You are viewing a free preview of this lesson.
Subscribe to unlock all 9 lessons in this course and every other course on LearningBro.
Every one of the twenty core studies in Component 02 belongs to one of five areas of psychology, and knowing a study's area tells you, before you read a word of its method, what kind of cause it will reach for to explain behaviour. The biological area is the one that looks inside the body — to the brain, the nervous system, hormones, genes and our evolutionary inheritance — for the origins of what we think, feel and do. Where a social psychologist asks "what situation produces this?" and a cognitive psychologist asks "what mental process underlies this?", the biological psychologist asks "what is happening in the physical machinery — the neurons, the structures, the chemicals, the DNA — that makes this behaviour possible?" The area rests on a bold and increasingly well-evidenced premise: that every thought, memory, emotion and action has a physical basis, and that to understand behaviour fully we must ultimately understand the biology that produces it.
This lesson does not tell the story of any single study. Instead it establishes the defining principles of the biological area — its core assumptions, its favoured methods, and its characteristic strengths and weaknesses — and shows how it differs from the other four areas you will meet. Because Component 02 examines you not only on individual studies but on the areas, perspectives and debates that organise them (Section B), a secure grasp of what makes an explanation "biological" is worth as much in the exam as knowing any one procedure. Throughout, the area's two key themes — regions of the brain (Sperry 1968; Casey et al. 2011) and brain plasticity (Blakemore & Cooper 1970; Maguire et al. 2000) — serve as illustrations of the principles in action, and you should hold these four studies in mind as concrete embodiments of every abstract point that follows.
| This lesson covers | OCR H567 Component 02 element | AO focus |
|---|---|---|
| Defining assumptions of the biological area (physiological, genetic and evolutionary bases of behaviour) | Section B — Areas: Biological | AO1 knowledge; AO3 evaluation of the area |
| Methods typical of the area (brain scanning, case studies of brain damage, lesion and animal studies, twin/genetic methods) | Section B — Areas: Biological | AO1; AO2 recognising the area in a novel study |
| Strengths and weaknesses of the biological approach | Section B — Areas: Biological | AO3 evaluation |
| How the biological area differs from social, cognitive, developmental and individual-differences areas | Section B — Areas | AO1; AO3 comparative judgement |
| The four biological core studies as illustrations of the area's principles | Section A — Core studies (Biological) | AO1; AO2 application |
The specification is referenced descriptively; consult the official OCR H567 specification document for its exact published wording. This lesson develops AO1 (defining the area's assumptions and methods), AO2 (recognising a "biological" explanation in an unfamiliar scenario, a recurring Section B and Section C demand) and AO3 (evaluating the usefulness and limitations of the biological approach and weighing it against the other areas).
The defining assumption of the biological area is that behaviour has a physical basis — that our thoughts, feelings and actions arise from the structure and activity of the body, principally the brain and nervous system, and are shaped by hormones, by our genes, and by the evolutionary history that built the human body and mind. Where another psychologist might explain a behaviour by a person's situation, upbringing or mental strategy, the biological psychologist looks to the hardware: which brain regions are involved, what neurochemistry is at work, what genetic inheritance predisposes it, and why natural selection might have favoured it. This is the intellectual heart of the area — the conviction that mind is, at bottom, the activity of a physical organ.
Four linked ideas follow from that assumption.
First, the biological area locates the causes of behaviour in the brain and its regions. It assumes that specific mental functions depend on specific neural structures — that language, memory, emotion, self-control and perception are not free-floating capacities but are localised, at least partly, in identifiable parts of the brain. This is the assumption behind the theme of regions of the brain: Sperry could study the functions of the two hemispheres precisely because he assumed that severing the link between them would reveal what each side does; Casey could ask about self-control by imaging the prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum precisely because he assumed those regions govern the balance between impulse and restraint.
Second, the area treats the nervous system and its chemistry as the machinery of behaviour. Neurons communicate electrically and chemically; the balance of neurotransmitters shapes mood, arousal and cognition; the endocrine system floods the body with hormones that alter behaviour. Even where a study focuses on structure rather than chemistry, this assumption underlies it: behaviour is the output of a physical signalling system that can, in principle, be measured.
