Section B

What are the principles of the biological area?

• Different regions of the brain are responsible for different behaviours

• The brain and nervous system are key to understanding human behaviour

What are some applications of the biological area?

• Healthcare professionals

  • A patient unable to talk due to their injury should include regular attempts at communication into their treatment plan

  • This exercises the language centre of their brain which due to brain plasticity, may allow them to speak again

How is the biological area scientific?

• Research is very controlled

• Allows for replication and falsification

• For example Casey standardised their Go/No-go trials by ensuring of the 160, 120 were go and 40 were no go

How is the biological area useful?

• We gain more understanding into how differences in brain structure affect behaviour

• For example, taxi drivers have a larger posterior hippocampal volume, which is the area associated with retrieval of old memories and spatial navigation

How is the biological area reductionist?

• It ignores other possible influences on behaviour

• This decreases insight which decreases validity

• For example in Blakemoore and Cooper, only the visual cortex was examined but we lack insight into how other areas of the brain had changed due to brain plasticity

How are samples an issue in the biological area?

• Unusual biological conditions are explored within the area so sample sizes may be small

• This is not generalisable to the target population as there are too few people

• For example, Casey’s study has a niche sample of 100 split-brained participants