A crucial goal in cognitive neuroscience is better understanding how attention influences information processing. Adam Gazzaley has worked at this question using faces and houses as stimuli. (15)

(a)In no more than one (1) sentence, distinguish between the concepts of enhancement and suppression. (2)

(b) In Gazzaley's experimental task, participants always view two houses and two faces, one at a time in alternating order. They are asked to attend to either the faces or houses (and to ignore the other stimulus type). Next, for a memory test, they see a face or a house and are asked to indicate whether that image is one that they saw in the present trial. Make and support an argument as to whether or not this design is suitable for the subtraction method with fMRI. (5)

(c) Suppose that this study was conducted in older adults and that in the right FFA, brain activity was equally strong and significantly greater for both paying attention to and ignoring faces, as compared to the passive view condition. First, carefully compare and contrast this pattern of results to the typical results you would see in younger adults. Then, offer the most plausible/reasonable explanation for why this pattern of results may be occurring, being sure that to justify your position. (5)

(d)Clarify what the right N170 is, and then briefly explain how you would expect enhancement and suppression to affect a key property of this brain wave in this task. (3)