Psychology 2301 Exam 2

Damien likes to put all sorts of things, like bugs, dirt, and shoelaces, in his mouth. He also likes his toy train; however, he seems to lose interest in playing with the train whenever his brother hides it. Damien is most likely in the ________ stage of development.

sensorimotor

Last year, Martina was in love with Robert, but they eventually broke up. Today in the mall, Martina smells someone wearing the same cologne that Robert always wore. She is immediately filled with positive feelings, which is most likely due to

spontaneous recovery

Jack uses classical conditioning to teach his dog Luna to sit whenever Jack says "Sit." But now, anything that Jack says that is similar to "Sit" causes Luna to show the conditioned response of sitting. This is most likely the result of

stimulus generalization

Giovanni is having difficulty learning English. He keeps putting verbs at the end of sentences. For example, instead of saying "The dog ate the bone," he says, "The dog the bone ate." Giovanni is having trouble with

syntax

After transduction, the neural signals of vision, hearing, taste, and touch all pass through the

thalamus

Reversible figures occur because

the correct assignment of figure and ground is ambiguous.

Dr. Osmond is a developmental psychologist who studies adulthood. Which of the following is he most likely to research?

the mental effects of stagnation

The major problem to be explained by depth perception is that

the retina input is two-dimensional

Sally is playing ball with her friend Anne. When Anne leaves the ball on the couch and goes to the bathroom, Sally hides the ball behind the TV. Sally expects Anne to look for the ball on the couch when she comes back because Anne does not know the ball was moved while she was in the bathroom. Sally is demonstrating that she understands Anne has her own thoughts and intentions that are different from Sally's. Sally has developed

theory of mind

Joseph used classical conditioning to teach his sister to be afraid of squirrels. If he is successful, the conditioned stimulus, the squirrel, must have been paired with a(n) _______, such as _______.

unconditioned stimulus; a loud noise

The ________ sense aids balance by judging direction and intensity of head movements

vestibular

Which of the following detects temperature and then sends information about temperature to the brain

warm and cold receptors

Which would be the worst tip for someone who is experiencing pain after a surgery

"Focus on the pain and its sensations."

Brian has three children with very different personality traits. Even with such different personality traits, Brian sees strong maturation effects. Which of the following has Brian most likely observed?

All three children learned to walk at about 12 months of age.

While visiting your friend and her 1-year-old son, Ian, you notice that Ian does not get upset when his mother leaves the room and he is alone with you, a stranger. In addition, Ian ignores his mother when she comes back into the room. Based on this, Ian's attachment style to his mother would most likely be described as

Avoidant

Five-year-old Simone is shown two evenly spaced rows of five nickels. When asked which row has "more" Simone responds that the rows are the same. Next, one of the rows of nickels is squished close together. When asked which has "more," Simone responds that the row that is still spaced out has more. In this example, Simone has displayed

Centration

People see the figure ( ) as an oval rather than two separate curving lines. Which Gestalt principal explains this outcome

Closure

Susie wants to use operant conditioning to teach her cat to sit up for a treat. A psychologist who has conducted research that would be useful to her in this situation is _______.

Edward Thorndike

The _______ is a thin layer of tissue in the nasal cavity containing olfactory receptors

Epithelium

A higher-pitched sound is one that is higher in ______, which is measured in ______.

Frequency; Hertz

According to ______ we perceive a car as a whole unit rather than perceiving it as a group of distinct entities (such as metal, tires, glass, door handles, hubcaps, and fenders).

Gestalt psychology

Sharon notices that her baby grasps her finger every time she places it in her infant's palm. Which of the following is an explanation for why her baby shows this reflex?

It helps babies survive.

Thirteen-year-old Sasha has a hard time getting along with her siblings because she often feels emotional and acts irrationally. She knows that she overreacts to their teasing, but she cannot help it. Sasha's feelings are most likely due to activation in her

Limbic system

Your psychology instructor is preparing her lecture on learning and wants to include an analogy about memes. She starts by writing "Memes are to genes as..." but cannot figure out how to finish the sentence. Which of the following would best complete her thought

Nurture is to nature

Miranda is learning how to play tennis. She has a unique way of hitting a backhand shot, but after a lesson with a professional instructor, Miranda changes her backhand technique because the technique she saw her instructor use is more effective. Miranda has learned to improve her tennis due to

Observational learning

Whenever baby Colin cries, his mother picks him up. This stops Colin from crying. In turn, this makes Colin's mother pick him up more often. In this example, his mother picking him up serves as a ________ reinforcer for Colin. Colin stopping crying is a ________ reinforcer for the mother.

