Ap Psych Mid Term

Hillary glances at a graph and then turns her head away less than a second later. When she tries to immediately remember what she saw, which of the following types of memory does Hillary use?

Iconic

Which of the following refers to the photoreceptors responsible for color vision?

Cones

Which dog is demonstrating stimulus discrimination in the following scenarios?

Cookie cowers when she hears the pop of fireworks, but not when she hears the pop of lightning.

Which of the following are NOT part of a neuron?

Synapses

Difficulty in typing smoothly on a keyboard would most likely result from damage to the

cerebellum

According to the information-processing view of memory, the first stage in memory processing involves

encoding

The most common form of color blindness is related to deficiencies in the

red-green system

Learned helplessness is most likely to result when

responses have no effect on the environment

The pituitary gland is controlled by the

hypothalamus

The area of the brain stem that is important in controlling breathing is the

medulla

Evidence for the opponent-process theory of color vision is provided by the fact that

the eyes see negative afterimages after staring at saturated colors for several minutes

Piper reads about someone described as adventurous and extroverted. She then judges that this person is more likely to be a lawyer who enjoys hiking than a lawyer who does not. The best explanation for Piper's error is that she is basing her judgment on

the representativeness heuristic

The results of a correlational study involving student volunteers in a psychology laboratory might not apply to the general population because

the sample is not randomly chosen and therefore may not be a representative sample

Which of the following is the strongest correlation?

-.90

Which of the following systems produces, circulates, and regulates levels of hormones in the body?

Endocrine system

Which of the following is an example of discrimination learning?

A dog trained to salivate to a particular tone does not salivate to any other tone.

All summer Thomas hears the sound of the icecream truck approaching before his brother Oscar hears it. Thomas most likely has which of the following?

A lower absolute threshold for hearing than Oscar

Research finds that, in general, the higher an incoming college student scores on a given test, the higher the student's college grade point average (GPA). Which of the following best describes this relationship?

A positive correlation

Electrically stimulating a rat's amygdala would most likely produce which of the following?

Aggression

Which of the following brain structures has the strongest influence on hunger and satiety?

Hypothalamus

Ted is hiking along a mountain trail when he sees a large snake slithering across the path ahead of him. Which of the following brain structures is most closely associated with Ted's fear response?

Amygdala

Researchers have found a negative correlation between income and dental problems. What conclusion can correctly be drawn from this statement?

As income increases, the likelihood of dental problems decreases.

Participants were asked to rate the importance of achieving honor-roll status. Researchers found that students from smaller families rated the importance more highly than students from larger families. The research team concluded that a student's attitude toward school achievement is the result of family size. Which of the following is the most important error made by the research team?

Assuming that correlation proves causation

The area labeled X in the drawing above denotes which of the following structures?

Axon terminals

A researcher randomly assigned boys and girls to each of two groups. One group watched a violent television program while the other group watched a nonviolent program. The children were then observed during a period of free play, and the incidence of aggressive behavior was recorded for each group. What is the independent variable in this study?

B Type of television program viewed

A list of the presidents of the United States in chronological order up through the year 2000 is presented in the exact same manner to two classes of students, and they are then asked to recall them. A fourth-grade class is tested in the morning and a sixth-grade class is tested in the afternoon. The percent recall for both classes was combined and is presented in the figure above. The results depicted in which segment are inconsistent with the serial position effect?

C

Research that focuses on in-depth analysis of an individual exemplifies which of the following methods?

Case study

Maria was never afraid of spiders until a spider bit her when she was eight. Today, even the sight of a plastic spider upsets her. Which of the following learning processes best explains Maria's fear of spiders?

Classical conditioning

Which of the following is the most accurate statement regarding the difference between classical and operant conditioning?

Classical conditioning involves the formation of associations between two stimuli, whereas operant conditioning involves the formation of associations between responses and their consequences.

In the figure above, what letter corresponds to the light-sensitive surface of the eye that contains photoreceptors?

D-Retina

Which of the following refers to the just-noticeable difference between two stimuli?

Difference threshold

Creativity is most closely associated with which of the following?

Divergent thinking

Dr. Antonio conducted a study on a patient who was experiencing extreme depression and was suicidal. Dr. Antonio recorded the patient's thoughts and actions in an attempt to determine what thoughts most likely led to the suicidal ideation. What type of study is Dr. Antonio conducting, and what conclusion can he make?

Dr. Antonio is conducting a case study, and he can conclude that for this patient certain thoughts are related to suicidal ideation.

In the figure above, what letter corresponds to the nerve that carries neural impulses from the eye to the brain?

