Biological Bases of Behavior
What to know
Focus on structure-function links: the frontal lobes (executive control, inhibition, motor planning), temporal lobes (auditory processing, memory, language comprehension), parietal lobes (somatosensory integration, spatial attention), and occipital lobes (vision). Know the limbic system's division of labor: amygdala for fear/threat detection and emotional tagging, hippocampus for consolidation of declarative memory, hypothalamus for homeostatic and endocrine regulation. Be able to describe neurotransmitter roles at a broad level: dopamine (reward, motor, psychosis), serotonin (mood, sleep, appetite), norepinephrine (arousal, vigilance), acetylcholine (memory, parasympathetic/muscular junctions), GABA (inhibition), glutamate (excitation). Lateralization: left hemisphere typically language-dominant; right hemisphere contributes prosody, visuospatial skill, and emotional tone. Understand the HPA axis and the sympathetic-adrenal-medullary pathway as distinct stress routes.
Traps
Questions often swap hippocampus (consolidation) with amygdala (emotional modulation of memory), or describe a lesion by symptom and expect you to localize it. Watch for "split-brain" items: the right visual field projects to the left hemisphere and vice versa. Beware of overgeneralized "left brain/right brain" claims; questions reward nuance.
Rule of thumb
Localize by asking: encoding/consolidation (hippocampus), threat detection (amygdala), homeostasis (hypothalamus), motor planning (frontal), comprehension (temporal/Wernicke), production (frontal/Broca).