Exam 1

What is the relation between action potentials and stimulus intensity?

Increased stimulus intensity increases the rate of nerve firing.

What does Beilock "chocking experiment" illustrate?

It helps show how research progresses from one question to the next and how the results of behavioral experiment can be used to infer what is happening in the mind.

What type of scan is an MRI and what does it show?

It is a structural scan bceasue it provides a structural image of the brain and data.

What is the turning test?

It is a test to see if you can distinguish between a human and a computer.

Which of the following is a criticism of analytic introspection?

It produces variable results from person to person.

Who first used the term artificial intelligence?

John McCarthy

Linguistics states that...

Language development is determined by an inborn biological program that holds across cultures.

Why is population coding beneficial?

Large number of stimuli can be represented

Where is Broca's area located?

Left Frontal lobe

What experiment was Watson known for?

Little Albert

Describe basic principles behind fMRI

Measures blood flow in activated brain areas by cognitive tasks

What cognitive function require distributed processing?

Memory, decision making, and problem solving

Which of the following statements is most consistent with recognition-by-components theory?

Humans can identify an object if sufficient information is available to enable us to identify an object's basic features.

What is the process of how we perceive things?

Sensation (absorb energy) --> Transduction (convert energy) --> Sensory nerve (transmits code) --> Thalamus (processes and relays neural response)

In the text's "animal lurking behind a tree / two oddly shaped tree stumps" example, which Gestalt law did NOT contribute to the incorrect perception?

Simplicity.

Who's experiment involved a rat pressing a bar in order to be reinforced by food?

Skinner

What is the term that describes how knowledge allows us to determine the beginning and endings of words?

Speech segmentation

Which of the following is an example of an effect of top-down processing?

Speech segmentation.

Why was the microstructure of the brain described as a continuously interconnected network?

Staining techniques and microscopes used could not resolve small details

What was Wundt's approach to psychology?

Structuralism

Where is Wernicke's area

Temporal lobe

Where is the damage site for Prosopagnosia?

Temporal lobe on lower right side of brain

The "indentations in the sand / bumps in the sand" example from your text illustrates:

The "indentations in the sand / bumps in the sand" example from your text illustrates:

What does Broadbent's diagram of the mind represent?

The diagram represents what happens in a person's mind when directing attention to one stimulus.

How is the idea of localization of function in perception supported?

The existence of a separate primary receiving area for each sense, the effects of brain damage, recording from single neurons, results from brain imaging experiments

What do the Helmholtz, regularities and Bayes approaches have in common?

The idea that we use data about the environment, gathered through our past experiences in perceiving, to determine what is out there.

What are electrical signals of an action potential representing?

The intensity of the stimulus

Which definition focuses on the mind's central role in determining various mental abilities?

The mind creates and controls mental functions such as perception, attention, memory, emotions, language, deciding, thinking, and reasoning.

Which definition reflects the mind's importance for functioning and survival?

The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals.

Which of the following events is most closely associated with the decline of behaviorism as an approach to psychology?

The proposal of cognitive maps

The theory of unconscious inference includes the:

likelihood principle.

What is the cognitive revolution?

A shift in psychology from the behaviorist stimulus-response relationships to an approach whose main thrust was to understand the operation of the mind.

How long is the decision-making process?

1/10 of a second.

How long does information stay in sensory memory?

A fraction of a second.

What method did Wundt use in his experiment of subjects describing their experience of hearing a five-chord note played on a piano?

Analytic introspection

Examples of how Localization of function was demonstrated by Neuropsychology

Broca's area, Wernicke's area, and brain injuries during war time

How do we study the neural basis of cognition?

By using the lesion method and functional neuroimaging.

Who developed a staining technique using silver nitrate that only showed fewer than 1% of the cells in brain tissue?

Camillo Golgi

Describe the levels of analysis

Chemical processes -> Neurons activated -> brain structures activated -> groups of brain structures activated

What is the formula for decision making time?

Choice reaction time - simple reaction time

What type of conditioning did Pavlov and Watson use?

Classical conditioning

Who conducted an experiment using dichotic listening?

Colin Cherry

What are the three main influences of cognitive psychology?

Computers, linguistics, and developmental psychology

Where do perceptual biases come from?

Content, knowledge, and expectations.

What functions are represented in the frontal lobe?

Coordination of senses and higher cognitive functions

Who did a series of experiments that involved presenting visual stimuli to cats?

David Hubel and Throsten Wiesel

How is distributed processing illustrated by how the brain responds to a rolling red ball?

Depth, motion, color, shape, and location. Different properties of the ball activate different areas of the cortex areas are in separate locations but there is communication between them.

What is a contribution of neuroscience to the understanding of the mind?

Determine where different capacities occur in the brain

What is basic principle of cognition according to distributed processing?

Different cognitive functions often involve similar mechanisms

Who created the first diagram of the mind?

