AP PSYCHOLOGY: Sensation and Perception
The absolute threshold is defined as the stimulus intensity that an organism can detect
50% of the time
The process in which the lens adjusts its shape depending on the distance between the eye and the object viewed in order to project a clear image onto the retina is
Accommodation
Subliminal means
Below threshold
Which of the following is NOT one of the four basic tastes?
Citrus
Damage to the ossicles of the ear is going to cause
Conduction Hearing Loss
Light first enters the eye through a transparent structure on the surface of the eye called
Cornea
Which of the following best describes how we hear according to place theory?
Different sound frequencies vibrate different portions of the basilar membrane, producing different pitches.
According to the signal detection theory, if a subject detects a stimulus when no stimulus is actually present, this would be a
False Alarm
Cells in the cerebral cortex that respond selectively to specific features of complex visual stimuli are called
Feature Detectors
Rather than provide details about the party she just attended, Patty tried to give her overall impression, operating on the assumption of ____, that the whole may be greater than the mere sum of its parts
Gestalt psychology
Eric has been wearing red welding goggles for the past 30 minutes. Based on the opponent-process theory of color vision, when Eric takes off the red goggles he should expect that objects will temporarily appear to be
Green
Imagine that biologists have discovered an animal that has eyes very similar to human eyes, but that the only receptor cells in the retina are rods; there are no cones. Based on what is known about human vision you might expect that this animal would
Have no color vision
If a radio play-by-play announcer describing each pitch during a baseball game fails to notice a naked fan running across the infield, the announcer would be demonstrating
Inattentional blindness
The structure that controls the size of the pupil is the
Iris
Which of the following is an example of visual capture?
McGurk Effect
The fact that the corner of a building thrust toward the viewer looks shorter than an inside corner thrust away from the viewer can be accounted for by the
Müller-Lyer illusion
As a result of the pathway through which visual information travels from the eye to the visual cortex, images seen in the left visual field are received in
Only in the right visual cortex
Two identical lines are drawn on railroad tracks. The tracks appear to move away from us due to linear perspective. We will perceive the higher line as larger because of the lack of relative size depiction. What is the name of this phenomenon?
Ponzo Illusion
The fact that we are generally much more aware of the changes in our sensory environments than we are of the constants is the general idea behind
Sensory Adaption
The fact that your criterion for "hearing" mysterious noises at night may change after a rash of burglaries in your neighborhood can best be explained by
Signal Detection Theory
The gate-control theory suggests that incoming pain sensations may be blocked at the
Spinal Cord
The visual cortex is to the auditory cortex as the occipital lobe is to the
Temporal Lobe
Reversible figures (old and young woman) illustrate the observation that
The same visual input can result in different perceptions.
Our perception of the brightness of a color is affected mainly by
Wavelengths
Which of the following statements is the best summary of the concept of size constancy?
We perceive an object's size as unchanging even though the image on the retina grows smaller as the object moves farther away.
Which of the following is NOT one of the primary skin sensations?
Wetness
The lens in the eye
bends entering light rays and focuses them onto the retina.
Vanessa describes a new melody that she heard at a concert by telling you each of the individual notes, in the order that they were played. In providing this type of description, it appears that Vanessa processed the melody using
bottom-up processing
When Justin looked up at the night sky, he perceived the three stars that make up the belt in the constellation Orion as a single complete figure, rather than as individual stars. Justin's perception of the night sky illustrates the Gestalt principle of
closure.
The structure of the ear that transduces sound vibrations into nerve impulses is the
cochlea
The retina is to the eye as the
cochlea in the ear
The wavelength of light mainly affects our perception of
color
When we view cars parked on a distant parking lot we know that the cars are not actually the size of toy cars because of a perceptual
constancy
As the large butterfly flew toward Richard, he could tell it was getting closer because he could feel his eyes turning inward toward his nose as he watched it. In this instance, Richard was able to judge how far away the butterfly was using the depth cue of
convergence
The visual cliff is a laboratory device for testing ________ in infants.
depth perception
Which of the following is NOT a structure of the inner ear?
eardrum
The correct order that auditory information travels as sounds enter the ear is from the auditory canal to
eardrum - ossicles - oval window - cochlea.
Relative height is a cue involving our perception of objects higher in our field of vision as:
farther away
Noticing a brown rabbit running through a field of brown grass depends on which of the following Gestalt principles?
figure-ground
Food generally tastes bland when you have a severe head cold because
flavor is influenced by smell as well as taste, and with a reduced sense of smell your sense of taste will be diminished.
When a clarinet plays a high C followed by a low C, these two notes are perceived differently because they differ in
frequency
Which theory of hearing states that the perception of pitch depends on the rate at which the entire basilar membrane vibrates?
frequency theory
The maximum firing rate for individual neurons is 1000 neural impulses per second. This biological limitation would make it difficult for
frequency theory to fully explain pitch perception
The sense associated with the perception of taste is referred to as the
gustatory system.
