Biological Psychology

Front 1

What covers most of the surface of the brain?

Back 1

The cortex

Front 2

What is the purpose of the forebrain?

Back 2

Current sensory input, past experience, making and communicating decisions, consciousness

Front 3

What is the purpose of the midbrain?

Back 3

Current sensory input to direct movement

Front 4

What is the purpose of the hindbrain?

Back 4

Homeostasis, control of mouth, respiratory system, reflexes

Front 5

Name the two ways messages get sent to the body.

Back 5

Neurons - electrical signals, rapid, but communication is costly (i.e. infrastructure is only set up for sending messages)

Vascular system - chemical signals, hormones, slower, communication is cheap, membrane receptors

Front 6

Where is life thought to have originated?

Back 6

Deep sea vents

Front 7

When did the first cells evolve?

Back 7

3.5 billion years ago

Front 8

Prokaryotes had what defining features?

Back 8

Cell membrane, cytoplasm (single-celled organism)

Front 9

Eukaryotic cells had what defining features (that made them different from prokaryotes)?

Back 9

Mitochondria, phagocytosis (bringing things in from outside the cell), secretion (pushing things out from inside the cell), communication between cells, cilia, microvilli

Front 10

What did the evolution of multicellular organisms mean that cells could start to do?

Back 10

Differentiate and specialise

Front 11

Name two structural brain imaging techniques.

Back 11

CT, MRI

Front 12

Name two functional brain imaging techniques.

Back 12

PET, fMRI

Front 13

What are the defining features of fMRI?

Back 13

Non-invasive, measures metabolic correlates of neural activity, has high spatial resolution, low temporal precision, measures slow processes, moderately expensive

Front 14

How does structural MRI work?

Back 14

Protons create small magnetic charge - MRI can differentiate tissues based on how quickly they release energy

Front 15

What does BOLD signal stand for?

Back 15

Blood Oxygen Level Dependent signal

Front 16

How does fMRI work?

Back 16

Neurons become active, blood flows to the part of the brain to provide oxygen to fuel the cells.

Haemoglobin differs in how it responds to magnetic fields - deoxygenated haemoglobin is more attracted to magnetic fields.

Oxygenated blood distorts magnetic field less

Net effect is a reduction in field inhomogeneity, an increase in MR signal

Front 17

Name some properties of BOLD signal.

Back 17

Signals are relative, have to provide both an experimental condition and a baseline condition, slow

Front 18

What was a block design, and what are some limitations of them?

Back 18

Long periods of alternating task/baseline performance.

Limitations: Highly predictable occurrence of stimuli, inflexible for complex tasks.

Front 19

What is an event-related design?

Back 19

Trials of different conditions are randomly intermixed and occur close together in time.

Front 20

What are the advantages of an event-related design?

Back 20

More complex and novel experiments, flexibility and randomisation, post hoc. sorting

Front 21

The BOLD signal is noisy. How do we pick out the signal from the noise?

Back 21

Good experimental design: lots of trials and robust manipulations.

Pre-processing the data (cleaning): correcting for non-task related variability

Front 22

What are the six pre-processing steps?

Back 22

High pass filtering (removes low frequency data), motion correction (scanner tracks head motion), slice time correction, coregistration (registering functional iamges with structural images), normalisation (to make group differentiations and consistent patterns of activations you use a standardised space), spatial smoothing (Warping, in a 3D space, each brain to fit the standardised atlas)

Front 23

What is multiple regression when analysing data?

Back 23

Used to determine the effect of a number of IVs on a DV. Create a design matrix - model of what we expect data to look like. Correlation between brain activation and experimental manipulation.

Front 24

What are beta values?

Back 24

Represent how closely data matches the model

Front 25

What is the multiple comparisons problem?

Back 25

The fact that you are basically guaranteed to find a false positive in the data

Front 26

What is the main, serious limitation that neuroimaging suffers from?

Back 26

The problem of causality - the same with any correlational data. We can't tell whether activations cause a behaviour or behaviour causes activations

Front 27

Does fMRI have a low or high temporal resolution?

Back 27

Low - can't precisely tell you where activity happens

Front 28

What are non-essential activations?

Back 28

When a brain region is activated that is not essential for completing the task - may have been involved in learning the task, or there may be more than one way to complete the task - throws off data

Front 29

How do we solve the causality problem?

Back 29

Examine whether behaviour is affected when the activity cannot happen (this is neuropsychology)

Neurosurgery- removal of brain tissue for treatment of neurological disorders

The effects of brain damage that has already occurred

Front 30

What is neuropsychology?

Back 30

The area of psychology that examines the effects of brain damage

Front 31

What did Paul Broca discover?

Back 31

Broca's area - inferior frontal lobe associated with language

Front 32

Describe split brain research.

Back 32

Separation of the two hemispheres to contain epilepsy - obviously had a number of consequences on psychological processes

Front 33

What is a wada test?

Back 33

Selectively numbing one of the hemispheres

Front 34

What is the assumption of fractionation?

Back 34

Brain is not equipotential - damage to the brain can produce selective benefits

Front 35

What is the assumption of transparency?

Back 35

Damage to the substrate of specific · psychologicalprocess ‘knocks-out’ this process without leading to significantre-organisation of other processes

Front 36

What is the assumption of universality?

Back 36

· Thearchitecture of the mental processes is fundamentally the same acrossindividuals, hence one can generalise from studying some individuals withdeficits to other individuals (including healthy ones)·

Theuniversality assumption is at the basis of all psychological testing ·

Neuropsychologicalresearch is particularly dependent on it because it often relies on smallnumbers of cases or single case studies – reporting the data from individualpatients

Front 37

What are the two schools of thought in neuropsychology?

Back 37

Classic neuropsychology - localisation of function (blobology)

Cognitive neuropsychology - Determining cognitive architecture by identifying processes that rely on qualitatively similar or different mechanisms regardless of location of damage

Front 38

What are single and double dissociations?

Back 38

Data can be used to test theories about brain architecture without knowing the exact location of the damage. Single dissociation is not sufficient for drawing a conclusion, double is the existence of the opposite patterns of the single dissociation.