Third, the area assumes that behaviour has a genetic and evolutionary basis. Genes build the brain and body and are inherited, so behavioural tendencies can run in families and be shaped by natural selection. This is why biological psychologists study twins, families and heritability, and why they ask what adaptive purpose a behaviour or brain feature might serve. Although none of the four biological core studies is primarily genetic, the assumption pervades the area and surfaces in the wider course (for example, the genetic basis of schizophrenia in Component 03).
Fourth — and this is the assumption that unites the area's second theme — the brain is not fixed but plastic: it is physically shaped by experience. Neural structure develops in response to the environment (Blakemore and Cooper's kittens), and it continues to reshape itself in adulthood in response to demand (Maguire's taxi drivers). Plasticity is a biological principle through and through — it concerns the physical remodelling of neural tissue — yet it is also where biology and experience meet, which is why the area is so central to the nature–nurture debate.
It is worth stressing what the biological area characteristically does not privilege. It does not reach first for the situation and other people (that is the social area); it does not centre the private information-processing steps of memory or attention as software-like operations abstracted from their neural substrate (that is the cognitive area, though the two overlap); it does not focus principally on how behaviour changes with age through experience and socialisation (that is the developmental area); and it does not treat the individual's unique psychological profile as the main object of study (that is individual differences). The biological area's causes are physical and internal — in the tissue, the chemistry and the genes.
The area in one sentence. Biological psychology explains behaviour by looking into the body — to brain regions, the nervous system, hormones, genes and evolution — on the assumption that every mental event has a physical basis.
Because the biological area wants to know how physical structures and processes produce behaviour, it favours methods that let researchers observe, measure or manipulate the biology itself. Four method types recur across the four biological core studies, and knowing which study used which is a reliable AO1 discriminator.
| Method | Biological core study using it | Why the area favours it | Characteristic weakness |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laboratory experiment on a special population | Sperry (1968) — divided-visual-field and tactile tests on split-brain patients | Rigorous control isolates hemisphere function; the surgery is a natural manipulation of brain connectivity | Tiny, unrepresentative sample (a handful of patients with epilepsy and surgery) |
| Brain-imaging (fMRI) experiment | Casey et al. (2011) — go/no-go task scanned to locate neural correlates of self-control | Objective, quantifiable measurement of brain activity linked to behaviour | Correlational (activity co-varies with behaviour; causation not proven); costly; artificial setting |
| Structural imaging quasi-experiment | Maguire et al. (2000) — MRI/voxel-based morphometry comparing taxi drivers and controls | Reveals experience-linked differences in brain structure in living humans | No random allocation; correlation between grey matter and driving cannot alone prove cause |
| Controlled animal experiment | Blakemore & Cooper (1970) — kittens reared in restricted visual environments | Permits invasive manipulation and study of neural development impossible in humans | Ethical cost; problems generalising from cats to humans |
Three features of this methodological profile deserve comment. The biological area is unusually able to draw on objective, physical measurement — voltages, reaction times to lateralised stimuli, volumes of grey matter, patterns of neural activation. This is a genuine strength, because such measures are less vulnerable to the demand characteristics and social-desirability effects that plague self-report: a brain scan does not try to please the experimenter. It is a large part of why the area scores so well on the psychology-as-a-science debate.
Second, the area frequently relies on natural experiments and special populations — people whose brains have been altered by surgery, injury or disease, or by an unusual life demand. Sperry's split-brain patients had their corpus callosum severed to control severe epilepsy; Maguire's taxi drivers had spent years memorising London's streets. The area cannot ethically create such conditions deliberately in humans, so it seizes on cases where nature or medicine has done so. This ingenuity is a strength, but it comes at the price of tiny, unrepresentative samples, since such cases are rare.
Third, where invasive manipulation is required to establish cause, the area turns to animal studies. Blakemore and Cooper could deliberately restrict kittens' early visual experience and then examine the visual cortex directly — an experimental manipulation and a level of physiological detail that would be unthinkable and unethical in human infants. This buys the area genuine causal evidence about neural development, but it raises the sharp ethical question of animal suffering and the scientific question of how far findings from a cat's visual system generalise to a human's.
The biological approach earns its place in the course because it explains things the other areas cannot, and because it does so with a rigour and an applied reach that few areas match.
