PSYC10006 Mind, Brain and Behaviour A
The Complete Study & Assessment Guide · July 2026PSYC10006 Overview
- Six-week online intensive
- Twelve topic modules
- Twelve research methods modules
- Weekly closed-book quizzes
- One 1500-word written assignment
- Two hurdle requirements
PSYC10006 Mind, Brain and Behaviour A is The University of Melbourne's introduction to how people sense and perceive the world, learn, think and remember, and to the neural mechanisms that underpin those processes.
- Assessed by Six weekly closed-book quizzes and one 1500-word essay. There is no exam.
- Hardest step Keeping pace: each quiz closes over its own week and never returns to it.
- Watch for Two hurdle requirements that carry no marks and can still stop a pass.
- How to prepare Drill the neighbouring-term discriminations, and derive every direction word.
- Start early on The written assignment, from week 2, with the learning diary kept as you go.
How PSYC10006 is assessed
| Component | Weight | Format |
|---|---|---|
| Assessment task 1: Weekly quizzes | 50% | Six graded quizzes, one closing each week. Each is 20 multiple-choice questions with a 40-minute limit, sat closed book in a locked-down browser, and set on that week's two topic modules and two research methods modules. Each is due 11:59pm on the Monday of the following week. |
| Assessment task 3: Written assignment | 40% | One essay of 1500 words on a title the subject sets and that must not be changed, structured in two parts: an evidence review, then a case study. Due 11:59pm on the Friday of week 6. |
| Assessment task 2: Perusall discussions | 5% | Three assessed discussions on a set reading, one for each of the three topic areas, due 11:59pm on the Monday of weeks 2, 4 and 6. |
| Assessment task 4: Participation in research activities | 5% | Up to five hours of research activities completed online, due 11:59pm on the Monday of week 7, a week after teaching finishes. |
| Hurdle requirement: Assessment literacy module · hurdle | Carries no weighting and must be completed to satisfy the requirements for a pass. Due 11:59pm on the Monday of week 5; it teaches how the written assignment is marked. | |
| Hurdle requirement: Practical class attendance · hurdle | Carries no weighting and must be satisfied to be awarded a pass. The subject states the requirement as attendance at 80 per cent of the tutorial classes, and elsewhere as attendance at at least five of the six two-hour classes. Falling short requires an additional written make-up assignment. |
The four weighted pieces sum to exactly 100 per cent. The two hurdle rows are shown with an empty weight because the subject's own assessment table gives them no weighting: they are requirements to be satisfied rather than marks to be earned. One point to confirm on the subject page: the attendance requirement is stated in one place as 80 per cent of tutorial classes and in another as at least five of the six classes, and both readings appear in the subject's own materials. Dates here are the pattern the subject states; confirm the calendar dates for your own offering, because an intensive subject's dates shift more than a semester subject's do.
What PSYC10006 covers
The whole subject in one map, in the order it is taught: three topic areas across six weeks, with the research methods stream gathered into its own two chapters so it can be revised as a whole. Each chapter links to its free guide.
Classical Conditioning: Pavlov, Watson and Preparedness
Module 1, week 1. The five conditioning labels and the two moments each one changes; acquisition, extinction, spontaneous recovery, rapid reacquisition; generalisation versus discrimination; biological preparedness; Preparatory Response Theory against stimulus substitution.02Operant Conditioning and Social Cognitive Learning
Module 2, week 1. The reinforcement and punishment grid; the four schedules and the response patterns each produces; shaping by successive approximation; contingency, contiguity and consistency; cognitive maps, latent learning, and vicarious consequences.03Memory Components, Capacity and Transfer
Module 3, week 2. The three stores and three processes; duration measured with a filled retention interval; decay against interference; verbal and visual span; chunking; the serial position curve; depth of processing against amount of rehearsal.04Working Memory, Long Term Memory and the Amnesias
Module 4, week 2. The four working memory components and their neural associations; declarative and non-declarative memory; anterograde and retrograde amnesia with its temporal gradient; the dissociation a single case establishes; consolidation and pattern completion.05Attention, Saccades and the Binding Problem
Module 5, week 3. Overt and covert attention; fixations, saccades and saccadic suppression; the cueing design and its three trial types; inattentional blindness against change blindness; feature integration, illusory conjunctions, and feature against conjunction search.06Depth and Size Perception
Module 6, week 3. Oculomotor, monocular and binocular cue families; the seven pictorial cues and the two movement-based ones; angular size and size constancy; the cue-removal experiment; why most size illusions are depth illusions.07Colour Vision: Physics, Theories and Constancy
Module 7, week 4. What colour vision is for; wavelength, reflection and transmission; additive against subtractive mixing; three cone types and the comparison that resolves them; the colour deficiencies; opponent channels, afterimages and impossible colours; discounting the illuminant.08Motion Perception and Its Breakdowns
Module 8, week 4. The four functions of motion perception; akinetopsia and what it dissociates; apparent motion, induced motion and the motion aftereffect; motion-induced blindness against motion-induced change blindness; contrast and apparent speed; the aperture problem.09Behavioural Neuroscience: History, Models and Simulation
