8 markers

Question 1

Julia complains that her baby is sleeping all day but can’t sleep at night.

Use knowledge of exogenous zeitgebers to discuss what she should do to encourage her baby to sleep more at night.

Answer 1

Exogenous zeitgebers
- external cues which help to regulate a biological clock

Skene and Arendt
- claim that most blind people who still have some light perception have normal circadian rhythms and those with no light do not
- shows importance of exogenous zeitgebers in circadian rhythms
- Morgan says endogenous pacemakers are more important, talk about hamsters and SCN

Julia
- try to keep baby in dark at night by shutting curtains and turning off all lights but expose her to light during daytime
- only use social cues during daytime

Question 2

Outline and evaluate one or more ways of studying the brain

Answer 2

fMRI
- uses magnetic field and radio waves to measure brain activity during a task
- very expensive so small sample sizes decreasing validity
- low temporal resolution

EEG
- uses electrodes to measure electrical brain activity
- cheaper than fMRI so larger sample sizes increasing validity
- lower spatial resolution than fMRI

Post- mortem
- looks at physical brain to find underlying pre-death issues
- requires special permission to conduct so small sample size reducing validity

Question 3

Outline and evaluate split-brain research

Answer 3

Split-brain patients
- corpus callosum damaged

Sperry and Gazzaniga
- researched extent to which the two hemispheres are specialised for certain functions
- image/word presented to patient’s left or right visual field, when info is presented to one hemisphere it isn’t transferred to other hemisphere as corpus callosum is cut
- concluded that left hemisphere dominates speech and language, right hemisphere dominant in terms of visual-motor tasks

Evaluate
- procedures were standardised
- hard to generalise