It is highly scientific and objective. The biological area's measures — brain scans, reaction times, tissue volumes, physiological recordings — are among the most objective in psychology. They can be taken without relying on what participants say about themselves, they are quantifiable, and they can be replicated. Sperry's divided-field procedure produced clean, repeatable results about hemisphere function; Maguire's voxel-based morphometry yielded numerical grey-matter measures that other researchers could check. This grounding in physical measurement places the area squarely within the scientific method and is one of its strongest cards in a Section B essay.
It establishes real physical causes of behaviour. Because the area studies the actual machinery of the mind, it can uncover mechanisms rather than mere associations. Sperry did not just observe that the hemispheres seem different; his procedure demonstrated their functional separation by controlling which hemisphere received information. Blakemore and Cooper did not merely correlate early experience with later vision; they manipulated the visual environment and traced the consequence into the visual cortex. When the area can run a true experiment or a decisive natural manipulation, it delivers causal knowledge of a kind that correlational social or developmental research often cannot.
It has powerful real-world and medical usefulness. Understanding the biological basis of behaviour translates directly into treatment and application. Knowledge of hemisphere specialisation informs neurosurgery and the rehabilitation of stroke and brain-injury patients; understanding the prefrontal control of impulse (Casey) informs how we think about adolescence, addiction and self-regulation; the discovery that the adult brain remains plastic (Maguire) underpins the optimism of neurorehabilitation after injury. Few areas have so direct a line from finding to clinical benefit.
It integrates psychology with the wider natural sciences. By explaining mind in terms of brain, the biological area connects psychology to biology, chemistry, medicine and neuroscience, allowing it to import their sophisticated tools and theories. This coherence with the rest of science is itself a strength: an explanation that fits with what we know of physiology and evolution is, other things equal, more credible than one that floats free of biology.
Balanced evaluation — the essence of AO3 — requires the limitations to be stated with equal force.
It is prone to biological reductionism. The area's greatest strength — reducing behaviour to its physical parts — is also its most persistent weakness. In explaining a complex behaviour purely in terms of a brain region, a neurotransmitter or a gene, the biological area risks over-simplifying phenomena that also have social, cognitive and cultural dimensions. Casey's neural correlates of self-control are illuminating, but self-control is also shaped by upbringing, expectations and situation; to locate it only in the prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum would be to strip out most of the story. The reductionism–holism debate exists precisely because the area's reductive move, powerful as it is, can leave out the person and their world.
Its samples are often tiny and unrepresentative. The very method that gives the area some of its most striking findings — studying rare special populations — also undermines its generalisability. Sperry's conclusions rest on a mere handful of split-brain patients, all of whom had a history of severe epilepsy and major brain surgery, so their brains may not be typical. Maguire studied a modest number of London taxi drivers, all male in the original sample and all in one unusual occupation. Findings from such narrow, atypical groups may not extend to the wider population, a standing caution against over-generalising the area's conclusions.
Much of its evidence is correlational, so cause is not always established. Where the area relies on imaging rather than true manipulation, it can show that a brain feature co-varies with a behaviour, but not that it causes it. Maguire found more posterior hippocampal grey matter in taxi drivers, but a structural correlation cannot on its own prove that navigating caused the growth rather than, say, people with larger hippocampi being drawn to the job; Casey's activation differences accompany good and poor self-control but do not by themselves establish the direction of causation. The area's imaging evidence, though objective, frequently shares the correlational limitation of any non-experimental design.
It can neglect the environment, cognition and the whole person. In privileging biology, the area risks under-weighting the enormous influence of experience, learning, situation and culture — and of the conscious, meaning-making person. A purely biological account of behaviour sits at one extreme of the nature–nurture debate and can drift toward biological determinism, the view that our biology fixes our behaviour and leaves little room for choice or context. The plasticity theme is, in effect, the area's own internal corrective: Blakemore and Cooper and Maguire show that experience physically shapes the brain, so even within biology, nature and nurture are entwined.
