ABSTRACT
Courses in physiological or biological psychology often have weekly laboratories. These laboratories provide students with hands-on experience performing such tasks as electrode implantation, organ removal, and histological analysis using animals as subjects (Hart, 1976; Skinner, 1971; Wellman, 1985; Wilsoncroft & Law, 1967). In addition, students frequently dissect different organs, including brains and eyes, in the biopsychology laboratory. These traditional exercises are viewed by many instructors as the cornerstone of the course. Other related courses, such as cognitive neuroscience and sensation and perception, have laboratories but use different equipment to demonstrate different approaches to their fields. For example, courses in cognitive neuroscience may use computers to demonstrate interhemispheric competition. Laboratories in sensation and perception may blindfold students to demonstrate sensory deprivation. Whenever laboratory exercises use laboratory animals for surgery, there is a concomitant need for expensive equipment, such as lesioning devices, stereotaxic instruments, and microscopes. Moreover, these exercises typically last only one or two laboratory sessions. A few students have ethical objections to these invasive procedures, but most students see them as valuable demonstrations of course material. Acknowledging the ethical objections and overcoming the expensive equipment requirements of traditional laboratories in physiological psychology, I designed the Biolog project to encourage independent thinking and introduce students to the joys and frustrations of data collection on human subjects, namely, themselves. This article describes this inexpensive project, the Biolog.
