Human Cognitive Processing

A heuristic is a ...

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

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

A chemical process takes place at the synapse

Which of the following is consistent with the idea of localization of function?

All of these.

Which of the following neural components is NOT found at the receiving end of neurons?

Axon

Which of the following is not a geon?

Circle

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

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

Recordings from single neurons are conducted using which of these pieces of equipment?

Microelectrode

Research using the ERP method shows that damage to the frontal lobes reduces the larger ___ response that occurs when the form of a sentence is incorrect.

P600

Which part of the brain is important for touch?

Parietal lobe

There are many methods for studying the physiology of the brain. _____ is the technique involving subtraction whereby brain activity is compared between baseline and stimulation measurements.

Positron emission tomography

Positron emission tomography (PET) utilizes which of the following tools?

Radioactive tracer

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

Speech segmentation

Damage to Wernicke's area is in which lobe of the brain?

Temporal

Which of the following do PET and fMRI have in common?

The use of the subtraction technique

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 with reception

Shinkareva et al. (2008) conducted research that revealed ...

a computer could fairly accurately predict what category of object one was viewing.

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.

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

an effect of experience-dependent plasticity

Most cognitive psychologists ___ the notion of a grandmother cell.

are actively investigating

Action potentials occur in the

axon

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

brain ablation

Neural circuits are groups of interconnected neurons that

can result in a neuron that responds best to a specific stimulus

The key structural components of neurons are

cell body, dendrites, and axon

The study of the physiological basis of cognition is known as

cognitive neuroscience

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

context

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 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.

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 the same three neurons to fire, with neuron 1 responding the least and neuron 3 responding the most. Your results support ____ coding.

distributed

The idea buted processing.specific functions are processed in many parts of the brain is known as ...

distributed processing

The idea that specific functions are processed in many parts of the brain is known as ...

distributed processing

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

familiarity

Neurons that respond to features that make up objects are called

feature detectors

When recordings 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 serves higher functions such as language, thought, and memory

frontal

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

A difference between a heuristic and an algorithm is ...

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

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

The neuron doctrine is

in disagreement with nerve net theory

Recent research on language has modified our earlier understanding of Broca's aphasia such that it is now understood as a problem in ...

language form, but not meaning.

An oscilloscope can display "spikes" that correspond to nerve impulses in response to a certain stimulus intensity. If the stimulus intensity is decreased, you are likely to observe spikes that are ...

less frequent, but of the same size

The theory of unconscious inference includes the ...

likelihood principles

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

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

mirror neurons

The pattern of feature detectors firing in respons to a stimulus creates the _____ for representing what the stimulus is. (e.g. a tree, a person, a ball, and so forth)

neural code

The waypatterns of neural firing represent a specific stimulus or experience is known as the ...

neural code

The concept of distributed neural coding proposes that a specific object, like a face, is represented across a number of ...

neurons

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

neuropsychology

Damage to the temporal lobe makes the _____ more difficult.

object discrimination problem

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

oblique effect

A grandmother cell responds

only to a specific stimulus

Speech segmentation is defined as ...

organizing the sounds of speech into individual words

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

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

parietal

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

perception

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

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

principles of componential recovery

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 firing

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

rectangular solids and cubes

The layer of neurons that lines the back of the eye is called the

retina.

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.

semantic regularities

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 ...

size constancy

The occipital lobe is

the first place in the cerebral cortex where visual information is received

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

the light-from-above heuristic

A synapse is

the space between neurons

Brain-imaging techniques can determine all of the following EXCEPT ...

the structure of individual neurons

In ERP methodology, the number that follows the "N" or the "P" (N400 or P300, for example) stands for ...

the time at which the response peaks in milliseconds.

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

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 ...

top-down processing

The likelihood principle states that ...

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

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

what ; where

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

what pathway

The temporal lobe is

where signals are received from the auditory system

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 ...

your prior knowledge