Cognitive Psychology test 1
Regarding children's language development, Noam Chomsky noted that children generate many sentences they have never heard before. From this, he concluded that language development is driven largely by
an inborn biological program
A technique in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli is known as
analytic introspection.
Wundt's procedure in which trained participants describe their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli presented under controlled conditions is known as
analytic introspection.
Eye tracking studies investigating attention as we carry out actions such as making a peanut butter sandwich found that a person's eye movements
are determined primarily by the task
Action potentials occur in the
axon.
A person with strong ________ would likely have a deeper experience of Bayesian influence
beliefs
During a visit to the local museum, you appreciate the incredible beauty of the paintings displayed. Your ability to see the paintings as complete pictures rather than individual, disconnected dots of color, texture, and location occurs through a process called __________.
binding
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
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 difficulty we have in recognizing even an obvious alteration in a scene is called __________ blindness
change
In Donders'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.
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 known as a(n)
cognitive map
The study of the physiological basis of cognition is known as
cognitive neuroscience
The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind is called
cognitive psychology
The relationship between the ____________ is NOT measured directly by cognitive psychologists
cognitive task and the mental response
Illusory conjunctions are
combinations of features from different stimuli
Your text describes the occurrence of a "cognitive revolution" during which dramatic changes took place in the way psychology was studied. This so-called revolution occurred parallel to (and, in part, because of) the introduction of
computers.
Which of the following adjectives has the LEAST connection to perception?
conscious
The first experiments in cognitive psychology were based on the idea that mental responses can be
inferred from the participant's behavior
Viewpoint ________ is the ability to recognize the same object even if it is seen from different perspectives.
invariance
A high threshold in Treisman's model of attention implies that
it takes a strong signal to cause activation.
Scene schema is
knowledge about what is contained in a typical scene
Broadbent's model is called the early selection model because
the filter eliminates the unattended information right at the beginning of the flow of information
Broadbent's model is called an early selection model because
the filter eliminates unattended information at the beginning of the information flow.
Placing tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, garlic, cilantro, and lime juice into a blender and turning it on to produce salsa is similar to which of the following?
the focused attention stage of feature integration theory
What does the principal of neural representation state?
Everything a person experiences is based on representations in the person's nervous system.
According to your textbook, perception goes beyond the simple receipt of sensory information. It is involved in many different cognitive skills. Which of the following is NOT one of those skills as noted by the chapter?
Experiencing neuromodulation
Ramon is looking at photos of athletes in a sports magazine. He is focusing on their body parts, particularly their chest and legs. Which part of Ramon's brain is activated by this viewing?
Extrastriate body area (EBA)
Consider the following definition of the mind: The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals. Which element of the mind does this definition emphasize?
Functioning and survival
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
Donald Broadbent was the first person to develop which of the following?
A flow diagram depicting the mind as processing information in a sequence of stages
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
__________ is the process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.
Binding
Which organ is unique in that it appears to be static tissue?
Brain
Josiah is trying to speak to his wife, but his speech is very slow and labored, often with jumbled sentence structure. Josiah may have damage to which area of the brain?
Broca's area
Which of the following is an experimental procedure used to study how attention affects the processing of competing stimuli?
Dichotic listening
What contains the words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated?
Dictionary unit
Which of the following is most closely associated with Treisman's attenuation theory of selective attention?
Dictionary unit
Who introduced the flow diagram to represent what is happening in the mind?
Donald Broadbent
Donders's main reason for doing his choice reaction time experiment was to study
decision making
Brain imaging has made it possible to
determine which areas of the brain are involved in different cognitive processes.
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
The idea that specific cognitive functions activate many areas of the brain is known as
distributed representation
Proponents of multitasking would note ________ to support their opinion, whereas opponents of multitasking would point to ________ to justify their perspective.
divided attention; distraction
Which of the following word strings all refer to the same pathway?
dorsal, where, action
According to Ebbinghaus's research on memory, savings is a function of
elapsed time
Which of the following best describes the result of attention in the context of perception?
enhancement
Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin's (1968) model of memory, which was introduced a year after the publication of Neisser's book, described the flow of information in the memory system as progressing through three stages. Which memory holds incoming information for a fraction of a second and then passes most of this information to short-term memory?
Sensory memory
Endel Tulving, one of the most prominent early memory researchers, proposed that long-term memory is subdivided into all of the following components EXCEPT
Short-term memory.
In the text's use of the Olympic Rings example, which Gestalt law contributes to the correct perception of five interlocking circles rather than nine separate segments
Simplicity
Neurons that respond to specific qualities of objects, such as orientation, movement, and length, are called
feature detectors.
When recording from a single neuron, stimulus intensity is represented by the
firing rate of the action potentials
Each time you briefly pause on one face, you are making a(n) ______________.
fixation
The __________ lobe of the cortex receives information from all of the senses and is responsible for coordination of the senses, as well as higher cognitive functions such as thinking and problem solving.
