meaningless phrases and immediate repetition of a phrase.
• Findings:

  o   Patients with damaged hippocampus were able to do the tests related to naming and categorising objects accurately similar to control.

  o   HM performed similar to the control group but couldn’t define things showing he had a very specific brain damage that cannot be generalised due to his unusual background.

  o   Overall, patients with hippocampus damage performed better than other groups with brain damage therefore, suggests a correlation between performance and extent of damage to the temporal cortex.
• strength study has high validity due to control group of healthy participants including the matched pairs with patients who had brain damage. means that we can be reasonably sure the different scores on the tests by the 6 patients were cause by brain damage in different parts of the brain not by age, intelligence, practice. E.g., MRI scans used show the temporal lobe area activating when patients had to make semantic judgements. However, it has low ecological validity as we wouldn’t normally need to name and categorise drawings in real life, it lacks mundane realism and is an artificial test.
• weakness the findings can't be generalised for people with other types of brain damage e.g., people with a damaged amygdala. study had a very small sample of 6 brain damage patients and 8 control group, one of them being HM, a case study which can't be generalised for any type of brain damage due to his background. This is a weakness as we cannot say the brain damaged patients in the study and other brain damaged patients would have the same results and cannot be sure that the healthy control group doesn’t have any specific differences that may affect their performance.
• Another weakness is that the tests the participants were given lacks ecological validity as they involved naming and categorising drawings on cards. This is a weakness as these artificial tests conducted in a laboratory environment do not represent how our memory works in everyday life, such as remembering to go to appointments or the names of friends and family.