Psych 7A Midterm 2 (Ch. 6-11)

A reinforcer is a consequence that _______ a behavior.

strengthens

The retina is the

surface at the back of the eye where the image is focused

Our two chemosensory systems are the _______ system and the _______ system.

taste; olfactory

According to the activation-synthesis hypothesis about dreaming, the content of dreams results from

your brain attempting to make meaning out of random bursts of neural activity

You do not act out your vivid dreams because

your brain inhibits motor neurons, and you cannot move

Opioid receptors are responsible for the pain-killing effects of morphine. One area of the brain in which opioids are found is the

brainstem

A _______ is a primary reinforcer, whereas a _______ is a secondary reinforcer.

glass of water; sandwich

To learn anything through observation, the learner must

pay attention to the model.

Your cousin is expecting a baby and excitedly tells you that she plans to buy lots of classical music to make her baby smarter. Which of the following is a reasonable response, based on what you have learned?

"Save your money. Studies have not shown that listening to classical music makes babies smarter."

In which of the following scenarios would you be most likely to succumb to a false alarm in signal detection?

Monitoring for the vibration of your phone in your pocket while you are sitting

During the associative phase of skill acquisition,

a person's performance will decline significantly if he is distracted.

As you and a friend throw a softball back and forth, you depend on _______ to help you determine how close the ball is getting to you and when and where to catch it.

binocular cues

Psychologists call the process by which encoded information is transferred from short-term to long-term memory

consolidation.

Contestants who do well on the game show Jeopardy, which involves using the store of facts that they have learned, are displaying _______ intelligence.

crystallized

A circadian rhythm is a

cycle of sleeping and waking that occurs approximately every 24 hours

The concept of the availability heuristic is illustrated when you

decide that it would be safer to drive rather than fly to your vacation destination, given all of the recent media coverage of plane crashes

An important distinction between declarative and nondeclarative memory is that only declarative memories can be

described using words.

For a behaviorist, the goal of psychology is to

determine how various experiences result in different behaviors

The Binet-Simon scale was originally designed to

determine which children were mentally disabled and get them help.

Damage to Broca's area leads to an aphasia characterized by

difficulty in speech production, but not in speech comprehension.

Hypnosis can be effective in reducing pain, if the hypnotist trains the patient to

disconnect from the unpleasant emotions attached to the pain

In rare cases of severe epilepsy, people can undergo _______ surgery, which severs the _______, the large band of neural fibers connecting the cerebral hemispheres.

split brain; corpus callosum

You associate each line of a poem that you need to memorize with a particular object in your dorm room. This is an example of aiding your memory via

mnemonic devices.

Psychologists describe consciousness as one's

perception of his or her own mental processes.

In a sense, phantom limb pain is a purely _______ phenomenon.

perceptual

Heritability estimates for IQ apply to _______ but tell us nothing about _______.

populations; individuals

Priming is evidence for the idea that our memories are connected with one another, and that recalling one memory influences recall of another memory, a concept called

spreading activation.

Imagine you have a sibling, Henry, who is two years old. When he is thirsty, he says "Henry milk." This is an example of

telegraphic speech.

Cognitive psychologists focus on studying how

we acquire and process information to gain knowledge.

The greatest adaptive, perceptual advantage to having two ears rather than one is that

we are more easily able to localize sounds with two ears.

Which of the following is a prototype of "bird"?

Sparrow

A sudden awareness of a solution in a problem-solving situation is called

insight

While attempting to solve a riddle, if you go from not having a clue what the answer is to solving the riddle in a flash (without resorting to trial and error), you have most likely experienced

insight

Your friend Tom lacks the ability to feel pain. Tom's condition is called

congenital insensitivity to pain.

Which of the following would be the most likely response from a Wernicke's aphasia patient who is asked if he or she is having a good day?

"The day I'm having today before the time ran out on the clock was ringing."

The intelligence quotient (IQ) was originally defined as a child's mental age divided by his or her chronological age and then multiplied by 100. Using this formula, what was the IQ of a 12-year-old with a mental age of 9?

75

Chang is an 8-year-old boy who can do all the tasks a typical 10-year-old can do. His chronological age is

8.

During an experiment in which participants press a button whenever they have the urge to do so, when would you expect their motor cortices to become active?

A few hundred milliseconds before they press the button

The experience of flow is best exemplified by

a jazz musician absorbed in playing without a conscious effort in the experience of soloing.

Learning in the absence of reinforcement is demonstrated by studies of

latent learning.

Which researcher is most closely associated with the Bobo doll studies?

