Cognitive Psych Quiz 1: Chapter 3

30. A heuristic is a

A. "rule of thumb" that provides a best-guess solution to a problem.

25. "Every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible" refers to which Gestalt law?

A. Good figure

6. Which of the following statements is most consistent with recognition-by-components theory?

A. Humans can identify an object if sufficient information is available to enable us to identify an object's basic features.

28. In the text's "animal lurking behind a tree / two oddly shaped tree stumps" example, which Gestalt law did NOT contribute to the incorrect perception?

A. Simplicity

13. Which of the following is an example of an effect of top-down processing?

A. Speech segmentation

2. 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.

A. bottom-up

40. The experimental technique that involves removing part of the brain is known as

A. brain ablation.

11. When people look at a tree, they receive information about the geons of that object through stimulation of receptors. But they are also aided in identifying the object as a tree by knowledge that a tree often has the sky as a background and sits on grass. This prior knowledge travels down from higher centers to influence the incoming signals. The latter information from the higher centers illustrates

A. feedback signals.

14. Speech segmentation is defined as

C. organizing the sounds of speech into individual words.

35. The "indentations in the sand / bumps in the sand" example from your text illustrates

D. the light-from-above heuristic.

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

A. good continuation.

49. Some neurons respond when we watch someone else do something. These are known as

A. mirror neurons.

46. The study of the behavior of humans with brain damage is called

A. neuropsychology.

45. Damage to the temporal lobe makes the _____ more difficult.

A. object discrimination problem

1. Experiences resulting from stimulation of the senses and information from the senses that can help guide are actions are called

A. perception.

15. When Carlos moved to the U.S., 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 is not capable of ____ in English.

A. speech segmentation

8. 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.

A. top-down

19. The likelihood principle states that

A. we perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli we have received

44. The pathway leading from the striate cortex to the temporal lobe is known as the

A. what pathway.

7. Which of the following is NOT associated with recognition-by-components theory?

B. Attention is used to combine features in the perception of whole objects

20. Which statement best summarizes the focus of the Gestalt psychologists?

B. We need to identify the number of geons needed for object recognition.

51. Neurons that respond to sounds associated with actions are called

B. audiovisual mirror neurons.

37. Palmer's experiment, in which he asked people to identify objects in a kitchen, showed how _______ can affect perception.

B. context

39. Gauthier and coworkers' experiment on experience-dependent plasticity showed that after extensive "Greeble recognition" training sessions, FFA neurons had a(n) _______ response to faces and an _________ response to Greebles.

B. decreased; increased

26. When you listen to someone speaking a foreign language, the words seem to speed by in an unbroken string of sound. To a speaker of that language, the words seem separated. The Gestalt law that is operating here is the law of

B. familiarity.

18. The theory of unconscious inference includes the

B. likelihood principle.

34. People perceive vertical and horizontal orientations more easily than other orientations according to the

B. oblique effect.

21. The process by which small objects become perceptually grouped to form larger objects is

B. perceptual organization.

3. Generally, if we can see an object's geons, we are able to identify the object. This is known as the

B. principles of componential recovery.

36. The demonstration in your text that asks you to visualize scenes such as an office, a department store clothing section, a lion, and a microscope often results in more details in the scene of the office or department store than the scene with the lion or microscope. The latter two tend to have fewer details because most individuals from modern society have less knowledge of _____ in those scenes.

B. semantic regularities

23. 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

B. similarity.

31. A heuristic for finding a cat that is hiding somewhere in the house is

B. to first look in the places where the cat likes to hide.

10. "Perceiving machines" are used by the U.S. Postal service to "read" the addresses on letters and sort them quickly to their correct destinations. Sometimes, these machines cannot read an address, because the writing on the envelope is not sufficiently clear for the machine to match the writing to an example it has stored in memory. Human postal workers are much more successful at reading unclear addresses, most likely because of

B. top-down processing.

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

B. what where

33. Which of the following is NOT an example of a physical regularity in your text?

C. Angled orientation

50. In which neurological disorder might mirror neurons be most likely to be implicated as a potential cause of the disorder?

C. Autism

17. Some perceptions result from assumptions we make about the environment that we are not even aware of. This theory of unconscious inference was developed by

C. Helmholtz.

38. The results of Gauthier's "Greeble" experiment illustrate

C. an effect of experience-dependent plasticity.

32. A difference between a heuristic and an algorithm is

C. heuristics do not result in a correct solution every time as algorithms do.

42. The landmark discrimination problem is more difficult to do if you have damage to your _____lobe.

C. parietal

43. The landmark discrimination problem is more difficult to do if you have damage to your _____ lobe.

C. parietal

5. The recognition-by-components approach proposes that there are a number of basic features such as

C. rectangular solids and cubes.

9. Maria took a drink from a container marked "milk." Surprised, she quickly spit out the liquid because it turned out the container was filled with orange juice instead. Maria likes orange juice, so why did she have such a negative reaction to it? Her response was most affected by

C. top-down processing.

4. Which of the following is not a geon?

D. Circle

41. Amhad is doing an experiment in which he has to choose between the object he has been shown previously (the target object) and another object. Choosing the target object will result in a reward. What sort of task is Amhad doing?

D. Object discrimination problem

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

D. When someone accurately identifies a word in a song on a radio broadcast despite static interfering with reception

29. The example of how we might perceive something that looks like an animal hiding behind a tree in the woods was used to illustrate the operation of

D. both heuristics and the Gestalt law of organization.

24. Things that form patterns that are meaningful are likely to be grouped together according to the law of

D. familiarity.

47. When a double dissociation occurs, this indicates that two functions

D. involve different mechanisms.

12. Charlene sees her boyfriend across campus and waves. Even though the image he projects on her retina from that distance is quite small, Charlene does not perceive him to have shrunk at all. Instead, she perceives him as far away because of

D. size constancy.

27. In the "finding faces in a landscape" demonstration in your text, once you perceive a particular grouping of rocks as a face, it is often difficult not to perceive them this way. This is due to

D. your prior knowledge.