PY 385 Exam 1

Taking clay and sand to create bricks, which are then used to build modular wall panels, which are then assembled to construct tall buildings, is similar to which of the following neural concepts?

Hierarchical processing

Which is NOT a characteristic of the information processing (IP) approach to study cognition

IP emphasizes stimulus-response relationships in cognitive processes

Which of the following illustrates how we can miss things even if they are clearly visible?

Inattentional blindness

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

Information processing model

Which of the following is a criticism of analytic introspection?

It produces variable results from person to person

Synapse

Gap between neurons

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

1950's

In which year was positron emission tomography (PET) introduced and made it possible to see which areas of the human brain are activated during cognitive activity?

1976

Donald Broadbent was the first person to develop

A flow diagram depicting the mind as processing information in a sequence of stages

Which method, often associated with structuralism, was used in the psychology laboratory established by Wilhelm Wundt?

Analytic introspection

Which parts of neurons are also known as a "nerve fiber"

Axons

Verbal Behavior was written by

B.F. Skinner

What proposed that children's language development was caused by imitation and reinforcement

B.F. Skinner

What does the field of neuropsychology study?

Behavior of people with brain damage

Which of the following is the process by which features such as color, form motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object?

Binding

Who introduced the flow diagram to represent what is happening in the mind?

Donald Broadbent

Suppose you are in your kitchen writing a grocery list, while your roommate is watching TV in the next room. A commercial for spaghetti sauce comes on TV. Although you are not paying attention to the TV, you "suddenly" remember that you need to pick up spaghetti sauce and add it to the list. Your behavior is best predicted by which of following models of attention?

Late selection

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)

Endel Tulving, one of the most prominent early memory researchers proposed that long term memory is subdivided into all of the following components

Semantic memory, procedural memory, and episodic memory

What is the gap between the end of a neuron's axon and the dendrites or cell body of another neuron known as?

Synapse

Imagine that lawmakers are considering changing the driving laws and that you have been consulted as an attention expert. Given the principles of divided attention, in which of the following conditions would a person have the most difficulty with driving and therefore pose the biggest safety risk on the road?

When the person is driving an unfamiliar vehicle that is more difficult to operate

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

analytic introspection

In which body part are neurons not present?

arteries

Which part of a neuron transmits signals to the other neurons?

axons

If you stand very close to a pointillist painting, all you will see are tiny colored dots. But as you step away from the painting, larger areas of color become noticeable and eventually become recognizable objects such as flowers or clouds. This is similar to which of the following?

binding

In Donder's experiment on decision making, when participants were asked to press one button if the light on the left was illuminated and another button if the light on the right was illuminated, they were engaged in a

choice reaction time task

The "Little Albert" experiment involving the rat and the loud noise is an example of

classical conditioning

Which of the following options would NOT be an important factor in automatic processing

close attention

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli is called

cocktail party effect

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

A mental conception of the layout of a physical space is know as

cognitive map

Illusory conjunctions are

combinations of features from different stimuli

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

continous

The technique where the participant's task is to focus on the message in one ear, called the attended ear, and to repeat what he or she is hearing out loud is known as

dichotic listening

What contains the words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated?

dictionary unit

The idea that specific cognitive functions activate many areas of the brain is known as

distributed representation

Which of the following best describes the result of attention in context of perception?

enhancement

Neurons that respond to specific qualities of objects, such as orientation, movement, and length are called

feature detectors

Each time you briefly pause on one face, you are making a(n) ______________.

fixation

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

If you are folding towels while watching television, you may find that you don't have to pay much attention to the act of folding while keeping up with the storyline on the TV show. Folding the towels would be an example of a(n) ________ task.

low-load

The Stroop effect demonstrates people's inability to ignore the ______ of words

meaning

The investigation of behavior is strengthened by presentation of positive reinforcers or withdrawal of negative reinforcers is best known as

operant conditioning (Skinner)

The use of a machine that tracks the movement of one's eyes can help reveal the shifting of one's ________ attention

overt

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 which lobe of the brain

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

Ebbinghaus's "memory" experiments were important because they

plotted functions that described the operation of the mind

Behavioralists believe that the presentation of _____________ increases the frequency of behavior

positive reinforcers

According to your text, the ability to divide attention depends on

practice, the type of processing being used, the difficulty of tasks

According to Treisman's feature integration theory, the first stage of perception is called the _____ stage.

preattentive

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

In which concept is an individual's knowledge most important?

schema

The idea that an object could be represented by the firing of a specialized neuron that responds only to that object is called _____________.

specificity coding

It is often said that "life doesn't exist in a vacuum." However, the emptiness of ______ is critical for brain functioning

synapses

Broadbent's model is called an early selection model because

the filter eliminates unattended information at the beginning of the information flow

When recording from a single neuron, stimulus intensity is represented by

the firing rate of the action potentials

Edgar Adrian studied the relationships between nerve firing and sensory experience by measuring how the firing of a neuron from a receptor in the skin changed as he applied more pressure to the skin. He found that

the rate if nerve firing increased as he increased the pressure.

The Stroop effect occurs when participants

try to name colors and ignore words