E- the optic nerve

When Gustavo goes through lists of inventory items and thinks about whether each one is a fruit or not, he remembers more of the items on those lists later than when he goes through lists of inventory items and does not think about what each item is. Which of the following concepts best explains Gustavo's performance?

Elaborative encoding, because engaging in deeper processing improves memory.

Which of the following research techniques would be the best way to demonstrate that getting eight or more hours of sleep produces higher exam scores the following day?

Experimentation

A rat always completes a maze successfully but is only rewarded every third trial. The rat is being rewarded using which of the following reinforcement schedules?

Fixed-ratio

Which of the following is the best example of the opponent process theory?

Fred stares at a green book for a minute, and then when he looks at a white page, he sees the color red.

Four-year-old Scott fell down the stairs at his grandmother's house. Although he was not badly hurt, he was very frightened. Now, whenever his parents mention visiting his grandmother's house, he feels anxious and fearful. In classical conditioning terms, what are the conditioned stimulus (CS) and the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) in the scenario, respectively?

Grandmother's house; falling

Latisha noticed that in the early evening she begins to have difficulty seeing the vibrant colors in her artwork. Which of the following best explains her difficulty?

Her cones cannot detect color well in dim light.

Bailey and Marcus packed everything they thought they would need for a weekend camping trip. When it rained and they realized they had not brought rain gear, Bailey said, "I knew we should have packed raincoats!" Bailey's thinking illustrates which of the following concepts?

Hindsight bias

After a stroke, Jeff has noticed his memory for past events remains good, but it is very difficult for him to remember new events like what movie he just watched. It is most likely that Jeff suffered damage to which part of the brain?

Hippocampus

After Doug witnessed two cars involved in a car accident, a police officer asked Doug how fast the cars were going when the accident happened. According to research by Elizabeth Loftus, which of the following questions could the officer ask that would make Doug most susceptible to the misinformation effect?

How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?

Which of the following statements best describes the placebo effect?

It can be brought about by the individual's expectations.

Which of the following is true about the pons?

It is the region of the brain that is most closely associated with sleep and arousal.

Which of the following is true about the blind spot in the eye?

It occurs where the optic nerve leaves the eye.

Which scenario below best depicts insight learning?

Laramie suddenly realized that he could put some of his groceries in a cabinet after repeatedly failing to fit them into a pantry.

When studying for a vocabulary test, Catherine read one of her vocabulary words and its definition aloud several times. About twenty seconds later, she still remembered the word's meaning, but then she moved on to the next word in the list without engaging in any further strategies to enhance her memory. The next day, she tested herself on the same vocabulary word at the same time, in the same mood, and in the same location as when she had first studied the word, but she could not remember its definition. It is most likely that Catherine could not remember the word because she failed to engage which of the following memory functions?

Long-term memory, because Catherine failed to encode the word; therefore, the word did not become a part of her long-term memory.

To stop his uncle's constant requests, Jimmy takes out the garbage. This makes him more likely to take out the garbage in the future. Jimmy's behavior is being controlled by which of the following types of reinforcement?

Negative

Taking a painkiller to relieve a toothache is behavior learned through which of the following processes?

Negative reinforcement

Feature detectors are neurons that are turned on or off by specific features of visual stimuli like edges and movement. Where in the visual system are these feature detectors located?

Occipital cortex

Madeline wants her son to be well-behaved when they go to church. For every five minutes he sits still, she gives him a piece of candy. What type of learning is Madeline employing?

Operant conditioning

Elena is presented with a list of 20 numbers. When asked to recall this list, she remembers more numbers from the beginning than from the end of the list. This phenomenon demonstrates which of the following types of effect?

Primacy

Which of the following methods best limits the influence of unknown variables in an experiment?

Random assignment

A psychology professor wants to investigate the study habits of students at her university. She cannot collect data from every student but hopes to use a subset of the students to draw accurate conclusions about the behavior of the student body. Which of the following features of research design will best address her goal?

Random sampling

If an individual has lost the ability to feel pain in the left arm, there is most likely damage to what area of the brain?

Right parietal lobe

Which of the following is the correct path a neural impulse will follow through the different layers of the retina?

Rods and cones, bipolar cells, ganglion cells, optic nerve

A researcher surveyed social adjustment in the same group of 20 people from early childhood through adulthood. In this example, the group of 20 people surveyed was the study's

Sample

Jason is attending a parade that features the local high school band. Jason's friend Brent plays the trombone in the band. It is difficult for Jason to hear Brent play at the parade. Which of the following would best allow Jason to hear Brent's trombone?

Selective attention

An individual's recall tends to be better for information that is personally relevant primarily due to which of the following phenomena?

Self-reference effect

To help himself remember the name of his new colleague, Hope, Jose thinks about the meaning of her name—the feeling of hopefulness. Which of the following concepts best corresponds to Jose's strategy?

