Module 16 quiz

Once Jonah learned of abuse in Sara's past, he began to perceive her cautious behavior around men as more self-protective than as rude. This best illustrates the impact of:

perceptual set.

Recent research on subliminal sensation has shown that:

priming thirsty people with the subliminal word thirst might, for a moment, make a thirst-quenching beverage ad more persuasive, but the effect would not be enduring.

Perceptual sets are the result of ______________, which we form to organize and interpret unfamiliar information.

schemas

The difference threshold is the minimum difference that a person can detect between two stimuli:

50 percent of the time

According to the principle of sensory adaptation, we become less aware of constant exposures to unchanging stimuli. Why, then, do objects not disappear from our sight even if we continue to stare at them?

Even if we seem to hold our gaze, our eyes move constantly.

Angie, the manager of a food store, is trying to come up with ways of increasing sales of items with high profit margins. She decides that she is going to embed subliminal messages to buy certain items in the music playing in the store. What do you predict will happen to the sales of the items that are subliminally advertised?

There will be no real change in the sales of those items.

The size of the difference threshold is greater for heavier objects than for lighter ones. This best illustrates:

Weber's law

A neutral facial expression may be perceived as sadder at a funeral than at a circus. This best illustrates:

a context effect.

Sean just learned that his roommate Ahmed's girlfriend no longer wants to see him. Sean knows that Ahmed is studying in the library, so he goes to find him. Although Ahmed looks like he is studying, Sean assumes he looks depressed. This assumption is an example of someone being influenced by:

a context effect.

The difference threshold is the minimum difference that a person can detect:

between two stimuli 50 percent of the time.

Sensory analysis starts at the entry level (i.e., with the sensory receptors) and works up to the integration of sensory information in the brain. This is called

bottom-up processing

Using details to understand the "big picture" is called:

bottom-up processing.

Seth volunteered to participate in a taste test for a new soup. The testers want to know when the participants notice a reduction in salt in the soup. After Seth tastes several bowls of soup he notices that the last bowl has less salt than the others. Seth's detection of the difference in salt content is an example of detecting the:

difference threshold

Sensory adaptation can be defined as:

diminished sensitivity as a result of unchanging stimulation.

When an extremely tired person is walking toward her parked car after a long day at work, she is more likely to perceive it as being _____ due to the context effect.

farther away

A researcher subliminally flashes words that have either emotionally positive content (e.g., puppies, people embracing) or negative content (e.g., murder, accidents) immediately before showing them a picture of a house. Then, when asked to rate the house in terms of attractiveness, the participants:

give the houses that follow positive content words higher ratings.

According to your text, transduction involves three processes. Which of the following is NOT one of these processes?

interpreting

Alan sees an apple on his desk. The sight of the apple reminds him of the times he spent picking apples from his grandmother's apple trees as a child. The experiences Alan had with apples has affected his ______ of the apple.

perception

____________ refers to the process of organizing and interpreting sensory information.

perception

After hearing that Bryce had served a prison sentence, Janet began to perceive his genuinely friendly behavior as insincere and manipulative. This best illustrates the impact of:

perceptual set

Janis decided she wanted her 6-year-old son Donnie to drink diet soda instead of regular soda that contained sugar. She filled the soda bottle that normally contained soda with sugar with diet soda. Donnie never noticed the difference. His perception was influenced by:

perceptual set

Both _______________ indicate how our experiences help us to construct perception.

perceptual set and context

Experiencing sudden pain is to _____________ as recognizing that you are suffering a heart attack is to perception.

sensation

When you arrived at the gym Tuesday morning, you noticed a musty odor in the locker room showers. When you had finished changing, you did not notice the smell. This is probably the result of:

sensory adaptaion

Torrie puts one toe into the swimming pool and shivers because the water is so cold. She grits her teeth and dives in anyway. After about ten minutes in the water, the temperature seems quite comfortable to her. This example illustrates the principle of:

sensory adaptation

The minute you walk into your mother-in-law's house, you are struck by the strong smell of her perfume. After about 10 minutes, however, you no longer notice it. This is probably the result of:

sensory adaptation.

Anthony Greenwald and his colleagues (1991, 1992) randomly assigned university students to listen daily for five weeks to commercial subliminal messages claiming to improve either self-esteem or memory. But the researchers switched half the labels. Some students who thought they were receiving affirmations of self-esteem were actually hearing the memory-enhancement message. Others got the self-esteem message but thought their memory was being recharged. The researchers found that:

students' test scores for self-esteem and memory, taken before and after the five weeks, revealed no changes yet the students perceived themselves as receiving the benefits they expected.

Sensation that is below the threshold of conscious awareness is called:

subliminal sensation

________- occurs below your absolute threshold for conscious awareness.

subliminal stimulation

The inability to recognize faces, or prosopagnosia, is a condition that may result from damage to the region of the:

temporal lobe essential to recognizing faces

Detecting a weak stimulus, or signal, does NOT depend in part on:

the sense being used to detect the stimulus.

Information processing is guided by higher-level mental processes, such as when we construct perceptions that draw on our experience and expectations. This process is called:

top-down processing

The fact that perceptions involve more than the sum of our sensations best illustrates the importance of:

top-down processing

When Kendra opens her eyes in the morning she sees a photograph by her bedside. At that point, her eyes are receiving light energy. Her eyes then change the light energy into neural messages for the brain to process. This conversion of one form of energy into another is called:

transduction

You open your eyes in the morning and see flowers by your bedside. At that point, your eyes are receiving light energy, which they change into neural messages for the brain to process. This conversion of one form of energy into another is called:

transduction

_____________ is the process in which we detect physical energy in the environment and encode that energy as neural signals.

transduction

When sensory receptors convert different forms of energy into neural signals, the process is known as:

transduction.

John is weightlifting at the gym. He works out with 100 pounds and then adds 5 pounds, but notices no increase in weight. He instead adds 10 pounds and notices the increase in weight. He notices that if he increases the weight by 10 percent each time he feels the increase in weight. This best illustrates:

weber's law