Albert Bandura

Why do modern-day IQ scores compare individuals of the same age group rather than using the original formula (mental age/chronological age × 100) to calculate IQ scores?

Assessing intelligence in terms of mental age versus chronological age does not work well for adults.

Which of the following people is relying the most on fluid intelligence?

Bettina runs antivirus software on her parents' computer.

Which situation most likely involves retrograde amnesia?

Brent woke up one night in a rage and found he could not remember details about his activities on the previous day for more than a few moments.

Aphasia, which is often the result of brain injury or disease, is a term that refers to

a language impairment that occurs after language is acquired.

In classical conditioning, the _______ and the _______ are usually the same

CR; UR

Which of the following is most like the opposite of habituation?

Dishabituation

Two of the most common genetic causes of intellectual disability are _______ syndrome and _______ syndrome.

Down; fragile X

Depressant drugs typically act on the _______ neurotransmitter system.

GABA

Which statement describes information likely stored in episodic memory?

George recalls the first time he saw his girlfriend

Which situation involves the concept of priming?

Grace read an article about her favorite actor, and later, when choosing a movie, she unknowingly chose to watch a movie with that actor

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?

Which pair of family members is likely to have the most similar IQ scores?

Identical twins

While studying the digestive process of dogs, _______ was the first person to describe learning as acquired through classical conditioning.

Ivan Pavlov

Which of the following is an example of a person in the autonomous phase of skill acquisition?

James' basketball play is so fluid that he looks as if he were born to play.

Imagine you are caring for a patient who in the past abused alcohol. You find that the patient's memory is heavily impaired. It is very likely that that the patient has

Korsakoff's syndrome.

_______ learning is hidden until it becomes useful.

Latent

The _______ is an example of a decision-making error in which someone fails to properly estimate the probability of a particular outcome after being given additional information.

Monty Hall problem

A group of parents are discussing whether music videos featuring scantily clad women are encouraging teenagers to become sexually active. Which of the following processes is being considered by the parents as the reason that music videos influence sexual activity in teens?

Observational learning

Duane took an intelligence test and achieved a score in the 85th percentile. What does this mean?

Of the comparable population, 15 percent got a higher score than Duane.

Why does punishment tend to be an ineffective way to change a child's behavior?

Punishment interferes with the child's ability to learn what good behaviors are.

Which of the following is most consistently correlated with IQ scores?

School performance

Jan's husband calls her while she is at the grocery store to ask her to pick up six varieties of chips for a party. He tells her the varieties he wants and hangs up. While walking to the chip aisle, she repeats the list to herself, then begins to pick up the chips. Which varieties will she most likely remember?

She will remember the ones at the end of the list

Which of the following statements is the most accurate?

Sleep allows for physical and mental restoration and energy conservation

As we age, which type of sleep will eventually cease altogether?

Slow-wave

Your sister attempts to condition her dog to salivate at the sound of a bell. She gives the dog a biscuit and a second later rings the bell. She does this several times, but no conditioning seems to occur. Why isn't this conditioning working?

The bell should have been rung before the dog ate the biscuit.

Which statement is consistent with the conclusion from Sperling's study of sensory memory?

The duration of sensory memory is brief, lasting less than 300 milliseconds.

Which of the following individuals is displaying superstition?

The last time Rose hit a homerun, she patted her batting helmet just before taking her swing; now she pats her batting helmet every time she enters the batting box.

Ivy is told that men far outperform women on standardized math tests. Which of the following reflects stereotype threat?

Though Ivy is a gifted mathematician, she performs poorly on the SAT math section.

Which of the following statements draws the most accurate conclusion about the difference between human and nonhuman animal communication?

Though members of other species communicate with each other, and some can understand human language, humans use the most complex systems of communication.

Why would you feel pain when placing your hand on both a hot and a 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.

With which of the following statements would Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg both agree?

Traditional IQ tests do not assess all of the different components of intelligence.

An animal's fearful reaction to a previously neutral stimulus can be unlearned by repeatedly presenting the _______ without the _______.

US; CS

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

While driving your car, you perceive that the position of nearby objects changes more than the position of distant objects.

Which of the following best illustrates the concept of confirmation bias?

You are a proponent of gun control. You seek out news sources and stories that affirm your beliefs about gun control.

Which scenario represents the concept of rehearsal?

You keep repeating a new friend's phone number while looking for your phone.

Telegraphic speech is a linguistic term used to describe

a communication form in young children in which they use only a few words, or even a single word, to express an idea

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.

In order to distinguish sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami tastes, humans have

a specialized type of taste receptor for each of the five taste categories.