Module 9, week 5. Brain, behaviour and mind; the four forces that shaped what could be believed about the brain; the field's energy economics; six allied disciplines; why neuron count rather than brain size tracks complexity; in silico simulation and the mind-body problem.10Nervous System Divisions and Brain Anatomy
Module 10, week 5. Central and peripheral; somatic, autonomic and enteric; the eight anatomical direction terms and the bent neural axis; the corpus callosum and callosotomy; forebrain, midbrain and hindbrain structures; the four lobes and the three topographic maps.11Neurons, Synapses and Measuring the Brain
Module 11, week 6. Neuron structure and one-way conduction; the action potential at minus seventy, minus fifty and plus forty millivolts; all-or-none firing and the rate law; the four release steps; excitation, inhibition and integration; agonists and antagonists; four measurement techniques and their trade-offs.12Modifying the Brain: Plasticity and Integration
Module 12, week 6. Three reasons to modify brain function and the correlation-causation point; lesions and the evaluation failure behind a historical procedure; convulsive, magnetic and current stimulation; strengthening and weakening at the synapse; where neurogenesis does and does not occur; integration, the three components of emotion, and consciousness.13Research Design, Sampling and Ethics
Research methods modules 1 to 7. Constructs and operational definitions; refining a question into a testable hypothesis; four scales of measurement with validity and reliability; five study designs and what each licenses; populations, samples and the internal-external split; the five named ethical issues.14Describing Data and Judging Arguments
Research methods modules 8 to 12. Frequency distributions and three ways of showing one; mean, median and mode and how each responds to an extreme value; range, inter-quartile range and standard deviation; pairing centre with spread; deductive validity against inductive strength.It runs wholly online, compressed into the opening six weeks of the second semester, and the subject's own home page records it as equivalent to PSYC10003.
The subject is built from three topic areas in a fixed order — Learning and cognition, Sensation and perception, and Behavioural neuroscience — delivered as twelve topic modules at two per week.
Running underneath them is a second stream of twelve research methods modules, also two per week, covering how psychological research is designed, how data are described, and how to judge an argument.
Each week also carries a two-hour practical class and an optional live question hour, and closes with a graded quiz that is set on all four of that week's modules.
Two things about the assessment shape this subject more than its content does.
There is no examination: half the mark is spread across six weekly quizzes, so the work cannot be deferred to a revision period, and nothing can be rescued at the end.
And most of the remaining mark sits in a single 1500-word essay due in the final week, which rewards starting in week 2 far more than working hard in week 6. Two hurdle requirements carry no marks at all and can still prevent a pass.
Label a conditioning scenario, then defend the labels
- 1Find the innate pairing first. The painful dressing change needs no learning history to produce tensing, so it is the unconditioned stimulus and the tensing it causes is the unconditioned response. Every other label is assigned relative to this pair.
- 1Check the cue was genuinely neutral. In the first days the chime produced looking up at the door and nothing more, which is an orienting response rather than a reflex, so the chime qualifies as a neutral stimulus at the start.
- 1Name the moment of the flip. Once patients tense to the chime with nobody in the room, the chime is a conditioned stimulus and the tensing it now produces is a conditioned response. The behaviour is unchanged; only the elicitor differs.
- 1Name the final effect and give its condition. The chime is now presented repeatedly without the dressing change following it and responding fades, which is extinction. The condition that defines it is the conditioned stimulus presented without the unconditioned stimulus, which is what separates it from forgetting over time.
- 1Predict, to show the last step is understood. If the chime reverted to announcing dressing changes, tensing would return far faster than it first appeared. That is rapid reacquisition, and it is why the fading should not be described as the association being erased.
Key terms
- Conditioned stimulus
- A cue that produced no reflex before conditioning and now triggers one, because it reliably preceded something biologically significant. It is the same physical event as the neutral stimulus; only its predictive relationship has changed, which is why the label flips without the cue doing so.
- Negative reinforcement
- A consequence that removes something aversive and thereby makes a behaviour more likely. Negative refers to subtraction, not to unpleasantness, so this is not punishment: the defining feature is that the behaviour increases.
- Partial reinforcement effect
- The finding that a behaviour maintained by reinforcement on only some occasions survives far longer once reinforcement stops than one that was reinforced every time. It explains both why partial schedules build persistence and why inconsistent punishment entrenches a behaviour.
- Serial position curve
- The U-shaped relationship between an item's position in a studied list and the chance of recalling it. The rise at each end has a different cause, and each can be removed without disturbing the other, which is the evidence for more than one memory store.
- Working memory
- A multi-component system that holds and manipulates information in the service of a current goal, comprising a central executive that allocates attention plus stores for sound-based material, visual and spatial material, and integrated episodes.
