PSYC20006: Biological Psychology

2000 word lab report split into two evenly weighted sections (each 1000 words and each worth 20%), due in weeks 5 and 9 (40%), 2 hour exam consisting of 120 MCQ (60%)

I thought it'd be a good idea to revamp the subject review for this, because a couple of the lecturers have changed with a new topic being introduced since Paulrus did his review, but I'll leave it in the same format. My sentiments mostly echo previous reviews in the sense that this is a really great subject with a manageable workload that I'd recommend to anyone that's capable of fitting it in their study plan. For context, I did this subject as a Biomedicine selective without having done MBB1/2.

Lectures:
Stefan is the new subject coordinator for Biological Psychology and he is a widely-loved and entertaining lecturer. He has a funny and extraordinarily engaging lecture style and really delivers the content in an enthusiastic way. Stefan covers the use of transcranial magnetic stimulation and the EEG with four lectures overall. There's not too much to say here outside of the fact that Stefan is one of the reasons why this subject is so great. He also has a beautiful German accent.

Formerly, Piers was subject coordinator and did Stefan's part of the course as well. It seems like he got the short end of the stick teaching the two areas of the subject that people find particularly dreadful: physics (of the fMRI) and statistics. In all honesty, Piers is a pretty solid lecturer and he does a great job with the content he teaches. It's obvious he knows what he is talking about. I think that it's fair to say that you might need to do an extra bit of work for this part of the course depending on your background. Having done Physics for Biomedicine and EDDA (level 1 stats subject), I was pretty comfortable dealing with the little bit of physics and statistics that is covered; however, I think these areas are totally manageable even without that background. The statistics part of the course is basically just preparing you for the assignment and you need to be able to do t tests and understand the different ones, really not much to worry about.

I think Jacqueline's section is fairly straightforward. It's probably fair to say that as a lecturer, she isn't quite as engaging as the others, but there's nothing particularly bad about her as a lecturer. The content itself is quite simple, and if you've done VCE psychology you'll find that you've already done half of the stuff before, which is a nice bonus. Make sure you understand all the different types of memory and memory systems, because you need a solid foundation of understanding for this part of the course.

Patrick Goodbourn, another new lecturer, is very witty and clearly a huge expert in his field. It's also probably fair to say that his section of Biological Psychology is the hardest one. I was extraordinarily grateful to have come from a Biomed background with genetics subjects, because he really expects you to understand what's going on when he's talking about genetics, and his questions will be impossible if you only have superficial knowledge. Overall, I'd be willing to say that neurogenetics was probably the most interesting topic I've covered at uni, but learning it will not come easily. Be warned that you will need to write down A LOT of information that he doesn't say, because his slides are simply barren. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can make it quite tricky if you're unsure what you actually need to know. If you have no biology background, this will be tricky.

Olivia is another great lecturer and she covers psychopharmacology. You will see based on the number of lectures this topic has that this area will be hugely important for the exam (it's basically 1/3 of the course... so learn it well). Olivia is super engaging and will basically start off with an overview of how psychopharmacology works, and then delve into a bunch of different neurotransmitters that you're expected to know and understand.

Tutorials:
The tutorials are pretty cool, but are mostly just there to help you with the assignments. One of the tutorials will involve you changing room to go to a computer room where you use SPSS to do data analysis for your lab report, and it's extremely important you pay attention to what's happening here or you'll have issues down the track. My tutor was a really awesome dude who was actually doing work in Stefan's lab, and basically gave us tons of tips on doing psychology because he was in our position doing Biopsych a few years back. If anything, I'd advise you to use your tutor as a resource if you (a) want to do well in the assignments, because they mark it; or (b) want to know more about psychology at Melb uni.

Assessment:
The previous review mentioned the lab report changing, which I believe will be applicable for those doing this subject in 2018, so I'll save the time by not going into the details and instead give some tips. My general advice for the assignments is to make sure you don't neglect the value of strong scientific writing (it's not just about regurgitating sentences) as well as the importance of doing all your referencing properly. Everybody thinks they'll be fine for referencing, but virtually nobody gets full marks for it. Staff have really put a ton of effort into making sure there are resources for the assignments, and the head tutor Annie even took "classes" for questions about each of the assignments. At the end of the day, you are thrown into the deep end a bit if it's your first APA lab report, so take your time and start the assignments ASAP or you'll get destroyed.

Fortunately, the exam is all MCQ, which is one of the greatest parts of this subject. In terms of difficulty, I think the exam was overall pretty fair, but did have a few questions that ended up getting removed, so my advice is not to stress too much if you think there's no correct option and move on to the next. Also: spam the online quizzes over and over, and really make sure you are capable of questions like them, because the exam is almost identical in question style. I think Patrick's section had some really tough questions; if it wasn't obvious already, just because he only takes 3 lectures does not mean his section is a walk in the park.

Great subject. Do it if you're in Arts, Science, Biomed, or whatever. Good luck!

Yep

Stefan Bode - Brain Imaging Techniques (2 weeks)
Piers Howe - Brain Imaging Techniques (1 week) and Statistics (1 week)
Jacqueline Anderson - Neurobiology of Memory (2 weeks)
Patrick Goodbourn - Neurogenetics (2 weeks)
Olivia Carter - Psychopharmacology (4 weeks)

No past exams, but the quizzes on the LMS are very similar to the exam and should be used like past exams

4.5 out of 5

Physiology of Behaviour is prescribed, but never really mentioned or used. All of the information that you need is in the lecture slides.