Mental imagery refers to the

ability to visualize images or events in our minds

Robyn's mother shows her how to cut hearts from construction paper. No matter how hard Robyn tries, she cannot cut the paper correctly. Bandura would say that Robyn's attempts failed because she was not

able to reproduce the behavior.

Retrieval is the process of

accessing information from long-term memory.

A(n) _______ is a specific set of steps that will always solve a particular problem, whereas _______ are easy-to-follow rules that often solve a problem

algorithm; heuristics

A stimulus is

any sensory event that an individual can detect.

The concept of inattentional blindness is illustrated when you

are concentrating so hard on studying that you fail to notice your roommate leaving for class.

Monozygotic (MZ) twins

are genetically identical.

About half of the individuals with savant syndrome also display

autism.

Standard deviation is the

average amount that each individual score falls above or below the mean.

If you had a device implanted in your brain that allowed you to stimulate the release of dopamine in the forebrain, you would likely

avoid all other activities in favor of self-stimulation.

Babies string meaningless sounds—like "da"—together over and over again. Linguists call this

babbling.

Phonemes are

basic speech sounds that make up languages.

The main difference between binocular and monocular depth cues is that

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

Though some people use the term short-term memory to refer to memory for recent events, like weekend plans, psychologists use the term to refer to memory that is limited in

capacity, and to a duration of a few seconds

English language units like "-ing" and "-ed" are considered morphemes because they

change words in subtle and gradual ways.

A child with fetal alcohol syndrome often has

close-set eyes and an absence of the typical folds between the nose and upper lip.

Modern-day IQ scores

compare individuals in the same age range.

Attention is best defined as the

concentration of the mind on a particular object or process.

An abstract idea or mental representation of an object or event is called

concept.

When a split-brain patient tries to describe in words why her left hand selected a stimulus card corresponding to an image presented in her left visual field, she engages in _______ to have her unconscious recognition make sense.

confabulation

Your professor has invented a device that can measure the change in brain activity of each student in her class, and she can now tell if you are dozing off during her lecture. She has solved the

easy problem of consciousness.

Another name for the physical memory trace in the brain is the

engram.

Infants who are breast-fed grow up to have higher IQs than those who are bottle-fed; this suggests a(n) _______ influence on IQ.

environmental

Episodic memory describes memory for

events and autobiographical knowledge.

In philosophical terms, free will is essentially the opposite of

fate.

You work most days from Monday through Friday for between one and three hours and receive a paycheck every Friday afternoon. You are being paid on a _______ reinforcement schedule.

fixed interval

Many people report vivid recollections of high-impact events such as the Kennedy assassination, the September 11, 2001, attacks, and the 2012 Newtown school shooting. These memories are referred to as

flashbulb memories.

Damage to Wernicke's area in the brain leads to an aphasia characterized by

fluent speech, which may be garbled.

Most of the Flynn effect appears to be due to increases in _______ intelligence.

fluid

Anterograde amnesia involves a loss of the ability to

form new memories.

After a behavior is established, the best way to maintain it for the long run is to reinforce it

frequently.

The primary function of the outer ear, or pinna, is to

gather sounds and direct them to the middle ear.

For practical purposes, IQ scores reflect what Spearman considered to be _______ intelligence.

generalized

Today your speech will include sentences that you have never exactly uttered before. This illustrates the _______ capacity of language.

generative

For the first few nights after you purchased a clock, you had trouble sleeping because the ticking of the second hand disturbed you. Now you do not notice the sound of the second hand at all. This is an example of

habituation.

The specialized receptor cells inside the cochlea are called

hair cells.

Your friend comes home from a party in an altered state and mistakes your housecat for a lion. Your friend may have taken a(n)

hallucinogen.

The "Flynn effect" refers to the finding that the average scores on IQ tests

have substantially increased since the first IQ tests were developed

In the popular cartoon Where's Waldo, viewers search for a character in a red-and-white striped shirt and hat. This character, Waldo, is hidden among numerous people and objects, many of which are also colored red and white, making Waldo very difficult to locate. In this cartoon, the red-and-white-stripe theme is the

heuristic.

Imagine that you know someone who developed a tumor that affected his or her ability to form new long-term memories. Though many parts of the brain are involved with memory, the part of the brain most likely affected by the tumor is the

hippocampus.

The social theory of hypnosis states that

hypnosis is likely a function of a person accommodating the hypnotist.

During your therapy session, your therapist speaks very softly, suggesting that you concentrate first on her voice and then on the image of a calm, cool ocean. This therapist is likely practicing

hypnosis.

