PSY 1001 Exam 1 UMN

Researchers find a negative relationship between alcohol consumption and speed of response: the more alcohol consumed the slower the response speed. Which of the following statistics could possibly represent that correlation?

-0.87

When an excitatory signal reaches a neuron, the resting voltage of ____________ becomes ________________.

-60 millivolts (or -70 mv, it depends) becomes less negative

The absolute threshold is defined as the stimulus intensity that an organism can detect __________________.

50% of the time

After suffering a brain injury by falling from a ladder, Zack's wife continues to tell the doctor that his personality has changed. He used to be fun loving and care-free, but he is now more critical and yells at his children for seemingly little reason. He seems to lack control over his emotions now. Given these symptoms, Zack is likely to have suffered damage to the ________ of his cortex.

Frontal lobe

Executives at Target want to use a personality inventory to screen job applicants for customer service positions. They want to select the inventory that best predicts behaviors such as honesty, friendliness, and dependability. Which of the following four inventories will be best for them?

High scores on Inventory D correlate -.73 with measures of honesty, friendliness, and dependability.

Going to the Mall of America for an hour each day for two weeks to record interactions between teenaged shoppers at Urban Outfitters would be an example of which research method?

Naturalistic observation

Your friend tells you that there is a negative correlation between how much caffeine someone drinks and hours of sleep. But you never drink caffeine drinks and you sleep only five or six hours per night, so you conclude:

No correlation is 100%

Vivian has been experiencing unexplained flashes of light and color, even when her eyes are closed. She recently saw a neurologist who located a small brain tumor. In this case, it is likely that the tumor is located in Vivian's __________.

Occipital lobe

A researcher claimed that he had successfully cultured a type of bacteria that could generate heat from trash. However, no other researchers have been able to culture the same bacteria, even when they follow the same steps. So the claim made by this researcher violates which of the principles of scientific thinking?

Replicability

Some research has shown that stimulating parts of the temporal lobe can produce vivid autobiographical memories. Others have suggested that these are not true memories, but rather are more like hallucinations that do not reflect real past experiences. To date, the true answer has not yet been solidified. This uncertainty in research findings demonstrates which of the six principles of scientific thinking?

Ruling out rival hypotheses

Imagine that biologists have discovered an animal that has eyes very similar to human eyes, except the only receptor cells in its retina are rods; there are no cones. Based on what is known about human vision you might expect that this animal would ___________________.

have no color vision

Dr. Carvallo is dissecting the brain of a rat in order to compare the brain of a rat to that of a human. He will find that rats __________________.

have similar brain structures in approximately the same position as humans

William James is considered a founding father of psychology because....?

he defined questions that have dominated psychology ever since and wrote the first textbook in Psychology..

During lecture, our lecturer described long-term potentiation, the neural basis of learning, in which ____________________.

high frequency stimulation increases the ability of cell A to activate cell B.

The lecturer explained that animals and humans have similar brains because they share a common evolutionary ancestor. The scientific term for this relationship is _________________.

homologous

Jake has been diagnosed with anxiety. A Cognitive psychologist would attribute the origin of Jake's anxiety to which of the following:

how Jake interprets his experiences.

According to our lecturer, perception is ___________.

how environmental stimuli are converted into neural impulses.

In their study on self-esteem and social media, Chris believes that people with lower levels of self-esteem will post less frequently on social media. This belief represents Chris' __________.

hypothesis

A group of clinicians is interested in testing which kinds of therapies are most effective for people with social phobia. To do so, they have patients complete different forms of therapy and assess their symptoms over the course of the study. In this example, the kind of therapy is a(n) ____________ variable and patients' symptoms of social phobia are a(n) ____________ variable.

independent; dependent

When an _________ message reaches the dendrites of a neuron, the cell becomes more negative and the likelihood that a nerve impulse will occur is _________________.

inhibitory...decreased

Michelle is participating in a research study. She has put on a set of Grado headphones and is listening to a stream of white noise. The experimenter has explained that every so often she will hear a quiet "click" in the noise and that she should press a button whenever she hears it. Michelle is very eager to please, and, as described in lecture, signal detection theory predicts that Michelle _______________ than study participants who are sensitive to the signal.

is likely to have more false alarms.

The confirmation bias

is the tendency to only seek information that is likely to support one's decisions and beliefs.

The firing of a neuron is most similar to _______________.

light coming on as a light switch is flipped.

As described in lecture, Hebb's rule is supported by the cellular phenomena of ____________________.

long-term potentiation

When Jill went to the doctor, tests initially revealed she did not have an egg allergy even though she really did. According to signal detection theory, the incorrect test result could be considered a _________.

miss

Rates of crime and ice cream sales are strongly correlated. A Psy 1001 student would interpret that amusing fact as __________________________.

most likely due to a the effect of a third variable, hot weather.