Semantic encoding

John walks into art class and is overwhelmed by the smell of paint. However, the longer he stays in the room, the less noticeable the smell becomes. Which of the following appears to be operating in this instance?

Sensory adaptation

A researcher is training laboratory rats to run a complex maze. Each time the rats learn a new part of the maze, they are rewarded with a pellet of food. Within a few hours, the rats have learned the entire maze. Which of the following did the researcher use to teach the rats the maze?

Shaping

Mary is introduced to three new people at a party. Later, however, she cannot remember the names of any of her new acquaintances, even though she remembers what she ate, her old friends who were there, and the address of the host. What may account for Mary's inability to remember these individuals' names?

She never encoded the names into long-term memory

A list of the presidents of the United States in chronological order up through the year 2000 is presented in the exact same manner to two classes of students, and they are then asked to recall them. A fourth-grade class is tested in the morning and a sixth-grade class is tested in the afternoon. The percent recall for both classes was combined and is presented in the figure above. The teacher noticed that the afternoon class recalled more presidents than the morning class did and concluded that this was caused by time of day. Which of the following is a confounding variable?

The grade level of the students

Ernst Weber's and Gustav Fechner's psychophysical laws concern the relation between which of the following?

The intensity of a stimulus and its corresponding psychological sensation

Which of the following occurs when a neuron is stimulated to its threshold?

The movements of sodium and potassium ions across the membrane creates an action potential.

Janice cleaned out the office refrigerator without being asked. The operant conditioning concept of positive reinforcement is illustrated in which scenario?

The next day, her boss gave her a gift certificate to a local coffee shop. As a result, Janice now regularly cleans out the office refrigerator.

When rehearsal of incoming information is prevented, which of the following will most likely occur?

There will be no transfer of the information to long-term memory.

Which of the following refers to the transformation of stimulus energy into neural impulses?

Transduction

People who play slot machines in gambling casinos usually exhibit steady, rapid rates of responding. This is because most games of chance use what schedule of reinforcement?

Variable-ratio

Which of the following best describes the primacy effect?

When people have better recall of things that occur at the beginning of a sequence

A cancer patient becomes nauseated following chemotherapy treatments. After a few treatments, the patient begins having a sick feeling whenever entering the treatment room. The treatment room has become

a conditioned stimulus

When confronted with the sequence "__N __" at the end of a word in a crossword puzzle, Tony inserts the letters "I" and "G" in the two blanks because that procedure has often led to the correct answer in previous puzzles. This example illustrates the use of

a heuristic

The intensity at which a sound becomes audible for a given individual is known as the individual's

absolute threshold

The change in the curvature of the lens that enables the eye to focus on objects at various distances is called

accommodation

A drug that has the effect of intensifying or mimicking a particular neurotransmitter can be characterized as

an agonist, because it intensifies the effects of a particular neurotransmitter

Heidi was trying to solve the anagram TORYS by rearranging every letter one at a time until she was able to identify the correct word: STORY. She could have attempted to solve the anagram more quickly by pairing common letters, like ST, but she did not do so. Her approach to solving the anagram involved

an algorithm

When trying to solve a problem, Bret uses a logical, step-by-step formula called

an algorithm

A brain tumor that results in obesity would most likely be located in the

area of the hypothalamus

When struck by light energy, cones and rods in the retina generate neural signals that then activate the

bipolar cells

In Ivan Pavlov's experiments in classical conditioning, the dog's salivation was

both an unconditioned and a conditioned response

As Susie left for work, she said "goodbye" to her husband and slammed the door. The loud sound of the door made her husband flinch. After many mornings of hearing "goodbye" followed by a door slam, her husband flinches when he hears her say "goodbye." In this scenario, hearing the word "goodbye" is the

conditioned stimulus

People who are color blind most likely have deficiencies in their

cones

Mikayla, a high school student strongly opposed to video game use, is researching the topic for a speech she will deliver to her English class. Rather than searching for "the effects of video games," Mikayla searches for "the dangers of video games" and finds hundreds of Web sites with information she can use to argue her position. Her behavior is an example of

confirmation bias

In an experiment to test the effects of hunger on aggressive behavior, aggressive behavior would be the

dependent variable

A person is asked to listen to a series of tones presented in pairs, and asked to say whether the tones in each pair are the same or different in pitch. In this situation the experimenter is most likely measuring the individual's

difference threshold

Drawing a random sample of people from a town for an interview study of social attitudes ensures that

each person in the town has the same probability of being chosen for the study

Edward L. Thorndike argued that responses that lead to satisfying outcomes are more likely to be repeated, and that responses followed by unpleasant outcomes are less likely to be repeated. This became known as the law of

