AP Psychology - Brain Notes

Frontal lobe

Responsible for executive control, planning, inhibition, decision-making, working memory, and voluntary motor command initiation.

Parietal lobe

Involved in somatosensory processing, spatial reasoning, body-position integration, and mathematical transformation.

Temporal lobe

Functions in auditory processing, language comprehension, and memory formation.

Occipital lobe

Specializes in visual processing, feature detection, color, orientation, and motion.

Motor cortex

Controls the execution of voluntary movement.

Somatosensory cortex

Detects touch, pressure, pain, temperature, and registers the body-map.

Prefrontal cortex

Involved in reasoning, impulse control, goal management, and personality expression.

Broca’s area

Associated with speech production and grammatical structuring.

Wernicke’s area

Responsible for language comprehension and semantic integration.

Cerebellum

Coordinates balance, fine motor timing, and procedural learning.

Amygdala

Involved in threat detection, fear, and emotional tagging.

Hippocampus

Centric to the consolidation of explicit memories and spatial navigation.

Hypothalamus

Regulates hunger, thirst, endocrine function, temperature, and circadian rhythms.

Thalamus

Acts as a sensory relay and attention gating.

Medulla

Controls autonomic survival functions such as breathing, heart rate, swallowing, and blood pressure.

Reticular formation

Involved in arousal, alertness, and sleep-wake transitions.

Basal ganglia

Modulates movement, supports habit formation, and links actions to rewards.

Corpus callosum

Facilitates interhemispheric communication.

Limbic system

Composed of structures that regulate emotion, motivation, and memory interplay.