Biological Psychology

Lesson 5:
Research Methods
Kalat, J.W. (2015). Biological Psycholgy.(12th ed.) Boston:
Cengage Learning. Ch 3.
Itır Kaşıkçı
Istanbul Ticaret University
Nov’17
Research Method Categories
1. Examine the effects of brain damage. After
damage or temporary inactivation, what aspects of
behavior are impaired?
• Lesion, ablasion (+TMS)
2. Examine the effects of stimulating a brain area.
Ideally, if damaging some area impairs a behavior,
stimulating that area should enhance the behavior.
• Optigenetics.
3. Record brain activity during behavior. Recording
changes in brain activity during different behaviors.
• Single cell recording, EEG, MEG, PET, fMRI.
4. Correlate brain anatomy with behavior. Do people
with some unusual behavior also have unusual
brains? If so, in what way?
Effects of Brain Damage
Lesion Studies • Ablation: Removal of a
brain area.

• Lesion: The brain region

which cannot function
due to head trauma,
stroke, tumor etc.
• Making a lesion:
Damaging a brain area.
• stereotaxic instrument
• sham lesion
• gene-knockout
approach: Directing a
mutation to a gene that
is important for one
type of cell, transmitter,
or receptor.
Broca’s area (Paul Broca, 1861)
Effects of Brain Damage - TMS
• Transcranial magnetic stimulation
• Application of magnetic stimulation to a
portion of the scalp, inactivates
neurons in a narrow area below the
magnet, producing a “virtual lesion”
that outlasts the magnetic stimulation
itself.

• Also used for therapuetic purpose.

• Drug resistant depression.
Effect of Brain Damage
• After any kind of brain damage or inactivation, the
problem for psychologists is to specify the exact
behavioral deficit.

• If you damage a brain area and the animal stops eating,

you don’t know why.
• Did it lose its hunger?
• Its ability to taste food?
• Its ability to find the food?
• Its ability to move at all?
• Further behavioral tests are needed to narrow down
the possibilities.
Effects of Brain Stimulation
• Optogenetics: Using light to control a limited population of
neurons.
• 1) The researcher uses a specially manipulated virus to insert
light-sensitive proteins into the membrane of a given type of
neuron.
• One protein reacts to light by opening a Na+ channel, exciting the
neuron.
• Another reacts by opening a Cl- channel, producing inhibition.
• The virus can be altered chemically so that it delivers one of these
proteins only to a certain type of neuron, or even to just one part of the
neuron, such as the axon or the dendrites.
• 2) The investigator implants a very thin optical fiber into the
brain, making it possible to shine light that affects only the type
of neuron containing the light-sensitive protein.
• 3) The neurons are activated/deactivated when the light is on.
Recording Brain Activity
During a given behavior or cognitive activity, which
brain areas increase their activity?

• Single cell recording: Inserting an electrode to a

single neuron to record activity (action potentials).

• «Watching action potentials»

• Zebra fish during their larval stage have transparent
bodies.
• By modifying one gene, researchers can cause neurons
to fluoresce when they produce action potentials.
Recording Brain Activity - EEG
• Electroencephalograph (EEG):
Recording electrical activity of the
brain through electrodes—ranging
from just a few to more than a
hundred—attached to the scalp.
• Spontaneous brain activity
• Evoked potentials: activity in response
to a stimulus.

• Very good in temporal measurement

but poor in functional localization.

• Neurofeedback
• Electrocorticograph (ECoG)
Recording Brain Activity – EEG/ERP
• Event related
potentials (ERP):
Electrical
potentials
recorded mainly in
experimental
conditions, related
to an event.

• N400: Familiar
word
• P600: Familiar
melody
Recording Brain Activity - MEG
• Magnetoencephalograph:
Similar to EEG but instead
of measuring electrical
activity, it measures the
magnetic fields generated
by brain activity.
• Has excellent temporal
resolution.
• Better than EEG in terms of
cortical spatial resolution.
Recording Brain Activity - PET
• Positron-emission
tomography (PET)
• Provides a high resolution
image of activity in a living
brain by recording the
emission of radioactivity
from injected chemicals.
• Radioactive agent is attached
to glucose.

• It’s use decreased with the

invention of fMRI.
• Harmful.
• Expensive
Recording Brain Activity - fMRI
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
• Structural vs Functional MRI
• MRI scans water.
• fMRI scanner detects hemoglobin with oxygen.
• It does functional
localization depending on
the oxygen level of the
blood. (BOLD response)

• Even it is quite good at

spacial localization, it is
slow for the temporal
measurement of cognitive
functions.
Recording Brain Activity - Interpretation

• Researchers found that people who crave chocolate

show a greater than average brain response to the
sight of chocolate.
• Does this result tell us why some people like
chocolate so much?

• Correlation vs Cause & effect

• Importance of control condition
Brain Anatomy & Behavior

• Phrenology: Relating skull anatomy to the behavior.

1800s, Franz Gall.
• Phrenology was
invalid for.
• Skull shape has
little relationship to
brain anatomy.

• Localization vs
Whole brain
function
Gathering info about Brain Anatomy
• Computerized axial tomography
• CT or CAT scan
• X-Rays
• help detect tumors and other
structural abnormalities.
• Structural Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
• Radio frequency
• Shows anatomical details
Correlating Brain Anatomy with Behavior
• A particular brain area is enlarged in certain types of people.
• People with a larger amygdala tend to have more social contacts
(Bickart, Wright, Dautoff, Dickerson,& Barrett, 2011).
• Adolescents with a large vocabulary tend to have more than
average gray matter in part of the parietal lobe (H. L. Lee et al.,
2007).
• Personality traits such as extraversion, neuroticism, and
conscientiousness correlate significantly with the size of certain
areas of the cortex (De Young et al., 2010).

• These are correlations, NOT cause and effect.

• We don’t know whether having much gray matter in the parietal
lobe helps people develop a large vocabulary, or
• whether developing a large vocabulary leads to growth of relevant
gray matter.
Brain Size and Intelligence
Comparison among species
• Not a main indicator.
• Some dog breeds
have higher
body/brain ratio than
human.
• Ants have very large
brains compared to
their bodies.
• Some species have
larger neurons than
others.
• Brains size is a poor
indicator of number
of neurons.
• We luck operational
definiton of
intelligence!
Brain Size and Intelligence
Comparison among humans
• Most studies find a moderate positive correlation
between brain size and IQ, typically around 0.3.
• However, there’s no consensus btw studies.
Brain Size and Intelligence
Comparison of Men and Women
• Men on average have larger brains than women but equal
IQs.(Differences in height taken into account).
• Women average more and deeper sulci on the surface of the cortex, especially
in the frontal and parietal areas (Luders et al., 2004).
• Consequently, the surface area of the cortex is almost equal for men and
women.
• Certain brain areas are relatively larger in men, and others in women.
• Pattern of connections differs between the sexes.

• Although male and female brains differ on average, behavioral

differences are smaller than most people expect.
• Behavioral differences are mostly cultural.

• On short the data do not support any simple summary of the

relationship between overall brain size and overall intelligence.
Overal LoOk
• ablation • lesion
• computerized axial • magnetic resonance
tomography (CT or CAT imaging (MRI)
scan) • Magnetoencephalograph
• Electroencephalograph (MEG)
(EEG) • phrenology
• evoked potentials or • Positron-emission
evoked responses tomography (PET)
• event related potentials • stereotaxic instrument
• functional magnetic • Transcranial magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) stimulation (TMS)