effect

In memory experiments on free recall, the recency effect refers specifically to the

enhanced recall of items at the end of a list of words

The role of the parasympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system is to

establish homeostasis after a fight-or-flight response

A researcher randomly assigned boys and girls to each of two groups. One group watched a violent television program while the other group watched a nonviolent program. The children were then observed during a period of free play, and the incidence of aggressive behavior was recorded for each group. This research method is best characterized as

experimental

When a conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus, a resulting decrease in the conditioned response is called

extinction

Whenever Sarah's mother answered the phone, Sarah would yell for her mother's attention and her mother would end the phone conversation. Then Sarah's mother began ignoring Sarah's yelling and eventually Sarah stopped behaving that way. The change in Sarah's behavior is an example of

extinction

Pam works hard in school because her parents give her ten dollars for every A she receives. Pam's parents are attempting to influence her academic efforts by capitalizing on

extrinsic motivation

A subliminal stimulus is a stimulus that

falls below the threshold for conscious detection

Visual acuity is best in the

fovea

If Carmelita stares at a red spot for one minute and then shifts her gaze to a white piece of paper, she is likely to experience an afterimage that is

green

A group of friends watched a recent episode of a crime investigation show and concluded that they would have been able to figure out who was responsible for a crime more proficiently than did the television investigators. The friends' overestimation of their ability to determine who committed the crime is most likely due to a reasoning error known as

hindsight bias

The brain scans of people with amnesia are most likely to show damage to the

hippocampus

Joseph thinks he does worse on tests when the weather is bad. In reality, his test scores are not influenced by weather conditions. This situation exemplifies

illusory correlation

The primary effect of the myelin sheath is to

increase the velocity of conduction of the action potential along the axon

Carla tutors other students because she likes to be helpful, whereas Jane tutors classmates strictly for pay. Their behaviors demonstrate the difference between

intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

In a memory study, the experimenter reads the same list of words to two groups. She asks group A to count the letters in each word, and she asks group B to focus on the meaning of each word for a later memory quiz. During a recall test, participants in group B recall significantly more words than participants in group A. Memory researchers attribute this effect to differences in

levels of processing

When Sophie reads her history assignments, she goes over them very carefully and tries to memorize each fact. Emma, on the other hand, studies by trying to relate the new information to things she has experienced, been told about by others, or seen in movies and on television. Emma's performance on history tests will probably be better than Sophie's due to differences in

levels of processing

A basic assumption underlying short-term memory is that it is

limited in capacity

Jane Goodall lived among wild chimpanzees intermittently for decades, studying their social and family systems while keeping her interaction with the chimpanzees to a minimum. Her research method can most accurately be described as

naturalistic observation

When Bram exhibits inappropriate behavior, his parents use time‑outs, during which he has to sit at a plain desk without toys. This approach to decreasing inappropriate behavior utilizes the concept of

negative punishment

The function of dendrites is to

receive information from other neurons

Significant damage to which of the following parts of the brain will most likely cause a person to fall into a deep coma from which the person will be unable to awaken?

reticular formation

In vision, transduction occurs within the

retina

The process by which neurotransmitters are reabsorbed into the neuron after it fires is called

reuptake

Money most often modifies people's behavior because it is a powerful

secondary reinforcer

Studying by focusing on the facts and not the meaning of information that has to be remembered involves

shallow processing

The thalamus processes information for all of the following senses EXCEPT

smell

The division of the nervous system that most directly allows voluntary muscle movement is the

somatic

Research has shown that a major reason for poor performance while multitasking is that while multitasking, people

switch their attention rapidly from task to task, so they miss critical information associated with a task that is not receiving their attention

In classical conditioning, stimulus generalization occurs when an organism responds

to stimuli that are similar to the conditioned stimulus

Ben was enjoying a walk in the woods on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. As he went around a curve, he noticed a bear walking toward him. Immediately his pupils dilated, he began to perspire, and his heart accelerated. These changes are most closely related to the function of the

sympathetic nervous system

Immediately after firing, a neuron is incapable of responding to stimulation. This condition is referred to as

the absolute refractory phase

Jim has seen reports of a number of cases of Ebola on the news. He is more afraid of contracting Ebola than tuberculosis, even though the risk of infection of tuberculosis is greater than that of Ebola. Jim's fear would most likely be attributed to

the availability heuristic

Tina is reading an important letter when she accidentally splashes water on the paper. The water has smudged a few words, but she is still able to understand what the letter says. This can be explained by

top-down processing

Damage to the occipital lobe would most likely affect a person's

vision

Research studies indicate that people who are intrinsically motivated as compared to people who are extrinsically motivated tend to

work harder and enjoy their work more