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Uploaded by BrigadierKnowledgeMandrill38
Hackett
Neuropsychology February 23, 2023
Article Critique 1) What research question did the paper address? This study was designed to find out if serial reaction time is affected by participants with right parietal lobe damage. 2) Why was it important to address this question? Why do we need to know the answer to this research question?
It is important to address this question so we can learn the causes of effects of learning with people with brain damage. This brain region was not studied before, so it was unknown if the right partial lobe played a crucial part in sequential learning. 3) Are the methods explained in sufficient detail to allow another scientist to replicate the study? If not, what details are missing? Please do not answer this question by just saying yes or no. Justify your answer.
This study has many of the properties needed to replicate this study. The study includes the number of patients and their condition, in Figure 1 it shows their lesions, and in table 1 it has a description of every patient. The study also explains the methods used to test neglect and included all the tasks that are needed. One limitation is that it does not completely explain what program was used to accumulate the array of squares the participants were being studied on. One patient also used only one hand instead of both hands when matching the corresponding key
on the keyboard.
Hackett
4) Please describe the results (i.e., what did the experiment find, describe all
of the important results not just the main finding)?
Both the patient and control groups had high accuracy. Compared to the control condition, patients were slower than the control group, throughout the training epochs there was improvement in reaction time for both the patient and control groups. The results found that there
was change in the 4
th
and 5
th
epochs because there was change in the pattern, in epoch 1-4 there was a repeated sequence whereas in the 5
th
epoch it was a random sequence, so reaction time was
slower for both conditions. Two of nine control participants and two of six patients seemed to have noticed a repeating pattern during the task, most participants were learning implicitly rather
than explicitly. 5) In your own words describe what you think the results tell us (e.g., eating at the wrong time can cause weight gain). What do the results mean? How do you interpret the results?
Patients with right parietal lobe damage, compared to participants with no neurological disorders did have a slower reaction time when presented with a sequence. There was an improvement during the training because of the repeated sequences. There was also no significant difference in learning between the patient and control groups. This means that having damage to the right parietal temporal lobe may slow reaction time, but it does not interfere with implicit learning, and they are explicitly aware.
Hackett
6) Were there any flaws in the study? Can you suggest any improvements to the study or think of alternate interpretations of the data? Did the results answer the research question posed by the authors?
One flaw I noticed in the study was there not an even number of patients and control participants, there were 6 patients and 9 control participants. The ages and education matched each other, but they did not say how many males or females there were in the control group. It is important to have the experimental group and control group as similar as possible or there may be inaccurate results. Another flaw that I noticed was the sample sizes were fairly small, if there were a larger sample size there may be significant differences the authors are missing. 7) Based on what this experiment discovered, what follow-up experiments should be conducted to extend and improve the findings from this study? Justify your answer.
For the replication of this study, I think it would be very important to get a larger sample and have a more even number of numbers within the groups. To ensure the most accurate results,
having an even number of participants in each group is crucial, as well as having a larger sample size.
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