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
When we search a scene, initial fixations are most likely to occur on __________ areas.
high-saliency
Perception is NOT essential for
improving empathy.
How is the term mind used in this statement: "When he talks about his encounter with aliens, it sounds like he is out of his mind"?
The mind as a healthy mind being associated with normal functioning, a nonfunctioning mind with abnormal functioning.
How is the term mind used in this statement: "If you put your mind to it, I'm sure you can solve that math problem"?
The mind as problem solver
Who developed the concept of the cognitive map?
Tolman
Patient DF, who suffered brain damage from carbon monoxide poisoning, had deficits with
visual object recognition, but not using vision for guiding motor control.
The "cognitive revolution"
was a gradual process that occurred over a few decades.
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
Anne Treisman's attenuator analyzes the incoming message in terms of all of the following EXCEPT
whether the perceptual load is low or high
According to Treisman's feature integration theory, the first stage of perception is called the __________ stage.
preattentive
The cocktail party effect is
the ability to pay attention to one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli.
If a Gestalt psychologist was baking a cake for an event, what would they be most focused on?
the cake
With the Stroop effect, you would expect to find longest response times when
the color and the name differed
Research on the use of cell phones while driving indicates that
the main effect of cell phone use on driving safety can be attributed to the fact that attention is used up by the cognitive task of talking on the phone.
When does bottom-up processing start?
When environmental energy stimulates the receptors
What is the process of unconscious inference?
When our perceptions are the result of inferences that we make about the environment
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
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.
Who founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany?
Wilhelm Wundt
The Stroop effect demonstrates people's inability to ignore the __________ of words
meaning
Semantic regularity refers to the _____.
meaning between properties of an object
The term semantics, when applied to perception, means the
meaning of a scene, often related to what is happening within the scene.
The main point of the Donders's reaction time experiments was to
measure the amount of time it takes to make a decision
Lan has no idea what she just read in her text because she was thinking about how hungry she is and what she is going to have for dinner. This is a real-world example of
mind wandering
Groups of interconnected neurons are referred to as
neural circuits.
Groups of neurons or structures that are connected within the nervous system are called__________.
neural networks
People perceive vertical and horizontal orientations more easily than other orientations according to the
oblique effect
John Watson believed that psychology should focus on the study of
observable behavior
In Schneider and Shiffrin's experiment, in which participants were asked to indicate whether a target stimulus was present in a series of rapidly presented "frames," divided attention was easier
once processing had become automatic.
The investigation of how behavior is strengthened by presentation of positive reinforcers (e.g., food) or withdrawal of negative reinforcers (e.g., shock) is best known as
operant conditioning.
The process by which small objects become perceptually grouped to form larger objects is the principle of perceptual
organization.
Speech segmentation is defined as
organizing the sounds of speech into individual words
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 the __________ lobe.
parietal
The landmark discrimination problem is more difficult to do if you have damage to your _____ lobe.
parietal
The Gestalt psychologists believe that _____.
perception is affected by experience, but built-in principles can override experience
The "filter model" proposes that the filter identifies the attended message based on
physical characteristics
The fact that trees are more likely to be vertical or horizontal than slanted is an example of ____.
physical regularity
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
Behaviorists believe that the presentation of ____________ increases the frequency of behavior.
positive reinforcers
The notion that every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible is called the law of
pragnanz
Reaction time refers to the time between the _______ of a stimulus and a person's response to it
presentation
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 nerve firing
Saccadic eye movement is a ______________.
reaction to physical properties of stimulus
The value that stays the same as long as there are no signals in the neuron is known as
resting potential.
As the ________ of a stimulus increases, ________ tends to ________.
salience; fixation; increase
The notion that faster responding occurs when enhancement spreads within an object is called
same-object advantage.
Entering a church service and seeing someone selling hot dogs and cotton candy from a cart near the altar would be perceived as a violation of
scene schema
In which concept is an individual's knowledge most important?
schema
When Sam listens to his girlfriend Susan in the restaurant and ignores other people's conversations, he is engaged in the process of __________ attention.
selective
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
Which of the following events is most closely associated with a resurgence in interest in the mind within the study of psychology?
Skinner's publication of the book, Verbal Behavior
Before the advent of intercoms, old mansions had a sash in each room. Each sash was connected to a bell on a master board in the servants' office. When someone pulled a sash in a particular room, a bell corresponding to the room would ring on the master board, informing a servant where to go to provide assistance. This system is similar to which of the following?
Specificity coding
According to Treisman's attenuation model, which of the following would you expect to have the highest threshold for most people?
The word "platypus"
Maria took a drink from a container marked "milk." Surprised, she quickly spit out the liquid because it turned out that 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 Stroop effect occurs when participants
try to name colors and ignore words.
