Subject Guide: Psychology: Cognitive Biology

The supervisory center of the nervous system in all vertebrates. It also serves as the site of emotions, memory, self-awareness, and thought.

Body control system composed of a group of glands that maintain a stable internal environment by producing chemical regulatory substances called hormones.

From The Concise Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology and Behavioral Science
Ever since Scoville and Milner’s 1957 report on the patient H.M., who suffered a profound amnesia following bilateral surgical resection of the medial temporal lobe, it has been clear that the hippocampal region of the brain plays a critical role in memory.

In biology, a chemical secretion of the ductless endocrine glands and specialized nerve cells concerned with control of body functions.

From The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology
A relatively small (peanut-sized) but extremely complex structure at the base of the brain (below the thalamus) that is intimately involved in control of the autonomic nervous system and a variety of functions that are crucially related to survival, including temperature regulation, heart rate, blood pressure, feeding behavior, water intake, emotional behavior and sexual behavior.

Network of specialized tissue that controls actions and reactions of the body and its adjustment to the environment.

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Chemical that transmits information across the junction (synapse) that separates one nerve cell (neuron) from another nerve cell or a muscle.

Structures in a cell nucleus that carry the many thousands of genes, in sequence, that determine the characteristics of an organism.

From Penguin Dictionary of Biology
Branch of biology which studies those causal interactions between genes and their products which bring the phenotype into being.

Slow gradual process of change from one form to another, as in the evolution of the universe from its formation to its present state, or in the evolution of life on Earth.

From The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies
Evolutionary psychology is concerned with the evolution of the cognitive mechanisms that arose as fitness-enhancing effects in the context of our ancestral environments.

Basic unit of inherited material, encoded by a strand of DNA and transcribed into RNA. In higher organisms, genes are located on linear chromosomes.

Transmission from generation to generation through the process of reproduction in plants and animals of factors which cause the offspring to resemble their parents.

Process of nuclear division in a living cell by which the number of chromosomes is reduced to half the original number.

Process of "shuffling" of genes by which new combinations can be generated.

In biology, the process by which a living organism produces other organisms more or less similar to itself.