Psychology
Ways of Studying the Brain
"Ways of Studying the Brain" refers to the various methods and techniques used to investigate the structure and function of the brain. These approaches include neuroimaging, such as MRI and fMRI, as well as invasive methods like electrophysiology and neurosurgery. By employing these diverse strategies, researchers can gain insights into the complexities of the brain and its impact on behavior and cognition.
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4 Key excerpts on "Ways of Studying the Brain"
eBook - PDFEarly Childhood Studies
A Social Science Perspective
- Ewan Ingleby(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Whether you focus upon the mind or the brain depends upon your fundamental understanding of how psychology should be studied. Many psychological perspectives such as behaviourism, humanism, psychodynamic and cognitive theories emphasize the importance of the mind. This is because each of these perspectives has a clear understanding or model of the mind. In contrast biological perspectives are more likely to place an emphasis upon the genes and hormones influ-encing the brain. We can now look at exploring some of the psychological perspectives. This is a way of adding detail to our introductory explanations of what the subject area of psychol-ogy is. It is also a means of setting the scene before we look at how psychology can be applied to early years practice and Early Childhood Studies in particular. The schools of psychology Table 1.1 gives a summary of five major schools of psychology together with a brief description of their key features. These schools of thought are especially useful to practitioners working with children and families because of the influence they have had in shap-ing the academic concerns of psychology. The practical application of this academic discipline appears to relate to much of the work that is undertaken with children and families. If you are working with children and families you will need to apply psychology through ‘modelling’ best practice and meet-ing the needs of children and families in an assertive manner. Knowledge and understanding of the competing perspectives in psychology can help you to achieve this ‘best practice’. The origins of the schools of thought go back to some of the earliest philosophical ideas to have influenced Western Psychology and Early Childhood Studies 9 thought. The proposition that there are forces beyond the individual that shape social reality goes back to the ideas of the Greek philosopher Plato.
- Anton Yasnitsky, René van der Veer, Michel Ferrari(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Mainstream neuropsychology today still takes an approach that Luria called naturalistic. This approach is well described by Kolb and Whishaw (1996): We define neuropsychology as the study of the relation between brain function and behavior. Although the study draws information from many disciplines – for example, anatomy, biology, biophysics, ethology, pharmacology, physiology, physiological psychology, and philosophy – its central focus is the development of a science of human behavior based on the function of the human brain. (p. 3) Most notable in this definition is not the list of disciplines that contribute to neuro- psychology but what is ignored, the disciplines that are not in the list. The list does not include any discipline that studies (human) environment – history, anthropology, culturology, sociology, ethnography, semiotics, etc. Mainstream neuropsychology today searches for an explanation of the behavior in the brain. Cultural-historical psychology, in contrast, does not actually study functions of the brain as the basis of behavior. Rather, this approach studies higher psychological functions from the perspective of the brain. Next I discuss what this statement means. Extracerebral origin of mind in the context of structural-systemic science Cultural-historical neuropsychology comprises a coherent whole. General structural-systemic principles that define what is scientific understanding and expla- nation do not stand alone but are applied at every step. Structural-systemic prin- ciples force us to ask – what is the whole? What are parts of the whole? In which specific way are the parts related so that this and not some other whole emerges? In order to answer these questions, a neuropsychological approach is taken for a very clear reason – cultural-historical neuropsychology is not so much the study of the functions of the brain but rather one particular way (among others) that allows us to study development of higher psychological functions.
eBook - PDF- Bradley R. Postle(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
● Studying an aspect of cognition requires careful thought about the validity of the function to be studied; and not all aspects of human behavior can be studied with the same sets of assumptions, or even with the same methods. ● The discipline of cognitive neuroscience could not exist without discoveries yielded by research with nonhuman animals. ● At the dawn of the twentieth century, scientists were studying the brain and behavior from three related, but distinct, perspectives that would eventually give rise to cognitive neuroscience as we know it today: systems neuroscience, behavioral neurology/neuropsychology, and experimental psychology. INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY INTRODUCTION AND HISTORY 5 CONTENTS KEY THEMES A BRIEF (AND SELECTIVE) HISTORY Construct validity in models of cognition Localization of function vs. mass action The first scientifically rigorous demonstrations of localization of function The localization of motor functions The localization of visual perception The localization of speech WHAT IS A BRAIN AND WHAT DOES IT DO? LOOKING AHEAD TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE END-OF-CHAPTER QUESTIONS REFERENCES OTHER SOURCES USED FURTHER READING 6 SECTION I: THE NEUROBIOLOGY OF THINKING A BRIEF (AND SELECTIVE) HISTORY Although the term “cognitive neuroscience” as a moniker for a scientific discipline has only been with us for a few decades, the field has roots that extend back thousands of years. Ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans all had ideas about the corporeal bases of human thoughts and emo- tions, although many of these did not specify a role for the brain. In preparing the bodies of deceased nobles for the afterlife, for example, ancient Egyptians removed and dis- carded the brain as an early step in the mummification process. The internal organs that were deemed to be important were preserved in urns that were entombed along with the body.
eBook - PDF- Jamie Ward(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
l The methods of social neuroscience Social neuroscience is too recent a field to have developed a distinct meth- odology of its own. As such its methods are borrowed from disciplines such as psychology (both cognitive and social psychology) and neuro- science (particularly cognitive neuroscience). The chapter will begin by considering various psychological methods such as performance measures (e.g. response times), observational studies, and questionnaires. It then goes on to consider methods linked to cognitive neuroscience – psycho- physiological responses (e.g. skin conductance response) and electrophys- iological responses – before turning to functional imaging, effects of brain lesions, and brain stimulation. Most of these methods are covered in more detail in Ward (2020). However, specific examples from the field of social neuroscience are used to illustrate the different methods and to explain the complementary nature of the different methods. The main methods of cognitive neuroscience can be placed on a num- ber of dimensions as illustrated in Table 2.1 below and Figure 2.1: The temporal resolution refers to the accuracy with which one can measure when an event is occurring. The effects of brain damage are permanent and so this has no temporal resolution as such. Methods such as electroencephalography/event-related potential (EEG/ERP), magnetoencephalography (MEG), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and single-cell recording have millisecond resolution. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has a temporal resolution of several seconds that reflects the slower hemodynamic response.
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