PSYC 318-01, Physiological Psychology, Fall 1998

Abstract

The goal of this course is to develop the student's ability to think critically about the relationship between the brain and human behavior. Our understanding of this relationship varies greatly across the phenomena typically addressed by psychologists (perception, emotion, thought, motivation, psychopathology, etc, etc), and we will cover representative work (the methods, findings and theories) in each of these areas as noted in the course outline. At the outset (Part I above) the student must develop a basic understanding of the physiological, pharmacological and anatomical principles which apply to all of the psychological phenomena we will study. We will then examine perceptual and motor systems (Part II) to gain an understanding of how information is coded and transformed in the nervous system. In Part III we will address a variety of motivated behaviors (eating, sleeping, reproducing etc) to gain insight into the interplay of various neural systems in behavioral activation and homeostatic regulation. Finally, in Part IV we will look at a variety of complex psychological phenomena such as language and psychopathology attempting to pull together the principles developed in Parts I, II and III.