Assignment Task: Suppose you are interested in using fMRI to study brain regions involved in making semantic mistakes while speaking aloud (i.e., mistakenly saying "I need a fork for my soup" instead of "I need a spoon for my soup"). To do so, you scan the brains of 40 volunteers while they are shown many sentences - one sentence at a time - that either have or do not have a semantic mistake.
(a) In only one (1) sentence, make a clear conceptual argument for the potential value of this cognitive neuroscience research.
(b) Carefully describe the key steps needed to be able to use the subtraction method effectively to identify brain areas more engaged by semantic mistakes.
(c) Suppose the procedure from part (b) above results in five (5) different brain areas being significantly activated. You then infer that these brain areas collectively make up a network for semantic processing. Evaluate the fairness of this inference, providing an example in a different context to clarify your point.
(d) Suppose that you had the opportunity to study semantic processing in patients with brain injury. Make an argument for why this approach would add to your knowledge of semantic processing in a manner that is complementary to what you learned above with fMRI (or put another way, uniquely adds to what fMRI already tells us)