Chapter 6 Review Questions
In which of the following scenarios would you be most likely to succumb to a false alarm in signal detection?
Monitoring for the vibration of your phone in your pocket while you are sitting
Among the various touch receptors, _______ have a role in sensing touch and _______ have a role in sensing vibration.
Merkel's discs; Pacinian corpuscles
In a sense, phantom limb pain is a purely _______ phenomenon.
perceptual
Sound traveling through air or water consists of alternating waves of
pressure.
The greatest adaptive, perceptual advantage to having two ears rather than one is that
we are more easily able to localize sounds with two ears.
Weber's fraction to detect a difference in weight is ___ percent.
2
Which of the following research questions is a psychophysicist likely to be most interested in asking?
How much louder must a sound be before a person can detect that it is louder than the original sound?
How does the figure illustrate the concept of a sensory threshold?
If the stimulus is weak enough, the sensory receptor will not reach threshold and will not produce an action potential.
Which of the following examples best illustrates an application of the Gestalt rule of continuity?
In the movie theater, you perceive that an actor is moving rather than just appearing first in one place and then in another place on the screen.
Which of the following would be an effective way to determine a just noticeable difference (JND)?
Reducing the intensity of a light beam against a wall until you can no longer detect it
The figure shows the response of a touch receptor in response to two stimulus strengths. What can you conclude about the relationship between the strength of the stimulus and the likelihood of the touch receptor to fire?
The harder the push against the skin, the more likely it is that the touch receptor will fire.
Why would you feel pain when placing your hand on both a hot and a cold pipe at the same time?
Touch receptors are reporting the sensations of heat and cold, but the brain combines the two and perceives pain.
Which of the following is the best example of a sensation?
Your skin receptors detect the touch of a student walking by.
Neuropathic pain is caused by...
a damaged or malfunctioning nervous system
The concept of labeled lines refers to the fact
a separate set of nerves transmits information from each sensory receptor organ to the brain.
A person who has lost her sense of smell is most likely to experience
a significant reduction in the ability to experience flavor.
The main difference between binocular and monocular depth cues is that
binocular cues require information from both eyes, while monocular cues do not.
The fact that _______ are relatively _______ to light explains why people have more difficulty seeing color in poorly lit places.
cones; insensitive
If you were an artist drawing a cityscape, you would apply the linear perspective depth cue by
drawing the streets converging with the edges of buildings at the horizon.
The specialized receptor cells inside the cochlea are called
hair cells.
According to the duplex theory, we use both _______ differences and _______ differences to localize sounds.
intensity; latency
Weber's fraction expresses the _______ as a proportion of the original stimulus.
just noticeable difference (JND)
The flexible, transparent structure in the eye that helps focus an image on the back of the eye's interior is called the...
lens.
The adequate stimulus for the visual system is ____, and the adequate stimulus for the auditory system is ____.
light; sound
An absolute threshold is the...
lowest intensity of a stimulus that a person can detect half the time.
Occlusion is a _______ depth cue.
monocular
The olfactory system routes information directly to the _______ of the brain.
olfactory bulb
Sensory adaptation is the...
progressive loss of responsiveness in sensory cells exposed to a constant stimulus.
While you are sitting in a park, you see a tulip that is exposed to the sun. Shortly after you notice it, the tulip is exposed to the shade. According to the concept of color constancy, you perceive that the color of the tulip has
remained the same, but the lighting conditions have changed.
Eyes and ears are...
sensory receptor organs.
A food that excites the taste receptors that allow positively charged hydrogen ions to enter cells is likely to have a _______ taste.
sour
A ____ is a physical event that a sensory receptor cell might detect, whereas a ____ is the final interpretation of that physical event.
stimulus; percept
The retina is the...
surface at the back of the eye where the image is focused.
Biting into a lemon is likely to stimulate taste receptor cells for _______ and _______.
sweet; sour
Chemicals in the mouth encounter the surface of taste receptor cells at
taste pores.
Our two chemosensory systems are the _______ system and the _______ system.
taste; olfactory
The optic disc is the part of the retina
that has no photoreceptors.
In psychology, the word "noise" is defined as...
the firing of a sensory cell without a stimulus or in response to an irrelevant stimulus.
The main idea behind Gestalt psychology is that
the whole perception is more than just the sum of our separate sensations.
The primary function of the three ossicles of the middle ear is to
transmit vibrations to the inner ear.