Sensory adaptation can explain all of the following EXCEPT
hearing your name spoken in a noisy room.
The place theory of pitch perception BEST accounts for the perception of ____ frequency sounds.
high
Gibson and Walk's visual cliff experiments demonstrated that very young infants won't move over the visual cliff. These findings indicate that:
humans may be born with some depth perception.
When your psychology professor is lecturing to your class, your professor can tell which students are sitting in the first, second, third, etc., row, in part because students in the closer rows obstruct his/her view of students in more distant rows. This illustrates the depth perception cue of
interposition
Juanita was drinking some warm punch and she thought she could just detect a faint taste of nutmeg in the punch. However when she took another sip the taste wasn't there. On the third sip she could just make out the taste of nutmeg again. It is very likely that the amount of nutmeg in the punch was
just at her absolute threshold for taste.
If your roommate slowly and carefully turns up the volume on the stereo until you can determine "now it's louder than it was before," it would be MOST accurate to say the volume increased by a
just noticeable difference.
As the farmer looked across her field, the parallel rows of young corn plants appeared to converge in the distance. This provided her with a distance cue known as:
linear perspective
Which of the following principles does the Ponzo illusion use to achieve its effect?
linear perspective
The depth perception cue based on the observation that parallel lines converge in the distance is
linear perspective.
Hue is to pitch as brightness is to
loudness
The perception associated with the amplitude of a sound wave is
loudness
The Gestalt principle of proximity refers to the idea that
objects nearer to each other are seen as forming a unit.
Of the following, the only sensory system that does not project upward to the cerebral cortex through the thalamus, is
olfaction
The sensory receptors for smell are referred to as
olfactory cilia
Which theory of color vision states that color perception depends on receptors that make antagonistic responses to three pairs of colors?
opponent process theory
The main pathway visual signals travel from the eye to the visual cortex is
optic nerve - optic chiasm - thalamus - occipital lobe
A perceptual set implies that
people often see what they expect to see
Charlie's eyes function normally but he is unable to recognize familiar faces. Charlie is suffering from
prosopagnosia.
If an object of known size appears small, your brain assumes it to be far away from you. This rule describes the monocular depth cue:
relative size
The structure of the eye that absorbs light, processes images and sends visual information to the brain is the
retina
Someone who loses sight in one eye would also lose which of the following depth
retinal disparity
The binocular depth cue that relies on the fact that objects within 25 feet project images to slightly different locations on the right and left retinas, so that the right and left eyes see slightly different views of the object is known as
retinal disparity.
Night and peripheral vision depend mainly on ____, while daylight and acute vision depend mainly on ____.
rods; cones
Which of the following statements is the best example of lightness constancy?
seeing a white t-shirt as still white even in a room with very dim lighting
While ____ involves the stimulation of sense organs, ____ involves the selection, organization, and interpretation of sensory input.
sensation; perception
If one is subjected to prolonged stimulation, eventually
sensory adaptation will occur.
Although textbooks frequently cast a trapezoidal image on the retina (when turned on an angle), students typically perceive the books as rectangular objects. This illustrates the importance of:
shape constancy.
A person without depth perception would have the most difficulty with which of the following tasks?
shooting a free throw in a basketball game
According to ____, the ability to detect a stimulus depends not only on the intensity of the stimulus but also on other variables such as your motivation and your expectations.
signal detection theory
Blake was at a football game, and even though people wearing green jackets were spread fairly evenly throughout the stands, he still perceived all the people in green jackets as a single group of visiting fans. Blake's perception is most consistent with the Gestalt principle of
similarity.
Your friend Jim creates a flip cartoon during a boring meeting by drawing a slightly different image in the bottom right corner on all the pages in his notepad. When you flip the corners, it appears Jim's flip cartoon is moving because of:
stroboscopic movement.
The sand at Jason's feet appeared coarse, and he could see the individual grains of sand. However, the sand down the beach appeared to be much finer and less granular. This apparent difference in the sand may have partially resulted from the depth cue of
texture gradient.
According to psychologists, the smallest difference between two stimuli that a specific sense can detect is
the just noticeable difference (JND).
As Briana drove down the highway, the pickets of the fences moved past her in a blur, but the mountains in the distance didn't appear to move at all. Briana was experiencing
the monocular cue for depth called motion parallax.
Which theory of color vision BEST explains why the color of an afterimage is the complement of the original color?
the opponent process theory
The lights around the movie marquee flashed on-and-off in succession. However, Jerome did not perceive them as separate lights flashing, but instead saw a continuous band of light moving around the edge of the marquee. Jerome's perception illustrates
the phi phenomenon
Our sense of balance is called the _____________ sense and its receptors are located in the ____________.
vestibular; semicircular canels
The blind spot in the eye is
where the optic nerve exits the back of the eye.
One key gender difference that has been found with respect to tasting is that
women are more likely than men to be supertasters.