Week 3 · Assignment: Traditional alternative (no AI)

Week 3 — Tracing a Signal: A Short Brain Brief — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Introduction to Psychology Free sample edition

Traditional alternative (no AI), unpublished. In the course this is a separate assignment that ships unpublished beside the adaptive assignment: same objective, no AI. An instructor who prefers it publishes it and unpublishes or deletes the adaptive one, as the note at its top says.

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 3 of the term — trace one message through the nervous system, check a brain claim against the evidence, and explain it to someone new to psychology.

This week you followed one message through a neuron, across a synapse, and into the brain, and you learned to write "associated with" instead of "causes." In this assignment you work four short problems on the week's shared example, interpret each one, and explain a brain claim to someone who has never studied psychology. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Analysis Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles; this assignment is where you put them together on one real moment and one real claim. It also builds on Week 2: you will read a famous case with the research-design questions you learned there.

The task

Use the week's shared example, the hot-stove signal trace. Your hand touches a hot pan handle and jerks away, and one message passes through 9 stations, in order: dendrites, soma, axon, myelin sheath, terminal buttons, synapse, spinal cord, motor neuron, and arm muscle. The first 5 stations are parts of the sensory neuron in your fingertip.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the numbers given without guessing which values or steps you used:

The hot-stove signal trace has 9 stations, and the first 5 are parts of the fingertip's sensory neuron. How many stations does the message pass through after that neuron's terminal buttons?
This course names 6 major neurotransmitters, and the hot-stove signal trace names 1 of them, acetylcholine, at the arm muscle. How many of the 6 does the trace leave unnamed?
Each half of the brain has 4 lobes. How many lobes are there across the 2 halves of the brain?
Wundt opened his psychology laboratory in 1879, and Scoville and Milner reported the case of H.M. in 1957. How many years after the laboratory opened did that report appear?

Beside each answer, add a brief interpretation:

For problem 1, name the stations after the neuron, in order, and explain what happens at the synapse.
For problem 2, name two of the unnamed neurotransmitters and what each is associated with, in hedged language.
For problem 3, name the lobe that registers where on your body the touch happened and the lobe that plans running cold water, and explain why the brain is better described as a network than as one structure causing the behavior.
For problem 4, say what kind of study the case of H.M. is, what it suggests about the hippocampus, and what one case cannot claim.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your cousin has never studied psychology. They saw an ad that says "low serotonin causes sadness" and are thinking of buying the supplement it sells. Write a 3–5 sentence message that explains what serotonin is associated with, why "causes" claims more than the evidence supports (name a third variable or a reverse direction), and one limit of what you can tell them. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one good message is possible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine an uncle who says he is too old to learn the guitar because adult brains cannot change. Model answer: "Your brain keeps changing its connections with practice your whole life; that ability is called neuroplasticity. So clumsy chords now do not mean clumsy chords forever. It may feel slow at first, and I can't promise how fast you'll improve. But 'too old to change' isn't what brain science says."

Use that pattern for your cousin, with your own explanation and evidence.

Deliverables

Submit a single brief containing:

the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and its brief interpretation;
your message to your cousin, explaining what serotonin is associated with, why "causes" overstates the evidence, and one limit; and
a one-line restatement of the numbers you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your brief as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labeled sketch of the signal trace with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the counts, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without a chatbot or other AI tool. You may use a calculator for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's work, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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