Introduction to Biological and Cognitive Psychology Essay and Narrated PowerPoint Presentation

Part 1: Essay on Biological Psychology

As part of the formal assessment for the programme, you are required to submit an Introduction to Biological and Cognitive Psychology essay, a narrated PowerPoint presentation and a transcript of the narrated PowerPoint presentation. Please refer to your Student Handbook for full details of the programme assessment scheme andgeneral information on preparing and submitting assignments.

1. Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the basic structure and function of the nervous system.
2. Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of fundamental concepts in cognitive psychology.
3. Recognise distinctive approaches and methods employed by biological and cognitive psychologists.
4. Communicate ideas effectively

Part 1: Essay on Biological Psychology

Discuss examples of how genetic and environmental factors can affect the brain. Please include examples from multiple different stages of the lifespan.

You should support your arguments with scientific research papers throughout your essay. You can find these papers in the lessons, but you be awarded extra marks for finding papers through independent wider reading.

Additional guidance:

In your essay, you should include research into environmental factors and research into genetic factors. Examples of environmental factors include (but are not limited to) social interactions, exposure to chemicals, exposure to physical harm or emotional harm and patterns of behaviour. Examples of genetic factors include (but are not limited to) genetic disorders, genetically inherited characteristics and genetic predispositions. You do not have to consider every single environmental factor and every single genetic factor listed here.

You need to cover multiple stages of the lifespan. For example, the pre-natal, post-natal, infant, childhood, adolescent, young adult, adult or elderly stages of life. You do not need to discuss all of these stages, but you do need to discuss more than one. Your examples do not have to fit neatly into one of the stages mentioned above, but it should be clear which part of the lifespan each example relates to. You can use examples which cover multiple stages of the lifespan (for example, looking at how alcohol affects the brain of neo-nates and then how it affects the brains of adults) or different examples for different stages of the lifespan.

You need to support your arguments with scientific research papers. You can find these papers in the lessons, and you will still get good marks for doing so, but you will be awarded extra marks for finding some of your papers through independent wider reading. Here is a video that will guide you through the process of finding your own research papers:

When discussing scientific research papers, it is worth mentioning the methods used by the researchers and their main findings. You do not have to relay all of the technical and statistical information here. Rather, you just need to clearly present ‘what they did’ and ‘what they found’. For example: What were the different conditions in the study? What kind of data were they recording (fMRI, EEG etc.)? Which areas of the brain were involved?

To go above and beyond and to push into the highest grade category, you could discuss how the factors affect the brain in different ways at different stages of the lifespan. For example, rather than simply explaining how an environmental factor affects the brain during childhood and then during adulthood and leaving the reader to identify the differences, you could directly identify the differences yourself. You could also critically evaluate the studies that you include. These are not requirements. Rather, they are extra things that you could do to excel and to challenge yourself.

Cognitive psychology has made significant contributions to our scientific understanding of learning, memory, attention and perception. Your task is to present a narrated PowerPoint presentation about four specific significant contributions, which are listed below. In your presentation, you should describe each significant contribution and briefly discuss how it has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the topic area. You should support your arguments by making reference to scientific papers throughout your presentation.

Significant contributions:

Learning – Latent learning

Memory – Childhood amnesia

Attention – Late filtering theory

Perception – The Gestalt approach