A synapse is
the gap that separates two different neurons
As a result of gaps in the behaviorist paradigm, the new cognitive paradigm began to emerge in which decade?
1950s
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
Neuroimage, a journal devoted solely to reporting neuroimaging research, was founded in which year?
1992
Which of the following statements best describes how neurons communicate with one another?
A chemical process takes place in the synapse
What does the field of neuropsychology study?
Behavior of people with brain damage
Which of the following is similar to early ideas scientists had about the brain's physical properties?
A web
Which of the following is consistent with the idea of localization of function?
All of these are correct.
Which of the following methods, often associated with structuralism, was used in the psychology laboratory established by Wilhelm Wundt?
Analytic introspection
Which of the following is NOT an example of a physical regularity in your text?
Angled orientation
In which of the following body parts are neurons NOT present?
Arteries
Which part of a neuron transmits signals to other neurons?
Axons
Which parts of neurons are also known as a "nerve fiber"?
Axons
Which of the following psychologists is known for research on operant conditioning?
B. F. Skinner
Who proposed that children's language development was caused by imitation and reinforcement?
B. F. Skinner
Verbal Behavior was written by
B. F. Skinner.
Why can we consider Tolman one of the early cognitive psychologists?
Because he used behavior to infer mental processes
What is the metabolic center of an individual neuron?
Cell body
. The "Little Albert" experiment involving the rat and the loud noise is an example of which of the following types of experiments?
Classical conditioning
Which of the following terms is correct in context with "Pairing one stimulus with another"?
Classical conditioning
___________________ developed the formal theory of digital circuits, constructed early machines that learned, formalized the concept of "information", and is considered the father of the information age.
Claude Shannon
Which of the following options would NOT be an important factor in automatic processing?
Close attention
Which of the following terms is correct in context with "conception within the rat's mind of the maze's layout"?
Cognitive mapping
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 or model inspired by digital computers?
Information processing model
Which of the following is true about perception?
It involves rapid processes
Which of the following statements is the most accurate with regard to specificity coding?
It is unlikely to be correct because there are too many stimuli in the world to have a separate neuron for each.
Which of the following is a criticism of analytic introspection?
It produces variable results from person to person
The use of the term artificial intelligence was coined by
John McCarthy.
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 the following models of attention?
Late selection
Which substance is released when signals reach the synapse at the end of the axon?
Neurotransmitters
Amhad is doing an experiment in which he has to choose between the object he has been shown previously (the target object) and another object. Choosing the target object will result in a reward. What sort of task is Amhad doing?
Object discrimination problem
Which of the following statements is correct?
Objects in central vision fall on the small area called the fovea.
What is a key difference between dendrites and axons?
One sends information and the other receives information.
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)
Colin Cherry's experiment in which participants listen to two messages simultaneously, one in each ear, found all but which of the following?
People who are deaf process auditory information on a nonconscious level.
Which of the following is an example of unconscious inference?
Perceiving that a partially covered automobile continues beneath the cover
How does perceptual load differ from processing capacity?
Perceptual load is individual and processing capacity is universal
Which memory is used for physical actions?
Procedural memory
Which part of the nervous system picks up information from the outside environment?
Receptors
Which of the following is an example of an effect of top-down processing?
Recognizing a crying friend's sounds as words in a sentence
What is the gap between the end of a neuron's axon and the dendrites or cell body of another neuron known as?
Synapse
Which of the following attention model components produces two levels of output?
Treisman's attenuator
Members of a security team are stationed on rooftops surrounding a large city plaza before a scheduled rally. Suddenly, three team members in different locations radio in to the command center, each stating that they have spotted a suspicious box on the ground with a pipe coming from the top. What enables the security team members to report seeing the same object despite being stationed on different rooftops?
Viewpoint invariance
With which of the following sentences would the author disagree?
We can consider the mind extraordinary if it is used for extraordinary purposes.
Which term best reflects what we do with an image projected onto our retina?
We interpret it
Barbara has recently been diagnosed with abdominal cancer. Her oncologist wants to determine the best treatment method to eliminate the tumors. Her gastroenterologist is focused on relieving her symptoms and restoring normal digestive functioning. Barbara's psychologist works to help minimize her anxiety and keep her spirits up. The fact that these doctors are considering Barbara's situation with different goals and from different perspectives is similar to the idea of __________ presented in your textbook.
levels of analysis
The saying, "If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all" best reflects which of the following?
likelihood principle
The theory of unconscious inference includes the
likelihood principle
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
By comparing reaction times across different tasks, Donders was able to conclude how long the mind needs to perform a certain cognitive task. Donders interpreted the difference in reaction time between the simple and choice conditions of his experiment as indicating how long it took to
make a decision about the stimulus
Suppose twin teenagers are vying for their mother's attention. The mother is trying to pay attention to one of her daughters, though both girls are talking (one about her boyfriend, one about a school project). According to the operating characteristics of Treisman's attenuator, it is most likely the attenuator is analyzing the incoming messages in terms of
meaning
You are at a parade where there are a number of marching bands. You perceive the bands that are all in the same uniforms as being grouped together. The red uniforms are one band, the green uniforms another, and so forth. You have this perceptual experience because of the law of
similarity.
