Biological and Cognitive Approaches to Psychology Flashcards

A set of vocabulary flashcards covering the definitions, historical figures, and methodologies of the biological and cognitive approaches to psychology as described in the lecture notes.

Biological approach

The scientific study of the biology of behaviour, relating behaviour to bodily processes as an integrative discipline involving neuroanatomy and neurochemistry.

Cognitive approach

A branch of psychology concerned with how people acquire, store, transform, use, and communicate information, emphasizing internal mental processes.

Hippocrates

A physician who believed all illnesses had a physical and rational explanation and devised the theory of the four humours.

Four humours

Substances produced by organs — black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm — whose balance was thought to determine psychological processes.

The Allegory of the Cave

An analogy by Plato exploring reality and human perception, where a man's reality is defined by shadows until he escapes to discover true knowledge.

Encephalocentrism

The belief, advocated by Plato, that the brain is the seat of mental processes.

Krasis

A term used by Aristotle to describe a melancholic temperament that predisposes individuals to depression-related diseases.

Phusis

A term used by Aristotle to describe individuals who are melancholic by constitution.

Erasistratus

The founder of neurophysiology who distinguished the cerebrum from the cerebellum and identified the brain as the origin for sensory and motor nerves.

Galen

A Roman physician who documented that the brain receives sensory information; his neuroanatomical views, based on animal dissection, dominated until the Renaissance.

The tree of nerves

Leonardo da Vinci's description of the neurological system leading via the spinal cord to the brain, the commanding neurological centre.

Causal mind–body interactionism

Descartes's account of the relationship between the mind and the body, providing an analysis of primary emotions.

Thomas Willis

A scientist who identified the 'Circle of Willis' arterial system and defined the brain as the seat of mental and cognitive function in the late 17th century.

Paul Broca

Generally regarded as the founder of modern brain surgery, he identified left hemispheric dominance for speech and worked on the localisation of brain function.

Brodmann

Developed a cartography of the brain and systematic study of the cerebral cortex using special staining techniques.

Neuron doctrine

The fundamental principle established by Cajal stating that the neuron is the anatomical, physiological, genetic, and metabolic unit of the nervous system.

Synapse

The gap between neurons, first described by Sherrington roughly 50 years before electron microscopy allowed it to be viewed.

Engram

The neural basis of a memory trace, which was the subject of research by Lashley.

Motor sensory homunculi

A disproportionate representation of sensation from body parts across the surface of the sensory cortex, published by Penfield and Rasmussen in 1957.

Multidisciplinary neuroscience

An approach emerging in the late 20th century that combines physical sciences, psychology, genetics, and molecular biology to study the brain.

Behavioural genetics

A field examining how genes, behaviour, and the environment interact, focusing on the inheritance of traits.

Genetic heritability

The extent to which any phenotype, such as personality or behaviour, is passed from parents to children, representing the genetic contribution to a trait's variation.

Genotype

The specific genetic code of an organism.

Phenotype

The observable physical or behavioural traits of an organism.

Information processing theory (IPT)

A concept proposing that cognition is a flow of information within an organism, moving through a sequence of stages or transformations.

Broadbent's filter model

A mechanistic account of selective attention where information from the perceptual system passes through a filter that only allows attended information.

Bits

A quantitative measure of information; Miller ($1956$) showed adults can typically perceive between five and nine unrelated items at once.

Universal grammar

Noam Chomsky's concept of innate rules of language that operate implicitly, allowing humans to acquire complex language easily.

Connectionism

Also known as parallel distributed processing, these models consist of neural networks with interconnected nodes of varying strengths.

Graceful degradation

A characteristic of connectionist models where performance diminishes slowly when the model is damaged, mirroring human neurological disorders.

Electroencephalography (EEG)

A methodology that measures real-time electrical activity in the brain by attaching recording electrodes to the scalp.

Positron Emission Tomography (PET)

A neuroimaging technique that measures changes in blood flow to localise neural activity during cognitive tasks.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

An imaging method sensitive to the concentration of oxygen in the blood, used to map neural activity.

Eye-tracking

A non-intrusive methodology for understanding visual attention by recording eye positions and pupil dilation.

Neuropsychological test battery

A quantitative procedure, such as the Halstead-Reitan or Luria-Nebraska batteries, used to assess functional areas affected by brain damage.

Chronometric methods

Techniques that use reaction times ($RT$) as an indirect measure of brain function and processing efficiency.

Dichotic listening task

An experimental procedure where two different auditory stimuli are presented simultaneously, one to each ear, to study ear asymmetry.

Right ear advantage (REA)

The observation that neurologically normal subjects typically report items presented to the right ear with greater accuracy.

Gaps in research

Areas where existing knowledge is incomplete, insufficient, or inconsistent, which serve to guide future research efforts.