Paper 2 - Biological Area Flashcards
What’s the function of the cerebral cortex ?
Frontal lobe: reasoning, planning, speech, movement, emotion and problem solving.
Parietal lobe: movement, orientation, recognition and perception of stimulus.
occipital lobe: visual processing
Temporal lobe: perception of auditory stimulus, memory and speech
What’s the function of the corpus callosum ?
Connects the left and right hemispheres to carry communications between the two.
What’s the function of the cerebellum ?
coordination of movement, posture and balance
What’s the function of the thalamus ?
a relay station for signals from the skin, eyes, stomach and ears
What’s the function of the hypothalamus ?
controls body temperature, hunger and thirst.
What’s the function of the limbic system ?
set of structures located either side of the thalamus. It’s involved in motivation, emotion and memory. It also has the reward centre (ventral striatum).
What does cross wired brain mean ?
The left side of the body is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain. The right side of the body is controlled by the left hemisphere.
The eyes receive information from both the right visual field (RVF) and the left visual field (LVF) info from the RVF is processed by the left hemisphere. Info from the LVF is processed by the right hemisphere.
What is Lateralisation ?
The theory that each hemisphere of the brain has different functions.
What are the functions of the left hemisphere ?
language
What are the functions of the right hemisphere ?
emotion, music and spatial localisation of stimuli.
What does biological psychology assume ?
behaviour is determined by underlying physiological processes, e.g genetic and neurochemical explanations - how the brain and nervous system work. All thought, feelings and behaviour have a biological cause
What is the reward centre of the brain ?
ventral striatum
What are strengths of the biological approach ?
It is useful because if we know behvaiour is caused by biological reasons this can lead to treatment and intervention for the suffering people, for example, in Casey’s study, Omega 3 can be used as an example to help people be less impulsive.
It is a scientific approach so allows a cause and effect relationship to be established in highly controlled environments.
Understanding how atypical brains work can help us understand how typical brains work, for example Sperry helped us understand what each hemisphere controls.
Measurements can be objective as it is performed by machines which have no interest in the results, e.g. MRI, PET scans have accurate results.
What are the weaknesses of the biological approach ?
It is a reductionist view - it is too simplistic to say that all of our behaviour is caused by physiological factors - it ignores cognitive and social factors, such as parental upbringing (biosocial approach). This also dehumanises humans to be biological machines.
Experiments lack ecological validity due to the controlled lab environment.
It is a deterministic approach as it believes that we are determines by our genetic makeup, therefore we have no free will.
Research many focus on rare conditions that have little impact on everyday life for most people.
Small/restricted samples means we cannot generalise.
Complex machinery can cause human error.
Reliability of some machines may be questioned, for example, in Casey’s study brain activity was found in a dead salmon using the fMRI machine.
What are the similarities of the biological area ?
The main factors behind cognitive processes include genes and hormones which are pysiological processes that the biological area also focus on.
The reductionism and determinism is similar to the individual differences and the social area.
The lab experiments are similar to the cognitive area.
The practical applications such as development for treatments are similar to the developmental area.