Positive;negative

You are driving to school when suddenly an ambulance rushes past you with its sirens blaring, so you quickly pull your car to the side of the road. A few minutes later, when you hear sirens in the distance, you get ready to pull your car over again. You have learned to respond quickly to sirens because of

Sensitization

Olivia begins menstruating at age eight. Which of the following is the most likely explanation for this occurrence?

She has been living in a stressful, unstable household.

Lila is not an alcoholic and never drinks to excess. However, she does have wine with dinner every evening. When Lila is two weeks pregnant, she asks you whether this can injure her baby. What correct response can you give her?

She should stop drinking wine completely until after the baby is born.

Which of the following explains how people localize sound

The brain integrates the different sensory information coming from each of the two ears.

The minimum amount of change required for a person to detect a difference between two stimuli is referred to as

The difference threshold

During sensation and perception, sensory receptors on the skin transduce information and then send this information to

The somatosensory cortex

Elenor wants to use classical conditioning to teach her students to run to the closet when the "intruder alert" sounds at their school. To be successful, Elenor must begin the learning process with a(n)

Unconditioned stimulus

Taylor's parents are very inconsistent with their child-rearing practices. Some days, Taylor can get away with climbing onto the back of the couch and jumping off, but other days she is punished. Taylor's parents are reinforcing her behavior on a _______ schedule.

Variable interval

Professor Jackson periodically gives his students pop quizzes on the reading assignments. To encourage students to complete the reading assignments, the schedule of reinforcement he should use for the pop quizzes is a ________ schedule.

Variable ratio

Over dinner one night, your little sister tells you how she is being picked on at school by two other students. Rowan has been calling her names during class for the past few weeks. Marty has been sending her offensive text messages and intimidating e-mails. Together, Rowan is engaging in ________ bullying and Marty is engaging in ________ bullying.

Verbal;cyber

Elizabeth is going to decorate her newborn's room and wants the baby to be able to see the decorations. Which of the following should she use to decorate?

a wall hanging with a large black-and-white checked fabric

Nora took her young son Alfred to the zoo, where he pointed to a zebra and said, "Look, Mommy, a horse!" Nora replied, "That is not a horse; that is a zebra. See, it has black and white stripes." Alfred then replied, "Wow! Look at the striped zebra!" In this situation, Henry's development of a zebra schema required

accommodation

Mary and Eric are outside playing one day when Eric looks up and asks, "What's that big bright ball in the sky?" Mary replies that it is the sun. That night, Eric looks out his bedroom window and sees a big, bright ball in the sky. "Look, Mary, it's the sun!" he exclaims. This example shows that Eric has used _______ for his new knowledge.

assimilation

During Tammy's eye exam, a buzzer rings and a puff of air is blown into her eye, which makes her blink. This happens several times. Then Tammy blinks when she hears the buzzer because she expects that a puff of air will be blown into her eye. In this example, Tammy is showing ________ learning.

associative

Helen keeps her new baby boy well fed and clean. However, she does not want to spoil him, so she does not hold him or touch him too much. After reading about Harry Harlow's research, Helen now knows that

babies need to be touched and held to develop normally.

For each cart of books that Spencer reshelves in the prison library, he receives a chip. He is allowed to collect chips and then trade them in for candy, extra recreation time, or visitation time. The prison uses a token economy, which is a method of

behavior modification

If the muscles of one of your eyes becomes paralyzed, making it impossible to change the point of focus of that eye, which kind of depth cue will become unavailable to you

binocular disparity

According to the _______ model of conceptual processing, the recognition of patterns occurs because data are relayed from a lower level to a higher level of processing in the brain

bottom-up processing

Because of which of the following can you see different colors

cones

Positive punishment causes a(n) _______ in behavior through the ______ of a stimulus

decrease; addition

Taj wants to create a robot that has sensation but not perception. The robot should

detect external physical energy but not interpret it.

Ernst is jealous that several of his friends are going through puberty but he has not started yet. He eagerly keeps checking for signs that his body is changing. Ernst knows he should be experiencing all of the following EXCEPT

development of a more rounded jaw.

