Cognitive Psych CPA 1 study guide

Time to respond to one of two or more stimuli. For example, in the Donders experiment, subjects had to make one response to one stimulus and a different response to another stimulus.

Choice reaction time

A procedure in which pairing a neutral stimulus with a stimulus that elicits a response causes the neutral stimulus to elicit that response.

Classical conditioning

Which of the following terms is correct in context with "Pairing one stimulus with another"?

Classical conditioning

A shift in psychology, beginning in the 1950s, from the behaviorist approach to an approach in which the main thrust was to explain behavior in terms of the mind. One of the outcomes of the cognitive revolution was the introduction of the information-processing approach to studying the mind.

Cognitive revolution

physiologist who performed the first cognitive psychology experiment

Donders

Which one of these early pioneers in cognitive psychology was the first to undertake quantitative measurements of mental processes?

Ebbinghaus

Techniques used to measure electrical responses of the nervous system.

Electrophysiology

In the text's use of the Olympic Rings example, which Gestalt law contributes to the correct perception of five interlocking circles rather than nine separate segments?

Simplicity

How does the phenomenon of apparent movement work?

The perceptual system creates the perception of movement from stationary images

Which of the following is true about Bayesian inference?

The probability of an outcome is determined by the prior probability and the likelihood of the outcome

Which of the following is a basic principle of Gestalt psychology?

The whole is different from the sum of its parts.

ability of a computer to perform tasks usually associated with the human mind

artificial intelligence

While George takes the bus home, he is thinking about how to resolve a difficult issue at work. This is an example of the mind

as a problem solver

Action potentials occur in the

axon

Which organ is unique in that it appears to be static tissue?

brain

System that creates mental representations of the world and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning.

mind

study of the behavior of people with brain damage

neuropsychology

John Watson believed that psychology should focus on the study of

observable behavior.

Joe and Meg are doing a study in psychology. Joe is asked to push a button as soon as he sees a red light, whereas Meg is asked to push a red button if she sees a red light and a green button if she sees a green light. From the information, who appear(s) to be involved in a task measuring choice reaction time?

only Meg

system of ideas that dominate science at a particular time

paradigm

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 notion that every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible is called the law of

pragnanz.

The fusiform face area (FFA) in the brain is often damaged in patients with

prosopagnosia

If the intensity of a stimulus that is presented to a touch receptor is increased, this tends to increase the __________ in the receptor's axon

rate of nerve firing

measurement of how long it takes to respond to presentation of a stimulus

reaction time

The value that stays the same as long as there are no signals in the neuron is known as

resting potential.

plot showing the amount remembered versus the time between initial learning and testing

savings curve

The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind is called

cognitive psychology

Mental conception of a spatial layout.

cognitive map

As a result of gaps in the behaviorist paradigm, the new cognitive paradigm began to emerge in which decade?

1950s

Which of the following statements best describes how neurons communicate with one another?

A chemical process takes place in the synapse

the gap that separates two different neurons.

A synapse

Why can we consider Tolman one of the early cognitive psychologists?

Because he used behavior to infer mental processes

What does the field of neuropsychology study?

Behavior of people with brain damage

The approach to psychology, founded by John B. Watson, which states that observable behavior provides the only valid data for psychology. A consequence of this idea is that consciousness and unobservable mental processes are not considered worthy of study by psychologists.

Behaviorism

Josiah is trying to speak to his wife, but his speech is very slow and labored, often with jumbled sentence structure. Josiah may have damage to which area of the brain?

Broca's area

According to your textbook, perception goes beyond the simple receipt of sensory information. It is involved in many different cognitive skills. Which of the following is NOT one of those skills as noted by the chapter?

Experiencing neuromodulation

In the mid-20th century, the study of the mind began using which technique or model inspired by digital computers?

Information processing model

The approach to psychology, developed beginning in the 1950s, in which the mind is described as processing information through a sequence of stages.

Information-processing approach

Which of the following is NOT true of positron emission tomography (PET)?

It replaced functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) because it was less expensive

What is a scene schema?

Knowledge of what a scene typically contains

The study of the physiological basis of cognition is known as

cognitive neuroscience

Which substance is released when signals reach the synapse at the end of the axon?

