CHAPTER 3
Biological Psychology
RICHARD F. THOMPSON AND STUART M. ZOLA
47THE MIND 47
THE BRAIN 48
SENSORY PROCESSES 51
Color Vision 51
Pitch Detection 52
LEARNING AND MEMORY 53
MOTIVATION AND EMOTION 56
Emotion 56
Motivation 57
COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE 59
CONCLUSION 62
REFERENCES 62The great questions of philosophy, the mind–body problem
and the nature of knowledge, were also the questions that
drove early developments in the pathways to modern psy-
chology. This is especially true of biological or physiological
psychology. Wilhelm Wundt, who founded experimental psy-
chology, titled his major work Foundations of Physiological
Psychology(1874/1908). William James, the other major fig-
ure in the development of modern psychology, devoted a
third of his influential text Principles of Psychology (1890) to
the brain and nervous system. Both Wundt and James studied
medicine and philosophy, and both considered themselves
physiologists. Their goal was not to reduce psychology to
physiology but rather to apply the scientific methods of phys-
iology to the study of the mind. The other driving force in
early biological psychology was the study of the brain and
nervous system.
The major topics in modern biological psychology are sen-
sory processes, learning and memory, motivation and emotion,
and most recently cognition—in short, behavioral and cogni-
tive neuroscience. A number of other areas began as part of
physiological psychology and have spun off to become fields
in their own right. We treat the major topics in biological psy-
chology separately in the text that follows. But first we sketch
very briefly the recent philosophical and physiological roots.
THE MIND
The history of such issues as the mind–body problem and
epistemology is properly the domain of philosophy, treated
extensively in many volumes and well beyond the scope of
this chapter and the expertise of these authors. Our focus in
this brief section is on the history of the scientific study of the
mind, which really began in the nineteenth century.
Perhaps the first experimental attacks on the nature of
the mind were the observations of Weber as generalized by
Gustav Fechner. Ernst Weber, a physiologist, was attempting
in 1834 to determine whether the nerves that respond to the
state of the muscles also contribute to judgments about
weights. He found that the just noticeable difference ( jnd) in
weight that could be reliably detected by the observer was not
some absolute amount but rather a constant ratioof the
weight being lifted. The same applied to the pitch of tones
and the length of lines.
Fechner realized that Weber had discovered a way of
measuring the properties of the mind. Indeed, in his Elements
of Psychophysics(1860/1966) he felt he had solved the prob-
lem of mind and body. He generalized Weber’s observations
to state that as the psychological measurement in jnd’s in-
creased arithmetically, the intensity of the physical stimulus
increased geometrically—the relationship is logarithmic.
Fechner, trained as a physicist, developed the classical psy-
chophysical methods and the concepts of absolute and differ-
ential thresholds. According to Edwin Boring (1942), he had
a nervous breakdown and resigned his chair at Leipzig in- During the last 35 years of his life, he devoted himself
to panpsychism, the view that mind and matter are one and
thus that mind is all. He viewed the psychophysical law as the
paradigm for the transformation of the material into the spir-
itual. In any event, the methods Fechner developed were of
great help to such early experimental psychologists as Wundt