CHAPTER 2
Which of the following statements best describes how neurons communicate with one another?
A chemical process takes place in the synapse
Which of the following is consistent with the idea of localization of function?
All of the above
Josiah is trying to speak to his wife, but his speech is very slow and labored, often with jumbled sentence structure.
Broca's area
The key structural components of neurons are
Cell body, dendrites, axon
Which of the following procedures can be used to help determine the exact way in which nerve fibers communicate with each other?
DTI
Ramon is looking at pictures of scantily clad women in a magazine. He is focusing on their body parts, particularly their chest and legs. Which part of Ramon's brain is activated by this viewing
Extrastriate body area (EBA)
Which of the following statements is the most accurate with regard to specificity coding?
It is unlikely to be correct because there are too many stimuli in the world to have a separate neuron for each
Which of the following brain imaging techniques, discovered in 1908, is now a standard technique for detecting tumors and other brain abnormalities?
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)
Sarah has experienced brain damage making it difficult for her to understand spatial layout. Which area of her brain has most likely sustained damage?
Parahippocampal place area (PPA)
Which part of the brain is important for touch, pressure, and pain?
Parietal lobe
Damage to Wernicke's area is in which lobe of the brain?
Temporal
Brain-imaging techniques can determine all of the following EXCEPT
The structure of individual neurons
A specific person's face is represented in the nervous system by the firing of
a group of neurons each responding to a number of different faces
Action potentials occur in the
axon
Early studies of brain tissue that used staining techniques and microscopes from the 19th century described the "nerve net." These early understandings were in error in the sense that the nerve net was believed to be
continuous
Brain imaging has made it possible to
determine which areas of the brain are involved in different cognitive processes
The idea that specific cognitive functions activate many areas of the brain is known as
distributed processing.
Neurons that respond to specific qualities (e.g., such as orientation, movement, and length) that make up objects are called
feature detectors
When recording from a single neuron, stimulus intensity is represented in a single neuron by the
firing rate of the action potentials
The ____ lobe of the cortex receives information from all of the senses and is responsible for coordination of the senses, as well as higher cognitive functions such as thinking and problem solving
frontal
You are walking down the street and see a really nice car drive by. You notice many features of it: its color, movement, shape, location, and so forth. All of these features are processed
in different parts of the brain
Paul Broca's and Carl Wernicke's research provided early evidence for
localization of function
Recording from single neurons in the brain has shown that neurons responding to specific types of stimuli are often clustered in specific areas. These results support the idea of
localization of function
Hemoglobin molecules in areas of high brain activity
lose some of the oxygen they are transporting
Groups of neurons or structures that are connected within the nervous system are called ____ .
neural networks
The concept of distributed neural coding proposes that a specific object, like a face, is represented across a number of
neurons
A grandmother cell responds
only to a specific stimulous
A 10-month-old baby is interested in discovering different textures, comparing the touch sensations between a soft blanket and a hard wooden block. Tactile signals such as these are received by the ____ lobe.
parietal
If kittens are raised in an environment that contains only verticals, you would predict that most of the neurons in their visual cortex would respond best to the visual presentation of a
picket fence
The fusiform face area (FFA) in the brain is often damaged in patients with
propopagnosia
When conducting an experiment on how stimuli are represented by the firing of neurons, you notice that neurons respond differently to different faces. For example, Arthur's face causes three neurons to fire, with neuron 1 responding the most and neuron 3 responding the least. Roger's face causes three different neurons to fire, with neuron 7 responding the least and neuron 9 responding the most. Your results support ____ coding.
sparse
A synapse is
the gap that separates two different neurons
The occipital lobe is
the part of the cerebral cortex where the visual cortex is located
In a procedure called diffusor tensor imaging (DTI), the way in which ____ diffuse(s) along the length of a nerve fiber is measured to determine how different nerves communicate with each other.
water
The temporal lobe is
where signals are received from the auditory system