Neurotransmitters

What is a key difference between dendrites and axons?

One sends information and the other receives information.

Type of conditioning championed by B. F. Skinner, which focuses on how behavior is strengthened by presentation of positive reinforcers, such as food or social approval, or withdrawal of negative reinforcers, such as a shock or social rejection.

Operant conditioning

Which of the following is an example of unconscious inference?

Perceiving that a partially covered automobile continues beneath the cover

Which part of the nervous system picks up information from the outside environment?

Receptors

Plot of savings versus time after original learning.

Savings curve

Occurs when there is a shift in thinking from one scientific paradigm to another.

Scientific revolution

Reacting to the presence or absence of a single stimulus (as opposed to having to choose between a number of stimuli before making a response).

Simple reaction time

Evidence for the role of top-down processing in perception is shown by which of the following examples?

When someone accurately identifies a word in a song on a radio broadcast despite static interfering w

Who founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany?

Wilhelm Wundt

psychologist who wrote the first psychology textbook; some of his observations are still valid today

William James

An animal might learn how to navigate a maze through the use of

a cognitive map

A technique in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli is known as

analytic introspection

procedure in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli

analytic introspection

The sequence of steps that includes the image on the retina, changing the image into electrical signals, and neural processing is an example of _____ processing.

bottom-up

The key structural components of neurons are the

cell body, dendrites, and axons

Attention, perception, memory, and decision making are all different types of mental processes in which the mind engages. These are known as different types of

cognition

mental processes involved in perception, attention, memory, language, problem solving, reasoning, and decision making

cognition

Brain imaging has made it possible to

determine which areas of the brain are involved in different cognitive processes.

You look at a rope coiled on a beach and are able to perceive it as a single strand because of the law of

good continuation

Which of the following terms best reflects the concept of cognition?

ideas

Perception is NOT essential for

improving empathy

The first experiments in cognitive psychology were based on the idea that mental responses can be

inferred from the participant's behavior

Viewpoint ________ is the ability to recognize the same object even if it is seen from different perspectives.

invariance

Paul Broca's and Carl Wernicke's research provided early evidence for

localization of function

By comparing reaction times across different tasks, Donders was able to conclude how long the mind needs to perform a certain cognitive task. Donders interpreted the difference in reaction time between the simple and choice conditions of his experiment as indicating how long it took to

make a decision about the stimulus

The term semantics, when applied to perception, means the

meaning of a scene, often related to what is happening within the scene

You are at a parade where there are a number of marching bands. You perceive the bands that are all in the same uniforms as being grouped together. The red uniforms are one band, the green uniforms another, and so forth. You have this perceptual experience because of the law of

similarity.

When Carlos moved to the United States, he did not understand any English. Phrases like "Anna Mary Can Pi and I Scream Class Hick" didn't make any sense to him. Now that Carlos has been learning English, he recognizes this phrase as "An American Pie and Ice Cream Classic." This example illustrates that Carlos was not capable of ____ in English.

speech segmentation

In your CogLab experiment, the reaction time measure was the time between the:

stimulus onset and the subject's response

approach to psychology that explained perception as the combination of small elementary units called sensations

structuralism

Wundt's approach, which dominated psychology in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was known as

structuralism.

The brain asymmetry demonstration in your CogLab experiment predicts that right handed participants will have a higher hit rate for words shown in the right visual field...

than in the left visual field

In your CogLab experiment, which of the following was not necessarily involved in a simple detection task of a visual stimulus?

the brain double checks the stimulus information

When the axon is at rest, the inside of the neuron has a charge that is 70 millivolts more negative than the outside. This difference will continue as long as

the neuron is at rest

What differentiates bottom-up processing from top-down processing?

the source of information

Which of the following is NOT considered a starting point for perception?

thinking

If a word is identified more easily when it is in a sentence than when it is presented alone, this would be an example of _____ processing

top-down

The perception pathway corresponds to the _____ pathway, while the action pathway corresponds to the _____ pathway.

what; where

According to your CogLab, if you show a split-brain patient a word in their right visual field they

would be able to say the word aloud