Donald Broadbent

Which psychologist studied the mind in some form?

Donders, Wundt, Ebbinghaus and James

Who was their own subject in their experiment?

Ebbinghau.

Why do neuropsychologists attempt to demonstrate double dissociation?

Enable conclusion that functions A and B are served by different mechanisms that operate independently of one another.

What are three types of long term memory?

Episodic, semantic, and procedural

What does the principle of neural representation state?

Everything that a person expierences is based not on direct contact with stimuli but on representations in the person's nervous system.

What did Hubel and Wiesel discover during their experiments?

Feature detectors

Who was interested in how long it takes a person to make a decision?

Franciscus Donders

What theory is seen as more of a "bottom-up" processing theory?

Gestalts

What techniques did Cajal use to propose the neuron doctrine?

Golgi stain and brains of newborn animals

What type of combination of letters did Ebbinghau use and why?

He used nonsense syllables because he didn't want the meaning of a word to influence his memory.

Who created the logic theorist?

Herb Simon and Alan Newell

Who was interested in determining the nature of memory and how rapidly information is lost over time?

Hermann Ebbinghaus

What was James' observation?

His observation was that paying attention to one thing involves withdrawing from other things.

Can metal processes be measured directly?

No, it must be inferred.

What experiment(s) did William James conduct?

None

What type of conditioning did Skinner use?

Operant Conditioning

How is distributed processing illustrated by how the brain responds to faces?

Other areas respond to various reactions to a face. evaluate Attractiveness, react emotionally, awareness of gaze direction, reaction to facial expression

Which part of the brain is important for touch?

Parietal lobe

Gais et al.'s research on the impact of sleep on memory consolidation illustrates which type of approach to the study of the operations of the mind?

Physiological

What are the four conceptions of object projection that allow the perceptual system to "decide" what it is perceiving??

Theory of Unconscious inference, Gestalts laws of perceptual organization, regularities in the environment, and Bayesian inference

Why is specificity coding unlikely to be correct?

There are too many different faces and objects to have a neuron represent each

What did Simon and Newell believe?

They believed there were limits as to the humans ability to process information.

When the rats were placed in a different arm of the maze and still managed to find their way to the food, Tolman concluded that...

They had created a cognitive map of the maze.

Who developed the concept of the cognitive map?

Tolman

Who used behavior to infer mental processes?

Tolman

Who was considered one of the early cognitive psychologists?

Tolman

damage to left part of occipital lobe caused blindness what part of visual field?

Upper right

How are action potentials recorded from a neuron?

Using microelectrodes

What concept describes why computers have difficulties identifying some objects?

Viewpoint invariance

Who were the behaviorist?

Waston, Skinner, and Tolman

What Watson use classical conditioning to argue?

Watson used classical conditioning to argue that behavior can be analyzed without any reference to the mind.

Who founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology?

Wilhem Wundt

A mental conception of the layout of a physical space is known as:

a cognitive map.

Shinkareva et al. (2008) conducted research that revealed:

a computer could fairly accurately predict what category of object one was viewing.

A specific person's face is represented in the nervous system by the firing of:

a group of neurons each responding to a number of different faces.

Stimulus are always ___________.

ambiguous

Neural circuits are groups of interconnected neurons that:

can result in a neuron that responds best to a specific stimulus.

In Donders' 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.

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.

Gauthier and coworkers' experiment on experience-dependent plasticity showed that after extensive "Greeble recognition" training sessions, FFA neurons had a(n) ________ response to faces and an ________ response to Greebles.

decreased; increased

Which brain imaging technique is best for structural and functional imaging?

fMRI

A difference between a heuristic and an algorithm is:

heuristics do not result in a correct solution every time as algorithms do.

What did concepts did Cajal introduce?

individual neurons, synapses, and neural circuits

The main point of the Donders' reaction time experiments was to:

measure the amount of time it takes to make a decision.

According to your text, the behavioral approach to the study of the mind involves:

measuring the relation between stimuli and behavior.

The process during which information is strengthened and transformed into a strong memory that is resistant to interference is known as:

memory consolidation.

Some neurons respond when we watch someone else do something. These are known as:

mirror neurons.

Damage to the temporal lobe makes the ________ more difficult.

object discrimination problem

Behaviorists believe that the presentation of ________ increases the frequency of behavior.

positive reinforcers

Reaction time refers to the time between the ________ of a stimulus and a person's response to it.

presentation

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

Describe the electrode setup for recording from a neuron.

recording electrode tip inside the neuron and reference electrode located some distance away. The difference in charge between the two is fed and displayed on a computer screen.

Most cognitive psychologists ________ the notion of a grandmother cell.

reject

In Donders' 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.

Chomsky believed...

that there are structures in our brains that predispose us to language learning.

Brain-imaging techniques can determine all of the following EXCEPT:

the structure of individual neurons.

"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.