- Temporal gradient
- The pattern in retrograde amnesia where memories from shortly before the causing event are lost while older ones survive. It is the observation that implies consolidation is a process taking years rather than an event at encoding.
- Binding problem
- The question of how attributes of an object that are computed separately, such as its colour and its motion, come to be experienced as belonging to one thing. Attending to a single location is the solution the subject teaches.
- Size constancy
- Perceiving an object as a stable size although the image it casts shrinks with distance. It is achieved by scaling the retinal image by perceived distance, which is why misjudging distance produces a matching error in judged size.
- Opponent process
- The account in which cone signals are recombined into channels that each carry a pair of colours in opposition. It predicts which colour experiences are impossible as well as explaining why an afterimage takes the opposite hue.
- Rate law
- The principle that because every action potential is the same size, the intensity of a signal is carried by how frequently a neuron fires rather than by how large each firing is. It follows from the all-or-none property rather than being a separate finding.
- Synaptic plasticity
- The adjustment of connection strength between neurons with use, implemented as a change in the number of receptors on the receiving cell. Strengthening follows repeated coincident activity and weakening follows disuse.
- Operational definition
- A statement of the specific observable procedure by which a concept will be measured in a particular study. It is always narrower than the concept it stands for, which is why every conclusion has to be checked back against the original idea.
PSYC10006 FAQ
What does this subject actually cover, week by week?
Three topic areas in a fixed order across six weeks: Learning and cognition in weeks 1 and 2, Sensation and perception in weeks 3 and 4, and Behavioural neuroscience in weeks 5 and 6. Each week carries two topic modules and two research methods modules, a two-hour practical class, an optional live question hour, and a graded quiz that closes the week.
How is the mark made up, and is there an exam?
There is no examination. Six weekly quizzes are worth 50 per cent between them, a single 1500-word written assignment is worth 40 per cent, three assessed discussions on set readings are worth 5 per cent, and up to five hours of research participation is worth 5 per cent. Two hurdle requirements carry no weighting at all.
What are the hurdle requirements and what happens if one is missed?
There are two: an assessment literacy module due early in week 5, and a practical class attendance requirement. Neither contributes any marks and both must be satisfied for a pass to be awarded. The subject states that falling short on attendance requires the submission of an additional written make-up assignment.
What is a weekly quiz like, and how should it be prepared for?
Twenty multiple-choice questions with a 40-minute limit, sat closed book with no aids of any kind and in a locked-down browser. That is two minutes a question, so recognition has to be built beforehand rather than reasoned out under time pressure, and the distractors are usually neighbouring terms rather than obviously wrong ones.
How much does the research methods stream matter?
Two of the four modules each quiz is set on come from that stream, so it is half the syllabus of every quiz. It is delivered as short videos with recommended textbook chapters and feels like background reading, which is exactly why students under-prepare it. Its vocabulary is also what the written assignment is marked on.
What does the written assignment ask for?
An essay of 1500 words on a title the subject sets and states must not be changed, in two parts of roughly equal length: a review of evidence for a theory, and a case study of your own experience of applying it, supported by a learning diary that does not count toward the word limit. It is due at the end of week 6.
How is this subject different from the twelve-week version?
The home page records this version as fully online and packed into six weeks at the start of Semester 2, and as equivalent to PSYC10003. The practical consequence is pace: the same breadth arrives in half the time, and there is no quiet fortnight in which to catch up on a module you skipped.
How to prepare for the assessments
Treat this as six self-contained weeks rather than one subject, because that is how it is assessed: each quiz closes over its own week's four modules and never returns to them. (1) Fix the order within the week. Do the two topic modules first, while the practical class is still ahead of you, then the two research methods modules, then the practice quiz where one is offered, then the graded quiz.
The methods modules are the ones that get postponed into a gap that never appears, and they are half of what the quiz is set on. (2) Prepare for recall, not for recognition. Twenty questions in forty minutes with no aids means you cannot look anything up and cannot reason a concept out from first principles.
Cover each comparison table in this guide and rebuild it from memory; that is the endpoint, not reading until the material feels familiar. (3) Drill the discriminations rather than the definitions.
Almost every item in this subject asks which of two neighbouring terms applies: unconditioned against conditioned, reinforcement against punishment, inattentional blindness against change blindness, anterograde against retrograde, depolarisation against hyperpolarisation. Write each pair with the single feature that separates it and drill that feature. (4) Derive every direction word instead of memorising it.
Sodium in raises the inside voltage; pro means old disturbing new; subtract the illuminant you assume. A derived direction cannot be remembered backwards, and reversed directions are this subject's most common lost mark. (5) Start the essay in week 2 and keep the learning diary while it happens.
It is 40 per cent in one artefact with no second attempt, its title is fixed, and a diary reconstructed afterwards reports your memory of how you studied rather than your behaviour. (6) Diary both hurdle tasks in week 1. They carry no marks, which is exactly why they are easy to leave, and either one can stop you passing a subject you have otherwise done well in.
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