Kendra loves spicy curry, but her husband prefers a mild curry. Starting with a mild curry, Kendra increases the spiciness every time she cooks. One day her husband complains that the curry is too spicy. After that, Kendra always makes the curry as spicy as the last time before her husband complained. With this exercise, Kendra assessed her husband's

difference threshold

Callie is pregnant. She has never liked vegetables and rarely eats them. However, she does not want her baby to have the same bad eating habits. If Callie wants her baby to grow up to enjoy the taste of vegetables, the most effective thing she can do is

eat vegetables while she is pregnant and nursing

According to signal detection theory, if Daniel incorrectly "detected" a stimulus that was not presented in a trial, he would be making a

false alarm

The Acme Chemical Company has some employees who work in a production plant and some who work in a sales office. The plant workers get paid every Friday; however, the office workers get paid for every fifth sale that they make. The plant workers are paid on a ________ schedule, whereas the office workers are paid on a ________ schedule.

fixed interval; fixed ratio

__________ generate action potentials that are sent to the brain by the optic nerve

ganglion cells

Claudia has been feeling ill for a couple of weeks and finds out she is two weeks pregnant. Up to this point, her baby has been in the ______ period of development, and the _______ has begun to form.

germinal; placenta

Ralph is very upset. His infant daughter was born with a preventable birth defect because she was exposed to a teratogen. Ralph's daughter may have all of the following EXCEPT

high birth weight

Andre is writing an introductory psychology essay on Piaget's theory of cognitive development. He should criticize the original theory for all of the following reasons EXCEPT

infants do not learn about the world through their senses

When Jodi walks from the sunlight into a dark theater, her _____ causes her _____ to enlarge.

iris and pupil

Sunil wants to classically condition his dog to fear skunks so he does not get sprayed again. This task should be much easier than teaching him to fear a house plant because a dog _______.

is biologically prepared to fear animals that might cause it harm

With regard to sensation, signal detection theory accounts for a person's

judgments

Genevieve wants her students to learn how to read their textbooks to answer questions about the material. She has her students do an ungraded in-class activity where they read sections of the book and answer questions about what they read on an activity sheet. A few weeks later, Genevieve assigns an activity sheet to go with her students' reading, but this time they receive a grade for finding the answers in the text. If the students do a good job and earn high grades on their answers, then their performance is most likely a result of _______.

latent learning

Being able to detect the origin of a sound is called

localization

Sonya's parents have been encouraging her to walk for several months by standing her up and holding her hands. Paul's parents have let him achieve motor milestones on his own, without encouraging or helping him. The fact that Sonya and Paul both started walking independently at about the same age can be best explained by

maturation

When an artist creates the illusion of depth in a painting, he or she does so by using

monocular depth cues

Gervase is staring at the blades of his ceiling fan. When he turns off the fan, he is surprised that the blades appear to be rotating in the opposite direction. To reassure Gervase that he is not hallucinating, you could tell him about

motion aftereffects

In operant conditioning, removing a stimulus to increase a behavior in the future is called

negative reinforcement

Nadia knows that a substance's quantity does not change, even when its form does. Based on this, Nadia is most likely ________ years old.

nine

Ian, who is 3 years old, was watching his father hammer a nail to join two pieces of wood together. If Ian learns how to hammer wood together after this experience, it is most likely the result of _______.

observational learning

When wild Arctic wolves hunt, their efforts are only sometimes reinforced because finding food is difficult. The fact that the wolves are only sometimes reinforced for hunting is an example of ________ reinforcement.

partial

The perception of higher-pitched sounds is called ______ coding

place

If getting $1 for every correct answer on this test makes you study harder, being given $1 would be a form of:

positive reinforcement

Camden is explaining all the different stages of development he has learned in his introductory psychology class. Which of the following is the correct order for all of the periods of human development?

prenatal, infancy, childhood, adolescence, adulthood

If Sheila wants to decrease her dog barking at the cat next door, she should most likely use _______.

punishment

Samantha tells her roommate that negative reinforcement and negative punishment are similar because they

remove stimulus

Research shows that marriage has psychosocial benefits for the couple. Research has found support for all of the following findings EXCEPT that

same-sex married couples show fewer of the benefits of marriage

Anna is reading her psychology textbook. The light reflects off the words on the page and falls on the sensory receptors in her retina, which results in ________. Then her brain interprets the stimuli as particular words, which is called ________.

sensation, perception