| Strength | Corresponding limitation |
|---|---|
| Highly scientific and objective (physical, quantifiable measures) | Prone to biological reductionism (over-simplifies complex behaviour) |
| Establishes real physical causes via experiment/natural manipulation | Much imaging evidence is correlational — cause not always shown |
| Powerful medical and real-world usefulness | Tiny, unrepresentative samples (special populations, animals) |
| Integrates psychology with the natural sciences | Can neglect environment, cognition and the whole person; risks determinism |
It is worth pausing on why so many of these strengths and weaknesses come in mirrored pairs, because recognising the mirroring is what turns a list of evaluation points into an argument. The area's defining move — reducing behaviour to its physical components and measuring them objectively — is simultaneously the root of its greatest strength and its gravest liability. That reductive, physical focus is what delivers the scientific rigour, the objective measurement and the causal, mechanistic knowledge; but the same focus is what tempts the area toward biological reductionism and toward neglecting the situation, the culture and the person that a fuller account must include. Likewise, the very ingenuity that lets the area study the brain at all — seizing on rare surgical or occupational cases, or manipulating animal brains — is the same ingenuity that saddles it with tiny, unrepresentative samples and sharp ethical costs. A candidate who sees that the strengths and weaknesses are two faces of the same coin, rather than an arbitrary balance sheet, is writing at the level the AO3 marks reward.
There is a further, subtler point about the kind of knowledge the biological area produces. Because it studies physical mechanisms, its findings tend to be precise and mechanistic but partial — they tell us, often with great exactness, how the machinery works while leaving open why, for this person, in this situation, the machinery was engaged. Sperry tells us with precision what each hemisphere can do when isolated, but not what any particular person will choose to think about; Casey tells us which regions are more active in better delayers, but not how a given child came to develop that self-control. This is not a failing so much as a boundary: biological explanation is one indispensable level of analysis among several, and the wisest use of the area is not to treat its mechanisms as the whole explanation but as the physical substrate on which social, cognitive and developmental explanations also operate. Examiners consistently reward candidates who can hold this multi-level view — who can say that a biological account is true but not complete — and that habit of seeing biology as one level among many is one of the most transferable skills the area teaches.
Finally, the area's evaluation cannot be separated from its history and its technology. The biological area has advanced in step with the tools available: Sperry, in the 1960s, worked with behavioural tests on surgical patients because non-invasive imaging did not yet exist; by 2000 Maguire could measure living human brain structure with MRI, and by 2011 Casey could watch the working brain with fMRI. The specification's pairing of a classic study (Sperry; Blakemore & Cooper) with a contemporary one (Casey; Maguire) is in part a story about technological progress — a chance to ask what modern imaging adds to what the pioneers could infer from lesions and behaviour. Reading the area as a moving technological frontier, rather than a set of timeless results, is itself an evaluative stance that strengthens a Section B answer.
Section B rewards candidates who can articulate not just what the biological area is but how it contrasts with the others. The cleanest way to hold the five areas apart is by the question each one asks and the kind of cause it privileges.
| Area | Core question | Kind of cause privileged | Illustrative core studies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Biological | How do the brain, body and genes cause behaviour? | Physical and internal — brain regions, neurochemistry, genes, plasticity | Sperry; Casey; Blakemore & Cooper; Maguire |
| Social | How do other people and the situation shape behaviour? | External — authority, groups, bystanders, roles, norms | Milgram; Piliavin; Bocchiaro; Levine |
| Cognitive | How do internal mental processes (memory, attention) work? | Internal information-processing (often abstracted from the brain) | Loftus & Palmer; Moray; Simons & Chabris |
| Developmental | How does behaviour change with age and experience? | Maturation and external influences over time | Bandura; Kohlberg; Chaney; Lee |
| Individual differences | How and why do people differ from one another? | The individual's unique profile (disorder, IQ, personality) | Freud; Baron-Cohen; Gould; Hancock |
The contrast is sharpest against the social and developmental areas, because they locate the cause outside the person — in the situation, in other people, in upbringing and socialisation — where the biological area locates it inside, in the tissue and the genes. Take self-control: a social account might look to the situation and the modelling of others; a developmental account might look to how self-regulation is learned across childhood; the biological account (Casey) points to the maturation and activity of the prefrontal cortex and its interaction with the reward system. All could be partly true — which is the point of the reductionism/holism and nature/nurture debates — but they are genuinely different explanations, and the exam expects you to keep them distinct.
