Biological Psychology

Abstract

Abstract The recent history of the broad field of biological psychology is reviewed in depth. Our focus is on the scientific study of behavior and experience and its neural/biological substrates. Scientific approaches to the study of mind began with the development of psychophysics, with the work of Weber and Fechner in the nineteenth century and continued through the work of Boring and Stevens to the modern field of signal detection theory. Scientific study of the brain has a much longer history, originally with neuroanatomy, the only method of study available until the nineteenth century. The question of localization of function in the brain has been—and—remains a key issue in the field. A major focus in the developing field of physiological psychology concerned the behavioral and biological mechanisms of sensory processes, highlighted here in the study of color vision and pitch perception. Another major focus was on brain substrates of learning and memory, pioneered by Lashley and Pavlov. Yet another major focus was on the behavioral and biological substrates of motivation and emotion, as in the classic views of William James and Walter Cannon. Cognitive neuroscience, the neural substrates of “higher” mental processes has become a major field with the development of methods to image the human brain and its functioning. Biological psychology continually self‐destructs in that as knowledge grows, areas like vision, audition, psychophysiology, and behavioral genetics leave biological psychology to become fields of science in their own right.

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