During lecture, we see a video of a young woman suffering from prosopagnosia, an inability to identify faces, a disorder of object recognition associated with damage to the _____________ lobe of the brain.

occipital

In which of the lobes of the cerebrum is the somatosensory cortex located?

parietal

Jim Steele lost his arm in a roadside bomb explosion while on military service in Iraq. Now, when he shaves, he feels the movement of the razor against his cheek and, at the same time, he feels stroking on his missing arm. At the VA, Jim is diagnosed with Phantom Limb Syndrome, a disorder due to plasticity in his ____________.

parietal lobe

The ventral "WHAT" pathway from the occipital lobe to the temporal lobe is also known as the ______________ pathway.

perception

A key aspect of an experiment that is missing in other research designs is...

random assignment.

If you fell forward and hit your forehead very hard on a concrete sidewalk, you may have problems with which of the following?

reasoning and executive control

Morgan's math teacher gives weekly quizzes during class. All of the items on the quizzes are designed to assess students understanding of crucial math concepts, and Morgan is a good student who studies consistently for the class. However, her scores fluctuate a great deal. Some weeks she gets every question right, and some weeks she gets more than half wrong. Given these inconsistent scores, you might wonder whether the quizzes are _________.

reliable

The voltage of (-60 or -70) millivolts is known as the neuron's __________________.

resting potential

If you are asked to multiply "17x 24," you will need to slow down and deliberately and consciously work through an orderly sequence of steps to find the correct answer. This effortful thinking is an example of what Daniel Kahneman refers to as _____________________.

system 2 thinking

Scientific thinking--an orderly, systematic sequence of steps that checks the validity of arguments and considers alternate explanations--is an example of what Daniel Kahneman refers to as ___________________________.

system 2 thinking

The ventral "WHAT" pathway travels through the brain's __________ lobe, while the dorsal "WHERE" pathway travels through the __________ lobe.

temporal; parietal

Neural information from four of the five sense organs--eyes, ears, skin, tongue--are relayed first to areas of the _________________.

thalamus

Researchers studying the effects of sleep deprivation tested the physical coordination skills of 25-year-old males who had been sleep deprived for either 24, 36, or 48 hours. In this study, the dependent variable would be _______________.

the physical coordination skills of the men in the study

Bi-stable figures illustrate the observation that...

the same visual input can result in different perception

A researcher will choose to use the correlational method when _____________________________.

the variables of interest cannot be manipulated

A system of interrelated ideas used to explain a set of observations is called _________________.

theory

Psychologists primarily rely on ______________ to reach their conclusions.

scientific methods

Blake was at a Vikings v Packers game, and even though people wearing green and yellow jackets were spread fairly evenly throughout the stands, he still perceived all the people in green jackets as a single group of visiting Packer fans. Blake's perception is most consistent with the Gestalt principle of...

similarity

When you look out your window, you see your neighbor walking towards you. Her image on your retina becomes "bigger," but you know that she is not actually growing bigger as she walks towards you. In your mind, she remains constant due to _____________.

size constancy

The one sense that doesn't undergo sensory integration in the thalamus before being transmitted to primary sensory cortex is _______________.

smell

The movement of voluntary skeletal muscles involved in doing calisthenics is under the control of the ____________.

somatic nervous system

The approach to psychology that sought to identify the fundamental components of conscious experience was ______________________.

structuralism

Neurotransmitters are found in the __________________________.

synaptic vesicles

A theory is a ____ of interrelated ideas that is used to explain _____.

system, observations

Which of the following could never be a correlation?

-1.02

The brain structure that controls your ability to produce speech is __________________________.

Broca's area

The dorsal "WHERE" pathway from the occipital lobe to the parietal lobe is also known as the ______________ pathway.

Gestalt

Which of the following is an example of how our selective visual attention can lead us to miss important information?

Change blindness

Which of the following statements explains why objects in our peripheral vision tend to be less sharply perceived than objects in our direct focus?

Cones, which are specialized for visual acuity, are less dense at the edges of the retina.

Comprehensive investigations have identified only 31 credible incidents of voter fraud in the USA since the year 2000 in the nearly one billion votes cast. Yet 36% of American voters believe that voter fraud is a major problem in elections. These true believers will point to one of the 31 cases to justify their belief that fraud is a major problem. They continue to insist that elections are riddled with fraud even after they are exposed to the evidence that the 31 cases of fraud have not affected election results. Match the following statements with the psychological concept.

Confirmation Bias - These true believers will point to one of the 31 cases to justify their belief that fraud is a major problem. Belief Perseverance - They continue to insist that elections are riddled with fraud even after they are exposed to the evidence that the 31 cases of fraud have not affected election results.

While watching TV, you see a commercial for a new drug, Curolex, which cures 93% of cancer patients. But when you check Curolex out on Google Scholar, you can't find any research on its effectiveness. You are surprised by this because Curolex seems to be too good to be true, and the lack of convincing evidence makes you suspicious. When thinking about Curolex, you have used which of the six principles of scientific thinking?

Extraordinary claims

James claims that he can read minds, but he refuses to tell anyone what he has learned so there is no way to test whether his claim is true or false. Which of the six principles of scientific thinking best describes this situation?

Falsifiability

Which ethical requirement of research was not present in the Tuskegee experiment, where nearly 400 African American men were exposed to syphilis and denied treatment for its symptoms?