The contrast with the cognitive area is the subtlest, because the two overlap: both study internal processes, and modern cognitive neuroscience deliberately fuses them. The dividing line is one of level: the cognitive area typically models the mind as information-processing software — the steps of encoding, storage and retrieval, or of attentional filtering — often without specifying the underlying brain. The biological area studies the hardware — the neural structures and activity that implement those processes. Casey's study sits close to this border, because it uses a cognitive task (the go/no-go test of inhibition) but explains performance by brain activity, making it a study that a cognitive neuroscientist would happily claim. Recognising that the biological and cognitive areas are near-neighbours that differ in level, rather than distant strangers, is a mark of sophistication.
The contrast with the individual-differences area turns on what the difference between people is attributed to: individual differences describes and measures how people vary (in disorder, intelligence or personality) and often treats that variation as the object of study in itself, whereas the biological area seeks the physical mechanism — genetic, neural or chemical — that might underlie the variation. The two frequently join forces (a biological explanation of a disorder is both), but their emphasis differs: one maps the differences, the other looks for their bodily cause.
Going further. The relationship between the biological and cognitive areas is the subject of the flourishing field of cognitive neuroscience, which uses imaging to locate mental processes in the brain — exactly the fusion that Casey's study exemplifies. Students considering psychology or neuroscience at university will meet the "levels of explanation" idea (that behaviour can be described at biological, cognitive, social and cultural levels, each valid) in far more depth; the OCR biological area is an excellent early grounding in it, and in the reductionism–holism debate that it raises.
The principles above are not abstractions; each is embodied in one of the four studies you will meet, organised under the area's two key themes.
Regions of the brain is illustrated by the pairing of Sperry (1968) and Casey et al. (2011). Sperry, the classic study, studied split-brain patients — people whose corpus callosum had been surgically severed to control epilepsy — using divided-visual-field and tactile tests to reveal what each hemisphere can do when it cannot communicate with the other, demonstrating hemispheric lateralisation (for example, language predominantly in the left hemisphere). Casey, the contemporary study, used fMRI to identify the neural correlates of self-control, following up the "marshmallow test" cohort and finding that high and low delayers differed in the activity of the prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum on a go/no-go task. Together they show the area's assumption that specific functions depend on specific brain regions, and its progression from inferring function through lesions and behaviour to watching the living brain at work.
Brain plasticity is illustrated by Blakemore & Cooper (1970) and Maguire et al. (2000). Blakemore and Cooper reared kittens in visually restricted environments (seeing only vertical or only horizontal stripes) and found lasting effects on their vision and on the orientation-selective cells of the visual cortex, demonstrating that early visual experience physically shapes neural development. Maguire's contemporary study used MRI to compare London taxi drivers — who spend years acquiring "The Knowledge" of the city's streets — with controls, finding more grey matter in the posterior hippocampus, correlated with years of driving, and so demonstrating that the adult human brain remains plastic in response to experience. Together they show the area's assumption that the brain is physically moulded by the environment, across both early development and adult life.
Holding these four in mind as concrete cases makes the abstract principles examinable: whenever a question asks you to evaluate the biological area, you can anchor each general point in a specific study, which is exactly the move that lifts a Section B answer from assertion to evidenced argument.
"Discuss strengths and weaknesses of the biological area in psychology. Support your answer with examples from the biological core studies. [15 marks]
How the marks are structured (own-words breakdown). On a 15-mark Section B "areas" essay of this kind, the assessment rewards three things in balance: AO1 — accurate knowledge of the biological area's defining assumptions and methods; AO2 — appropriate use of the biological core studies as evidence for the points made; and AO3 — genuine evaluation that weighs strengths against weaknesses and reaches a supported judgement. A strong answer is not a list; it argues, using named studies as evidence, and arrives somewhere.
Mid-band response (7/15): The biological area says that behaviour is caused by the brain, genes and body rather than by the situation or personality. One strength is that it is very scientific because it uses brain scans and physical measurements, like Casey who used fMRI to look at self-control, so the data is objective. Another strength is that it is useful for medicine, for example understanding the brain helps treat brain damage. A weakness is that it is reductionist because it explains complicated behaviour just by a brain region and ignores other causes. Another weakness is that the samples are often small, like Sperry who only used a few split-brain patients, so the results might not apply to everyone. Overall the biological area is scientific and useful but too reductionist.