2 x 1 hour lectures per week, and 1 x 2 hour tutorial every second week

Semester 1, 2016

H1

2000 word lab report split into two evenly weighted sections (each 1000 words and each worth 20%), due in weeks 5 and 9 (40%), 2 hour exam consisting of 120 MCQ (60%)

The course and staff have changed a fair bit since the other reviews for this subject were posted, so I figured I'd try give a more recent perspective on it. Content-wise, this is my favourite subject I've done in undergrad so far. There are a few small things that brought down my mark a tiny bit, but overall it's a fantastic subject that I wholly recommend doing.

Lectures:
Piers does a great job of teaching brain imaging techniques, a topic which could easily be fairly dry. Instead, his lecturing style is actively engaging and I actually found his lectures pretty interesting. He covers transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), electroencephalography (EEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), as well as t-tests in the statistics component. His lectures are extremely content heavy (expect 100+ slides per lecture) and you're expected to know things in a good amount of detail, but understanding is more important than rote-learning. His section can get a bit complicated if you're not particularly scientifically inclined (particularly in that you're expected to understand the physics underlying the different imaging techniques), but it is biological psych after all so that's to be expected.

Amy covers sleep and emotions - more specifically, the biology and structure of sleep, sleep disorders, and the physiology of emotions. Her section is mostly straightforward and there's not a particularly large amount of content, which is nice. She's a really great lecturer (and also a lovely person) and her content is both absorbing and applicable to everyday stuff, which makes her section super enjoyable.

Jacqueline's section on memory is kinda disappointing - a lot of the stuff in her lectures is actually really interesting, but the way she teaches is extremely dull and sounded a bit like a synthesised text-to-speech generator. Her slides were also bland as fuck and had a lot of blurry diagrams filled with extraneous details, which made it hard to know what you needed to know. Despite that, her section is solid if you focus on the content itself, but it's a bit disappointing knowing that it could have been a lot better.

Olivia teaches psychopharmacology and she is FANTASTIC. She's an extremely engaging lecturer and her part of the course is fascinating. She's probably my favourite lecturer I've ever had at university. She generally focuses on a particular hormone/neurotransmitter (or group of them) within a given lecture and discusses their action on the body and nervous systems in detail, as well as their synthesis/breakdown and chemical composition, along with pharmaceutical and experimental applications (e.g. one week focuses on acetylcholine in relation to attention and memory). She also taught us that Calvin Klein (or CK) is a street name for mixing cocaine and ketamine, which is definitely the most applicable thing I've learned at uni so far.

Tutorials:
My gripe in this area is one that's common to the majority of psych subjects: once you finish the lab report, the tutorials are mostly useless. They're invaluable for the lab report, and you'll do all of your SPSS data analysis in the tutorials (which you'll interpret and write up at home). After that, the tutorials are kinda useless and mostly consist of filling time. Some of the stuff was interesting, like running and designing an experiment on caffeine and cognitive performance in the last two tutes - but again, it wasn't examinable, so it just felt like a bit of a time filler.

Assessment:
The topic for the lab report might change depending on the year (not sure), but we looked at the different brain areas involved in spatially-primed and unprimed visual search tasks. For the first part, you're expected to write the introduction and methods sections - for the second, you revise your intro and methods based off tutor feedback, as well as writing up your results, discussion and abstract. We were taught in the tutorials how to write up the lab report in a general sense, but you were kinda left in the dark about exactly what you should include and the instructions were a bit vague. It would have been difficult to do well on the assignment without consulting the coordinators' posts on the discussion board (to their credit, the coordinators did a good job of answering questions). Writing in APA format for lab reports (which is much, much more difficult and anal than writing essays in APA) was also not taught, but was assumed knowledge, which is a bit unfair as this would have been the first proper lab report many students would have written. However, these criticisms were pretty much true of every psych subject in second year, so I think the psych department just expects you to take initiative and work things out for yourself (for better or for worse).

The exam was pretty chill and mostly fair. Amy and Jacqueline's sections were both relatively easy and I think they recycled a small number of questions from the online practice questions. Olivia's section was a bit more challenging, but not as difficult as it could have been given the amount of detail in her lectures. All of her questions were fair and didn't assess anything that was outside of the course, so if you revised well then you should have been fine. Piers's questions were definitely the hardest and a lot of people struggled with them. They featured a few (emphasis on few) slightly dodgy questions where it was a bit unclear what was being asked, and where you could have realistically picked two different answers depending on how you interpreted the question, which is a bit disappointing. For statistics, there's much more of an emphasis on the underlying theory than there is on being able to do calculations, so make sure you know HOW the calculations and formulas work rather than just being able to plug them into a calculator. Overall though, it was a pretty fair exam.

Overall:Fuck, this is longer than I expected. TL;DR - Super interesting subject with a mostly really great teaching staff, brought down very slightly by small factors, but still would very much recommend.

Yes, with screen capture.

Piers Howe - Brain Imaging Techniques (3 weeks) and Statistics (1 week)
Amy Jordan - Sleep and Emotions (2 weeks)
Jacqueline Anderson - Neurobiology of Memory (2 weeks)
Olivia Carter - Psychopharmacology (4 weeks)

No, but practice questions are on the LMS.

4.5 out of 5

Physiology of Behaviour is the prescribed textbook, but you'll never need it so it's not worth buying. If you really decide you want a copy, it's fairly easy to find a pdf.

2 x 1 hour lectures per week, and 1 x 2 hour tutorial every second week

Semester 1, 2016

H1