chapter 6

The main function of nociceptors is to sense

pain

Sound traveling through air or water consists of alternating waves of

pressure

Thanks to _______, we can distinguish sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami tastes.

specialized taste receptors

Weber's fraction to detect a difference in weight is ____ percent

5

___ cues to depth are dependent on information from both eyes

binocular

Some of the many things that can cause an eardrum to rupture are an ear infection, SCUBA diving, and poking the ear with a sharp object. Which of the following might a ruptured eardrum cause?

Environmental bacteria will be more likely to get into the middle ear..

You attend a lecture in which the speaker explains how vision organizes images. This is most likely a lecture about

Gestalt psychology

Which of the following research questions is a psychophysicist likely to be most interested in asking?

How much louder must a sound be before a person can detect that it is louder than the original sound?

How does the figure illustrate the concept of a sensory threshold?

If the stimulus is weak enough, the sensory receptor will not reach threshold and will not produce an action potential.

Which of the following would be an effective way to determine just a noticeable difference (JND)?

Piling five-pound bean bags on your friend's foot until he reaches his pain threshold

The figure shows the response of a touch receptor in response to two stimulus strengths. What can you conclude about the relationship between the strength of the stimulus and the likelihood of the touch receptor to fire?

The harder the push against the skin, the more likely it is that the touch receptor receptor will fire

You have misplaced your cell phone, and you ask a friend to call you so you can hear its high-pitched, musical ring. Assuming the ringer is on and is loud enough to hear, what would tell your brain that the phone is somewhere directly to your right?

The ringer sounds slightly louder in your right ear than in your left ear..

Why would you feel pain when placing your hand on both a hot and cold pipe at the same time?

Touch receptors are reporting the sensations of heat and cold, but the brain combines the two and perceives pain.

Which of the following scenarios best illustrates the size cue for monocular depth perception?

While walking on the beach, you perceive that your friend is far away because he looks very small

Which of the following constitutes a false alarm in signal detection theory?

You turn off the radio to answer your phone, but the phone is not ringing.

Which of the following is the best example of a sensation?

Your skin receptors detect the touch of a student walking by.

Neuropathic pain is caused by

a damaged or malfunctioning nervous system

The concept of labeled lines refers to the fact that

a separate set of nerves transmits information from each sensory receptor organ to the brain.

A person who has lost her sense of smell is most likely to experience

a significant reduction in the ability to experience flavor.

The main difference between binocular and monocular depth cues is that

binocular cues require information from both eyes, while monocular cues do not.

Both sense of taste no the sense of smell rely on cells designed to detect

chemicals

The rotating mask illusion involves seeing the ____

concave; convex

The fact that ___ are relatively ___ to light explains why people have more difficulty seeing color in poorly lit places

cones; insensitive

The photoreceptors we need to appreciate a blue sky on a sunny day are the ___ whereas the photoreceptors we use to detect the stars outside at night are the ___

cones; rods

When you drink coffee, the perceptual experience, called ___, is the combination of information from your taste receptors and your olfactory receptors

flavor

The sensory receptors in your skin that are specialized to report information about changes in temperature are the

free nerve endings

The receptor cells that are specialized to detect vibrations along the cochlear membrane are called

hair cells

The specialized receptor cells inside the cochlea are called

hair cells

The art movement that included a branch that created images out of points of color was ___

impressionism

According to the duplex theory, we use both ___ differences and ___ differences to localize sounds

intensity; latency

Weber's fraction expresses the ___ as a proportion of the original stimulus

just noticeable difference (JND)

The adequate stimulus for the visual system is ___, and the adequate stimulus for the auditory system is ___

light; sound

An absolute threshold is

lowest intensity of a stimulus that a person can detect half the time

The olfactory system routes information directly to the ___ of the brain

olfactory bulb

The ___ theory of color vision is the idea that color vision is based on a system of paired opposites of color

opponent-process

Tiny bones called _______ transmit vibrations to the inner ear.

ossicles

This study, which involves electrical brain stimulation of specific areas of the brain, may shed light on face blindness or ___

prosopagnosia

The study of how physical events, such as lights and sounds, affect our senses is called

psychophysics

A ___ is the region of space where stimuli affect the activity of a cell in a sensory system.

receptive field

While you are sitting in a park, you see a tulip that is exposed to the sun. Shortly after you notice it, the tulip is exposed to the shade. According to the concept of color constancy you perceive that the color of the tulip has

remained the same, but the lighting conditions have changed.

In order for our visual system to work properly, the lens must focus light into the

retina

Detection of the sound of a bell ringing is referred to as a _______. Once you interpret the stimulus as the sound of your alarm clock, it is referred to as a _______.

sensation, perception

Vision and hearing are different

sensory modalities

Eyes and ears are

sensory receptor organs

You would expect that your pupils would be smallest when you are

sitting on the beach on a very sunny day

A food that excites the taste receptors that allow positively charged hydrogen ions to enter cells is likely to have a ___ taste

sour

A ___ is a physical event that a sensory receptor cell might detect, whereas a ___ is the final interpretation of that physical event

stimulus, percept

Professor Ramachandran asks the audience to do the "kiki"/"bouba" task. They almost all grew on which Martian alphabet letter is kiki and which is bouba. He is showing the audience the experience of ____

synesthesia

Our two chemosensory systems are the ___ system and the ___ system

taste and olfactory

___ are collections of 50-150 cells and are located on the surface of your tongue, back of your mouth, and roof of your mouth

taste buds

The optic disc is the part of the retina

that has no photoreceptors.

In psychology, the word "noise" is defined as

the firing of a sensory cell without a stimulus or in response to an irrelevant stimulus.

Size constancy refers to

the perception of the actual size of an object regardless of the distance and the angle of view.

Sensory adaptation is the

the progressive loss of responsiveness in sensory cells exposed to a constant stimulus

The main idea behind Gestalt psychology is that

the whole perception is more than just the sum of our separate sensations.

The reason that we have blind spots in our visual fields is that

there are no photoreceptors on the optic disc

The primary function of the three ossicles of the middle ear is to

transmit vibrations to inner ear