Exam 3: Biological Foundations of Behaviour

Graded potentials are directly proportional to the amount of incoming stimulation, while action potentials are not.

You have just joined a psychology lab and are working with a group of researchers who are interested in how the brain responds to different kinds of facial expressions (e.g. happy, scared, angry, etc,.). They ask you if you have any ideas for experiments. You suggest testing what happens when you temporarily disrupt a specific part of the brain involved with facial processing (the fusiform face area) when students are making judgments about face stimuli. What method would be appropriate to test that hypothesis?

Describe the four methods used to study brain-behaviour relations. For each method, give an example of a test or technique.

The area of the brain that is responsible for self-awareness, planning, and initiative is called the ___________ lobe.

An antagonist can produce its effects by ___________.

As far as the sensory cortex is concerned, humans primarily consist of the following body structures

Dr. Kelsey is working with a split-brain patient to better understand what the different parts of the brain do. She finds that when words are flashed to the left side of the visual field, so they are sent to the right hemisphere, patients can't describe what they have seen using words. This tells Dr. Kelsey that language abilities are at least somewhat localized in one hemisphere of the brain. This localization is called

Alcohol is a(n) ___________.

In the laboratory, Sarah electrically stimulated a part of a rat's brain that made it assume an aggressive posture. What part of the brain did she stimulate?

Mark's father had triple bypass surgery a week ago and has been told by his doctors to reduce the stress in his life in general, and at least for the next several weeks try to maintain calmness around him. After opening a letter from school containing Mark's poor semester grades, his father does his biofeedback exercises in an effort to return his blood pressure to normal and his muscles back to relaxation. For this to work, a particular nervous system is working overtime. This is the ________________ nervous system.

You are trying to get a good scan of a patient's brain in order to see where the area of greatest activity is. Which of the following would be the best scan to use?

The memory of a woman is substantially impaired after she injures her head falling off of a ladder. In particular, she is unable to remember recent events that have happened to her. Damage to which of the following brain areas is most likely responsible for these difficulties?

Isaac contracted viral encephalitis. Five days later, he was unable to remember a number of details about his life and had trouble acquiring new memories. Most likely, the virus had damaged his

In the human body, which nervous system is responsible for calming and slowing down the body processes?

Let's say that you are a crime scene investigator. A victim has died from massive convulsions and violent muscle contractions. In looking for the poison that killed this person, you would probably focus on a drug that resulted in a huge release of

The type of neuron that carries input messages from the sense organs to the central nervous system is called the ___________.

Contrast the types of information provided by a CT scan with a PET scan. How does the information provided by the MRI/fMRI compare to these other techniques?

A CT scan is to a PET scan as brain ____________.

Ion exchange in an axon (sodium in, potassium out) is the basis for

If there were equal amounts of positive and negative ions inside and outside of a neuron's cell membrane