Examiner-style commentary: This earns solid AO1 (the core assumption is correctly stated) and makes appropriate use of Casey and Sperry for AO2. The evaluation is present but thin: the objectivity, usefulness and reductionism points are correct yet asserted rather than developed, and the small-sample point names no consequence beyond "might not apply". To reach the next band the answer needs to develop each evaluation into an argument — for example explaining that the same reductive focus that produces the scientific objectivity is what tempts the area to leave out the situation and the person — and to name the reductionism–holism debate rather than merely using the word "reductionist".
Stronger response (11/15): The defining assumption of the biological area is that behaviour has a physical basis — in the brain and its regions, the nervous system, hormones and genes — rather than in the situation or the individual's psychology. A major strength is the area's scientific objectivity: because it measures the biology directly (Sperry's controlled divided-field tests; Casey's fMRI of the prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum; Maguire's numerical grey-matter measures), its data resist the demand characteristics that trouble self-report, placing it firmly within the scientific method. This grounding also yields real-world usefulness, since understanding the physical basis of behaviour informs medicine — Maguire's demonstration of adult plasticity underpins the optimism of neurorehabilitation. However, these strengths carry costs. The area is prone to biological reductionism: explaining self-control purely by two brain regions (Casey) risks stripping out the upbringing and situation that also shape it, which is why the reductionism–holism debate is the area's signature. Its samples are also often tiny and atypical — Sperry's handful of epilepsy patients may not have typical brains — limiting generalisability. So the biological area is rigorous and useful but must be handled as one level of explanation, not the whole.
Examiner-style commentary: AO1 is precise and AO2 draws on three of the four studies with genuine relevance. The AO3 is now argued, not listed — it links the objectivity strength to the reductionism weakness and correctly invokes the reductionism–holism debate. To reach top-band the answer needs a sharper sustained judgement: rather than alternating points, it could organise around a thesis (that the area's power and its limits share a single root — its reductive, physical focus) and could add the correlational limitation of the imaging evidence (Maguire's and Casey's structure/activity differences cannot alone prove causation) to complete the coverage.
Top-band response (14/15): The biological area's defining claim — that behaviour is produced by the physical body, above all the brain and its regions, the nervous system, hormones and genes — is simultaneously the source of its greatest strength and its most persistent weakness, and a balanced evaluation is best organised around that single tension. Its strength is scientific and practical: by measuring the biology directly, the area achieves an objectivity few approaches match (Sperry's clean, replicable divided-field demonstration of hemisphere function; Casey's quantified fMRI activation in the prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum; Maguire's voxel-based grey-matter measures), and this rigour feeds directly into medical usefulness, from stroke rehabilitation to the neurorehabilitation optimism that follows from Maguire's proof of adult plasticity. Yet the very device that manufactures this rigour — reducing behaviour to physical components and measuring them — is also the area's liability: it invites biological reductionism, so that a phenomenon such as self-control, which is also social and developmental, risks being explained away by two brain regions (Casey), and it can slide toward biological determinism, marginalising the environment and the person. Two further limitations qualify the area's confidence: its reliance on rare special populations yields tiny, unrepresentative samples (Sperry's few epilepsy patients; Maguire's small, initially all-male occupational group), and much of its imaging evidence is correlational — Maguire's hippocampal difference and Casey's activation patterns co-vary with behaviour but cannot alone establish that the brain feature is the cause. The judgement, then, is that the biological area is indispensable for the precise, causal, physical knowledge it provides, but is best understood as one level of explanation among several: most complete when its mechanisms are integrated with the social, cognitive and developmental accounts on which they operate, rather than treated as the whole story. Tellingly, the area supplies its own corrective in the plasticity theme, where Blakemore and Cooper and Maguire show that experience physically shapes the brain — so that even within biology, nature and nurture are entwined.
Examiner-style commentary: Full-band AO1/AO2/AO3. The answer is organised around a genuine thesis (the shared root of strength and weakness in the area's reductive physical focus), deploys all four core studies as evidence, distinguishes reductionism as a tendency from a settled reductive victory, and correctly identifies the correlational status of the imaging evidence. Crucially it reaches a sustained, qualified judgement — biology as one indispensable level rather than the whole — and turns the plasticity theme into evidence for that judgement. The single mark withheld reflects room to develop the nature–nurture point into the free-will–determinism debate explicitly.
This content is aligned with the OCR A-Level Psychology (H567) specification.