The tendency of baby birds to recognize, bond with, and follow the first moving object they see is called

imprinting.

Researchers have suggested that insight occurs

in both humans and animals.

Memory researchers define forgetting as the

inability to retrieve information from long-term memory

Problem solving is often described in terms of the situation at the beginning of the problem, or _______, and the desired outcome of the problem, or _______.

initial state; goal state

You accidentally break off the pull tab when attempting to open a can of soup. You are about to reach for another can when it occurs to you that you can use a regular can opener. You have just demonstrated

insight.

The ability to acquire, retain, and apply knowledge is called

intelligence.

The main distinction between sensation and perception is that only perception involves

interpreting what the stimulus is.

A phobia is the

irrational fear of particular objects or situations.

Stage 3 sleep is also called slow-wave sleep because the EEG

is defined by very low-frequency waves.

A team of psychologists has devised a new intelligence test. Some versions of the test have 20 questions, and some have 50 questions. Some allow the test-takers one hour to complete the test; others give the test-takers as much time as they need. From this information you know that this new intelligence test

is not standardized.

Imagine that you are trying to help an elderly aunt manage the chronic pain of arthritis. Your success is more likely if you suggest to her that the pain

is very manageable, and that she is capable of coping with it.

One of the best sources of evidence that there is a sensitive period for human language development is that

it can be very difficult for adults who are learning a second language to become proficient in the grammar of that language.

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

just noticeable difference (JND).

Students who are given unsolvable problems eventually give up and make only token attempts to solve new problems, even if the new problems can be solved easily. This behavior is most likely due to

learned helplessness.

Dyslexia is defined as difficulty in

learning to read.

The acquisition of knowledge, skills, attitudes, or understanding brought about by experience is called

learning.

The flexible, transparent structure in the eye that helps focus an image on the back of the eye's interior is called the

lens.

If you could recall a dream from non-REM sleep it would likely be

less vivid than an REM dream.

All of the following have been shown to correlate with high IQ scores except

life satisfaction.

Photoreceptors are the

light-sensitive receptor cells in the retina.

The adequate stimulus for the visual system is _______, and the adequate stimulus for the auditory system is _______.

light; sound

The hypothesis that the language we speak influences the way we think is called

linguistic relativism.

Scientists who study language are called

linguists.

A reluctance to take a risk that might lead to a loss of money is an example of

loss aversion

An absolute threshold is the

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

Due to a lack of thiamine, people with Korsakoff's syndrome develop cell loss in the

mammillary bodies.

Last night Enrico dreamt that he was walking through a strange city and was surrounded by tall buildings. According to Freud, the buildings themselves are the _______ content of Enrico's dream

manifest

When a culturally unbiased intelligence test is being constructed, it should

minimize the use of language.

The susceptibility of our memories to include false details that fit in with real details of an event is called the

misinformation effect.

The hindsight bias describes the tendency to

misremember your previous views to fit your current knowledge or beliefs

Occlusion is a _______ depth cue

monocular

Your friend sometimes falls asleep during short car rides, meals, and even conversations. He also seems to have sudden bouts of muscle weakness and severe fatigue whenever he gets excited or stressed. He is likely suffering from

narcolepsy.

One of the main reasons psychologists sometimes use nonsense syllables, rather than real words in studies of memory, is that

nonsense syllables are unlikely to be associated with someone's existing knowledge.

When psychologists say that intelligence test scores are _______ distributed, they mean that the distribution of scores ________.

normally; follows a bell-shaped curve

A prominent part of the reward pathway of the brain is the _______, located at the base of the frontal lobe.

nucleus accumbens

In order for you to enjoy the smell of a flower, molecules called _______ from the flower must land on your olfactory epithelium, which lines the inside of the nose

odorants

The olfactory system routes information directly to the _______ of the brain.

olfactory bulb

According to _______ theory, behavior is influenced by its consequences

operant conditioning

Fatal familial insomnia is a rare genetic disorder afflicting adults in middle age. Sufferers

progressively sleep less and less, until they stop sleeping and ultimately die.

If someone shined a flashlight into your eye, your _______ would constrict

pupil

Edward Thorndike was known for his experiments with

puzzle boxes.

Your roommate wakes up and reports that she was dreaming about a large insect chasing her around your dorm room. She was likely in _______ sleep.

rapid eye movement (REM)

Categorization is the process of

recognizing similarities and differences among concepts.

Chunking information facilitates encoding because it

reduces the absolute number of items to be encoded.

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.

Kim Peek was described as a savant mainly because he was able to

remember all of the details of every book he had ever read.

