Çelik and Kaya (2004) performed SPECT to study Wernicke's encephalopathy in chronic alcoholics and found hypoperfusion of bilateral frontal and frontoparietal areas as well as right basal ganglia. SPECT has been used to study patients with partial epilepsy (Lee et al., 2011), frontotemporal lobar degeneration (Borroni et al., 2010), depression (Azuma et al., 2009) and several other issues that are important for psychologists. For instance, the study of hypoperfusion in patients with frontotemporal lobar degeneration by Borroni et al. (2010) is important for psychologists as the patients show impairment in their executive functions, behavioural disturbance and language deficit. Azuma et al. (2009) administered Wechsler Memory Scale–Revised ( WMS -R) on patients with depression to investigate memory function and its relationship to brain perfusion in them. Using SPECT they found relationship between anterior cingulate cortex at rest, severity of depression and immediate memory scores.

Other alternatives

Besides these regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) and event-related potential (ERP) are also the available technologies. In ERP the electrical activities of pre and poststimulus periods are correlated to refer to stimulus and response. In rCBF a scinitillation counter is put on the surface of the head to monitor the blood flow. Increased blood flow is an indicator of increased metabolic activity in the gray matter which in turn indicates increased neural activity in that area. Along with the imaging techniques and other physiological measures, cerebral involvement in a cognitive task can be studied with the help of functional measures such as dichhaptic measure, dichotic listening measure, lateral eye movement and split-field presentation.