Foundations of Behavioral Neuroscience

This set of flashcards covers fundamental concepts and findings in behavioral neuroscience, addressing topics from consciousness to the impact of brain injuries on personality.

Consciousness

A state of awareness about oneself and the environment.

Behavior

Observable actions or responses of an organism to its environment.

Biological Explanations of Behavior

Framework involving physiological, ontogenetic, evolutionary, and functional aspects to understand behavior.

Niko Tinbergen

A Dutch ethologist who identified four types of questions to understand behavior: physiological, ontogenetic, evolutionary, and functional.

Innate Behavior

A behavior that is present at birth and does not require learning.

Sign Stimulus

A simple cue that triggers an innate behavior.

Functional (Adaptation)

Describes why a structure or behavior evolved.

Phineas Gage

A famous patient whose brain injury demonstrated the link between brain areas and personality changes.

Broca’s Area

A brain region crucial for language production.

Dualism

The philosophical view that the mind and body are separate entities.

Monism

The belief that everything consists of matter and energy, including the mind, which is produced by the nervous system.

Clever Hans Effect

A phenomenon where a horse was thought to exhibit intelligence through response cues rather than actual understanding.

Operant Conditioning

Learning process through which behavior is modified by consequences (reinforcements or punishments).

Classical Conditioning

Learning process where an organism learns to associate a neutral stimulus with a meaningful stimulus.

Emotion in Animals

The consideration of whether animals experience emotions similar to humans.

Neuroscience

The scientific study of the nervous system.

Evolutionary Psychology

The study of how evolutionary processes shape psychological traits.

Research Methodology

The systematic approach to research involving hypothesis, experimentation, and analysis.

Lateralized Brain Function

The specialization of certain cognitive processes in one hemisphere of the brain, such as language in the left hemisphere.