According to memory researchers, the best way to prepare for an exam is to

repeatedly test yourself on information that will be on the exam

When you enter an old password to retrieve your email, rather than entering your new password, you are demonstrating _______ interference. On the other hand, not being able to recall your old phone number is an example of _______ interference.

retroactive; proactive

Imagine that you were in a car accident in which you hit your head on the steering wheel. The next day you could not remember anything that had occurred in the week before the accident. You were suffering from

retrograde amnesia

Howard Gardner would argue that a successful _______ is most likely to be high in interpersonal intelligence.

salesperson

Jamal has multiple intellectual disabilities. Yet, he has an extraordinary ability in mathematics and is able to solve complex mathematical problems within seconds. On this basis, Jamal would most likely be characterized as displaying

savant syndrome.

Once you reach the autonomous phase of skill acquisition, you

seem to perform without steady concentration.

Our knowledge of facts, such as the year that President Kennedy was shot or the fact that Paris is a city in France, is collectively called _______ memory.

semantic

Patient K.C. is notable in psychological history because his case illustrates the difference between _______ and _______ memory.

semantic; episodic

The study of the meanings of words is known as

semantics.

Eyes and ears are

sensory receptor organs.

The best-known example of observational learning in birds is

singing.

The ability to perform very well with a minimum of effort is the defining aspect of

skill.

You volunteer for a sleep study and the researchers discover that your blood oxygen level drops many times during the night. It is likely that you have

sleep apnea.

Your roommate walks into the kitchen rather shaken and tells you that, upon waking, she was unable to move or speak for about thirty seconds. This phenomenon is called

sleep paralysis.

Drugs classified as depressants typically

slow down neural transmission and behavior

The research of Albert Bandura is most closely associated with

social learning.

Research suggests that racial differences in average IQ among Americans is most likely due to

socioeconomic factors.

Your cat comes running as soon as she hears you open a can of food. In this example, the _______ is the conditioned stimulus

sound of the can being opened

Your friend insists that cigarette smoking calms his nerves, but you are skeptical because in reality, nicotine is a(n)

stimulant.

Ever since Ryan was bitten by a gray cat, he cries when he sees any gray cat. One day, he sees a gray squirrel scamper across his front yard and he begins crying. Ryan's behavior illustrates

stimulus generalization.

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

stimulus; response

Psychologists have clinically defined drug addiction as substance use disorder, which is essentially the

strong desire to self-administer a drug of abuse.

The key aspect of the hard problem of consciousness is the _______ of each individual's conscious experience.

subjectivity

Linguists like Noam Chomsky distinguish between the specific words that are put together in a sentence, called the _______, and the meaning underlying those words, called the _______.

surface structure; deep structure

Biting into a lemon is likely to stimulate taste receptor cells for _______ and _______.

sweet; sour

The optic disc is the part of the retina

that has no photoreceptors.

Memory, as a general construct, is best defined as

the ability to store and retrieve learned information

In psychology, the word "noise" is defined as

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

Believing that a coin is more likely to land on "tails" because it has landed on "heads" for the last four tosses is an example of

the gambler's fallacy.

The fact that people with Williams syndrome have normal verbal abilities but severe deficits in spatial reasoning suggests that

the human brain may be specialized to pick up languages in a way that is distinct from solving other tasks.

One way to differentiate between long-term and short-term memory systems in research is to construct a serial position curve, or to plot the position of an item in a list along with

the percent of participants that recalled the item.

Ashley was telling her friend about a movie she saw last night when she realized she could not remember the lead actor's name. She could only remember that it began with a B. This is an example of

the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon.

The main idea behind Gestalt psychology is that

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

Monozygotic twins raised together have a higher correlation in IQ scores than MZ twins raised apart. This offers proof that

there may be an environmental influence on intelligence.

If your doctor prescribes Xanax to alleviate anxiety, she is prescribing a(n)

tranquilizer.

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

transmit vibrations to the inner ear.

Thorndike believed that most learning occurred by

trial and error.

You are worried that your friend has a dangerously high tolerance for coffee because he

typically drinks six or eight cups a day just to stay focused.

The visual field is

what we can see without moving our eyes.

The first widely used intelligence tests for adults were developed by American psychologists to determine

which draftees should be officers versus ordinary soldiers in World War I.

Your friend is cutting back severely on her coffee intake. She is experiencing headaches, fatigue, and irritability as a result of

withdrawal.

The cocktail party effect describes a phenomenon in which

you can selectively attend to a particular conversation out of the many conversations taking place.