In Donders's experiment on decision making, when participants were asked to press a button upon presentation of a light, they were engaged in a
simple reaction time task
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 three different neurons to fire, with neuron 7 responding the least and neuron 9 responding the most. Your results support __________ coding.
sparse
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
When Carlos moved to the United States, he did not understand any English. Phrases like "Anna Mary Can Pi and I Scream Class Hick" didn't make any sense to him. Now that Carlos has been learning English, he recognizes this phrase as "An American Pie and Ice Cream Classic." This example illustrates that Carlos was not capable of ____ in English.
speech segmentation
Wundt's approach, which dominated psychology in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was known as
structuralism.
It's often said that "life doesn't exist in a vacuum." However, the emptiness of ________ is critical for brain functioning.
synapses
Strayer and Johnston's (2001) experiment involving simulated driving and the use of "hands-free" versus "handheld" cell phones found that
talking on either kind of phone impairs driving performance significantly and to the same extent.
According to your text, the ability to divide attention depends on all of the following EXCEPT
task cueing.
When the axon is at rest, the inside of the neuron has a charge that is 70 millivolts more negative than the outside. This difference will continue as long as
the neuron is at rest.
Edgar Adrian studied the relationship 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 of nerve firing increased as he increased the pressure.
What differentiates bottom-up processing from top-down processing?
the source of information
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Symposium on Information Theory, George Miller presented a paper suggesting that
there are limits to the human ability to process information
Which of the following is NOT considered a starting point for perception?
thinking
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
Perceiving machines are used by the U.S. Postal Service to "read" the addresses on letters and sort them quickly to their correct destinations. Sometimes, these machines cannot read an address because the writing on the envelope is not sufficiently clear for the machine to match the writing to an example it has stored in memory. Human postal workers are much more successful at reading unclear addresses, most likely because of
top-down processing
What is a scene schema?
Knowledge of what a scene typically contains
The existence of transitional probabilities adds a(n) ________ quality to learning and using language
anticipatory
The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli is called
cocktail party effect.
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
continuous
Colin Cherry's experiment in which participants listened to two different messages, one presented to each ear, found that people
could focus on one message and ignore the other one at the same time.
Newell and Simon were among the first to use computers for artificial intelligence. Their computer program
created proofs for problems in logic
A bottom-up process is involved in fixating on an area of a scene that
has high stimulus salience
In Donders's research on human decision making, he found that it took ____________ to decide which of two buttons to push in response to a stimulus.
less than one second
Which of the following is true about Bayesian inference?
The probability of an outcome is determined by the prior probability and the likelihood of the outcome.
Which of the following would have the most semantic regularities?
a shopping mall
The results of Gauthier's "Greeble" experiment illustrate
an effect of experience-dependent plasticity
How does the phenomenon of apparent movement work?
The perceptual system creates the perception of movement from stationary images.
Which of the following is a basic principle of Gestalt psychology?
The whole is different from the sum of its parts
Why is it easier to study brain tissue from newborn animals than brain tissue from adults?
The density of cells in a newborn brain is small compared with the density in an adult brain.
What is the study of mental processes that includes determining the characteristics and properties of the mind and how it operates?
Cognitive psychology
Determining the sequence of DNA in humans was a major scientific advance that opened the door to new ideas about illness and approaches to treatment. An individual's unique DNA sequence is similar to which of the following?
Connectome
Which of the following terms does NOT reflect functional network activity in the brain?
Consistent
Which of the following could be considered as always taking a "working vacation"?
Default mode network
Which of the following does NOT characterize the information processing (IP) approach to the study of cognition?
IP emphasizes stimulus-response relationships in cognitive processes.
Which stage in Treisman's attenuation model has a threshold component?
The dictionary unit
Which of the following is NOT true of positron emission tomography (PET)?
It replaced functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) because it was less expensive.
Watson became dissatisfied with the method of analytic introspection in which context?
Results were interpreted in terms of invisible inner mental processes
Which book was written by Thomas Kuhn?
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Your author points out that studying the mind requires both __________ and __________ experiments.
behavioral; physiological
The key structural components of neurons are the
cell body, dendrites, and axons
You are walking down the street and see a nice car drive by. You notice its color, movement, and shape. All of these features are processed
in different parts of the brain.
The task of determining the object responsible for a particular image on one's retina is called the
inverse projection problem