Informed consent

You should voluntarily enter a research study and have the right to withdraw from it at any time. This respect for the participant falls under the ethical principle of _____________________.

Informed consent

Which structure is like a locked door that only certain neurotransmitter keys can unlock?

Receptor sites

Mary put her hand on a hot stove. Ouch! A "move your hand" message is carried from her spinal column back to her hand by which neurons?

Sensory neurons

Prudence put her hand on a hot stove. A "Wow! Pain! danger!!" message is carried from her fingers to her spinal column by which neurons?

Sensory neurons

Which of the following statements accurately describes the relationship between sensory thresholds and sensitivity?

Sensory thresholds and sensitivity are negatively correlated with each other.

A Canadian woman had suffered damage to her temporal lobe from carbon monoxide poisoning. Which of the following describes a consequence of her brain damage?

She can no longer complete the "perceptual" task of aligning a card to a slot when asked, "what is the orientation of the slot?"

The psychoanalytic perspective proposed that unconscious thought processes and early childhood experiences are important determinants of peoples behavior. Which psychologist is most closely associated with this perspective?

Sigmund Freud

The belief that our environment, life experiences, and upbringing determine our behavior is known as...

The "nurture" argument

The fact that humans have three cone receptors, specialized for red, green and blue spectrum light waves, is consistent with which theory of color vision?

Trichromatic theory

If your great-uncle has difficulty understanding the meaning of someone's speech after a stroke, you may suspect damage to his _____________.

Wernicke's area

Which of the following questions would be of most interest to a psychologist influenced by Freud?

What unconscious conflicts is this patient experiencing?

Scarlett is a graduate student who is observing children playing together after watching a film. She knows that some children saw a film that contained graphic scenes of violence and some children saw a non-violent film, but she doesn't know which film each child she is observing watched. In this case, Scarlett is recording data for _________________.

a double-blind research study

To discover whether residents of a city are in favor of building a new sports stadium, the team's owner randomly selected and interviewed 500 of the city's 500,000 residents. In this instance, the 500 people that the owner interviewed would be ____________________.

a representative sample

A hypothesis is _______________________.

a tentative statement about the relationship between two or more variables

During lecture, Psy 1001 students saw an experiment in which participants were told either that they would experience intense and painful shocks or mild shocks that were not painful. Then, while waiting for the shock treatment, participants answered survey questions on whether they would like to spend time waiting alone or with another person. In this study, the questionnaire that students completed served __________________.

as the dependent variable

The ________ is sometimes called the emergency center of the body.

adrenal gland

A researcher is interested in studying aggression. In order to measure aggressiveness, he asks parents of nursery school children to rate how aggressive their child is, on a scale of 1 to 7. In this case, the rating that each parent gives his or her child is __________________.

an operational definition

A researcher is measuring the heart rate of subjects as an index of anxiety. In this study, heart rate is _________________.

an operational definition of anxiety

Clinical psychologists study ________________.

causes of and treatments for mental health problems

The two most basic divisions of the nervous system are the ______________.

central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system

Greg was a world-class diver until he hit his head on the diving board during one of his dives. He now has difficulty coordinating the movements required for various tucks and rotations. It is likely that when he hit his head on the diving board, Greg damaged his ______________.

cerebellum

When the neurotransmitter binds to the post-synaptic receptor _____________________.

channel molecules open up to let in positively or negatively charged ions

What type of psychologists are trained to perform assessments and conduct research on people with mental disorders?

clinical psychologists

Light enters and is processed by the eye's major structures in which order?

cornea, pupil, retina

During states of stress, the adrenal glands produce _____________.

cortisol

Statistics that are used to summarize and organize data are called...

descriptive statistics.

The use of _____ differentiates psychological science from pseudoscience.

empirical evidence

The fact that many times researchers unintentionally influence the outcome of their studies implies the existence of _______________________________.

experimenter bias

Before you hear your favorite song, the sound waves are first processed by your auditory sensory system as follows:

hair cells in the organ of corti--thalamus--primary auditory cortex

The Ames room, in which people are seen to get small or enlarge as they move about, demonstrates that our perception of the world depends strongly on ________________.

the assumptions we make about the world

When evaluating hypotheses, the criterion of parsimony (or Occam's razor) states that the _____________________.

the best explanation is the one that accounts for findings without adding unnecessary elements.

Transduction refers to ___________________.

the process of converting environmental energy into neural information.

A researcher has children watch 30 minutes of violent television, and then counts the number of times they hit each other afterward in a one-hour play period as a measure of aggression. The researcher concludes that television violence causes aggression. However, this conclusion may be invalid because ____________________.

there was no control group

From the photoreceptors in the retina, visual information is most precisely described as passing ______________________.

through the thalamus to the visual cortex.

Riding his bicycle, Rob loved how the world smelled. The smell of grass and flowers were being converted from chemical molecules into neural information by receptors in Rob's nose in the process known as _________.

transduction

One advantage to the scientific method is that it __________________________.

works against confirmation bias