Genetic and Environmental Factors Affecting the Brain Across Lifespan

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 ofgenetic 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 listedhere.
• 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 canfind 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 ofthe technical and statistical information here. Rather, you just need to clearlypresent ‘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.

Task

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 yourpresentation.

• A narrated PowerPoint consists of a normal PowerPoint presentation with the addition of voice recordings (i.e. narration). Guidance on how to add voice recordings is available in the “How to record and embed your narration” guide, which can be found in the My Assessment tab on iLearn.
• The narration should summarise and add to the content on the slides, rather than simply reading out the text on the slides.
• Your narrated PowerPoint must address all four of the given significant contributions.
• As with the essay, you can find research papers to support your arguments by looking through the lessons, but extra marks will be awarded for papers found through wider reading. Here is a video that will guide you through the process offinding your own research papers: