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ii AP Psychology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Table of Contents Special Focus: The Brain, the Nervous System, and Behavior Introduction Kristin Whitlock. 3 The Brain and Your Students: How to Explain Why Neuroscience Is Relevant to Psychology Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S. 5 Active Learning: Activities Engaging the Entire Brain to Construct Meaning Brennis Lucero-Wagoner.
21 Basic Neuroscience David G. 39 Teaching Resource: Neurons in the Real World Jessica Habashi. 51 Teaching Activity: Memory, Memory Loss, and the Brain Kristin Whitlock. 70 Important Note: The following set of materials is organized around a particular theme, or “special focus,” that reflects important topics in the AP Psychology course.
The materials are intended to provide teachers with resources and classroom ideas relating to that focus. The special focus, as well as the specific content of the materials, cannot and should not be taken as an indication that a particular topic will appear on the AP Exam. AP Psychology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: The Brain, the Nervous System, and Behavior Introduction Kristin Whitlock Viewmont High School Bountiful, Utah The articles that follow are organized around the theme of “The Brain, the Nervous System, and Behavior.” I chose this theme because, based on personal experience and my interactions with fellow high school psychology teachers, I’ve found that many of us feel unprepared to teach the concepts of neural and brain functioning. Over the years, independent study and practice have improved my presentation of these topics, but the support of my fellow educators has also been invaluable.
The purpose of these materials is to provide you with that type of support. What follows are wonderful teaching activities that you can readily implement in your classes and articles that provide background information, helpful hints on how to teach certain concepts, and images and data that will supplement your course lectures. The collection begins with an article entitled “The Brain and Your Students: How to Explain Why Neuroscience Is Relevant to Psychology,” by Stephen M. Kosslyn and Robin S.
Rosenberg of Harvard University. Sometimes it is a challenge for teachers to help students understand why studying biology in a psychology course is important. Kosslyn and Rosenberg believe that helping students learn more about recent findings in neuroscience enables them to better “establish the reality of psychological phenomena” and to understand cognitive processes more fully. The authors provide illustrative examples and ideas about how to incorporate biological research into the classroom.
Brennis Lucero-Wagoner of California State University: Northridge contributed “Active Learning: Engaging the Entire Brain to Construct Meaning.” She has developed active- learning activities centered on teaching the parts and functions of the neuron and the brain. Lucero-Wagoner focuses on a learning model developed by David Kolb that suggests that genuine learning occurs in a cycle of experience, reflection, abstraction, and active testing. James Zull has adopted Kolb’s ideas and applied them to current research in neuroscience. Lucero-Wagoner has created activities based on Zull’s model to help students become more fully engaged in their own learning of neuroscience.
In his article “Basic Neuroscience,” David G. Thomas of Oklahoma State University provides clear, concrete examples about how neurons do their jobs. He explains that students need to understand these neural functions because neurons are the building blocks from which students can understand more complex psychological processes. AP Psychology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: The Brain, the Nervous System, and Behavior Thomas not only explains these basic processes but also provides an interesting application in a hypothetical psychological experiment demonstrating the connection between neural functioning and goal-directed behavior.
To supplement the teaching of the neuron, Jessica Habashi has provided valuable resources in “Neurons in the Real World.” For most teachers of introductory psychology, the images of neurons provided in textbooks and overheads are artists’ drawings of the various structures. Habashi provides links to histological slides of neuronal structures typically discussed in introductory psychology classes. To accompany the slides, Habashi provides detailed descriptions of each as well as hand-drawn, black-and-white images for students to color and label. Finally, I developed an additional teaching activity investigating another aspect of the physical basis of behavior and cognition.
In “Memory, Memory Loss, and the Brain,” I explore the physical aspects of memory and the role of the hippocampus, as well as the consequences of life without memory, through the case studies of H., Clive Wearing, and Jimmie G. By integrating the articles and teaching activities contained in this book into your own syllabus, you will give students valuable insight into the biological and technological bases of behavior that transcends the information normally included in an AP-level textbook. I hope you will find these many resources useful in your courses and the teaching activities engaging for your students. AP Psychology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: The Brain, the Nervous System, and Behavior The Brain and Your Students: How to Explain Why Neuroscience Is Relevant to Psychology Stephen M.
Kosslyn Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts Robin S. Rosenberg Lesley University Cambridge, Massachusetts Note: This article first appeared in Voices of Experience: Memorable Talks from the National Institute on the Teaching of Psychology by Perlman, Baron. Copyright 2005 by American Psychological Society. Reproduced with permission of American Psychological Society in the format Other Book via Copyright Clearance Center.
Barely a week goes by without an announcement of some new advance in neuroscience research. Often the new research findings arise from neuroimaging studies, which may use techniques like positron emission tomography (PET) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to show that certain brain areas are activated when people perform specific tasks. Many of these advances directly bear on the nature of psychological phenomena, but it is often not clear how to teach this information in a way that is meaningful and interesting to psychology students. Not being neuroscientists, many students do not feel motivated to learn the results of brain studies because, from their point of view, associations between a particular task and where the brain happens to be activated when that task is performed seem arbitrary and irrelevant.
To counter this attitude, teachers of psychology need to show students how understanding the brain is relevant to psychology. The brain, after all, is the seat of cognition, affect, and consciousness—and thus its characteristics surely affect the nature of our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. We have developed two related approaches to integrating neuroscience into psychology, which we illustrate in this chapter. First, we show how discoveries about the brain can help us to establish the reality of psychological phenomena and distinguish among them, and help us understand mental processes more deeply.
Second, we take a step back and exploit an important general principle: Any psychological phenomenon can be addressed from multiple levels of analysis. The brain does not exist in a vacuum, and putting it in AP Psychology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: The Brain, the Nervous System, and Behavior context—seeing its role in our thoughts, feelings, and behavior, alone and in groups— allows students to see how the brain affects everyday phenomena. Facts about the Brain Inform Psychology In this section we discuss how findings about the brain illuminate three general types of psychological questions: (a) whether a psychological phenomenon actually exists; (b) whether two phenomena are distinct or instead are different facets of the same thing; and, (c) why people think, feel, or behave in specific ways in specific circumstances. Psychological Reality? Facts about the brain can tell us whether a phenomenon is “psychologically real.” Introspection, or even behavioral data, may not prove sufficient to implicate a specific mental phenomenon; such data can often be explained in many different ways (e.
Facts about the brain can play a decisive role in documenting that a mental phenomenon actually exists. Do Mental Images Exist? Consider this quote from John B. Watson, founder of behaviorism: What does a person mean when he closes his eyes or ears (figuratively speaking) and says, “I see the house where I was born, the trundle bed in my mother’s room where I used to sleep—I can even see my mother as she comes to tuck me in and I can even hear her voice as she softly says good night”? Touching, of course, but sheer bunk. We are merely dramatizing.
The behaviorist finds no proof of imagery in all this. We have put all these things in words long, long ago. 76-77) Pylyshyn (1973, 1981, 2003) and others echoed this view years later, conceptualizing cognition as analogous to programs running on a computer. In their view, such programs use language-like internal representations (lists of facts, tables of information, and so on), and do not involve images in any sense.
According to this view, the “picture-like” aspects of mental imagery are purely epiphenomenal. Like the heat from a light bulb when one is reading, these characteristics do not play a role in information processing. Are reports of using images in reasoning and recall to be taken as simply figures of speech, or do they reflect fundamental facts about how the mind works? Visual mental images have been shown to exhibit three kinds of properties (for reviews, see Kosslyn, 1980, 1994). Try this (or have your students try it): Count, from memory, AP Psychology: 2006–2007 Workshop Materials Special Focus: The Brain, the Nervous System, and Behavior how many windows are in your living room.
Most people report that they visualize the room and mentally scan along the walls, counting the windows. Did you notice the locks on the windows?