Psych final

According to Pinker, "virtually all cognitive scientists and linguists agree that language is not a prisonhouse of thought." In support of the majority view, Pinker lists several facts. Which of the following is NOT a genuine statement of Pinker?

"Eskimos are capable of surviving harsh winters because their language has at least 100 words for snow, including snows, snowy, and snowish."

The word dogs consists of

2 morphemes

What is the difference between a mood and an emotional feeling?

A mood is the after-effect of an emotion and is broader in scope

Which statement concerning mutations is FALSE?

A mutation occurs when a new phenotype is required by the environment

Why are myelinated neurons able to conduct action potentials at a faster rate than unmyelinated neurons?

Action potentials move rapidly from node to node in myelinated neurons, but must move in continuous fashion down the whole axon of unmyelinated neurons.

Which of the following is NOT an example of sensory adaptation?

After a few minutes of exposure to cold weather, we start to feel chilled

Do students earn higher grades when taking notes by longhand or by computer? Correlational studies find that students using laptops in class are less likely to be thinking about class material less likely to earn high grades, and less satisfied with their education. Which of the following hypotheses are consistent with the correlational data?

All of the above

_______ is a depth perception cue that you could not use to judge depth if you had a patch over one eye

Binocular disparity

The males of some animal species (such as birds) are heavily involved in the care of their offspring, while the males of other animal species (such as cats) have very little involvement. According to Trivers's theory of parental investment, which of the following is most likely?

Cats are more likely to be polygynous than birds

A person will automatically blink in response to a puff of air in the eye. If the word pickle is spoken just before the eye puff on a number of occasions, the person will eventually blink in response to hearing the word pickle. This is an example of:

Classical conditioning

A team of psychologists at Princeton and UCLA hypothesized that laptop note-taking distracts students from the meaning of what speakers say. To test this hypothesis, researchers randomly assigned students to one of two rooms-- either with a laptop or with a paper notebook. Then, students were asked to watch five brief lectures and to use their normal classroom note-taking strategy to prepare for an upcoming quiz. Thirty minutes after the lecture, students were then tested on two types of questions-- factual recall questions (e.g., "How did the Indus and Greek civilizations differ in their reliance on manufacturing and trade?"). The psychologists found that students who took notes on their laptops wrote more, paraphrased less, and answered fewer conceptual questions correctly. Which of the following hypotheses are consistent with these results?

Computer note-taking affects paraphrasing and learning conceptual content.

Initially unfearful monkeys were shown a videotape of other monkeys reacting fearfully to a toy rabbit, a flower, and a toy snake. When later placed in the presence of these objects, what was the subject monkeys' response?

Consistent with biological predisposition, the subject monkeys subsequently showed a fear response only to the toy snake.

The hypothalamus is anatomically suited to be a hub of many central drive systems because it:

Contains tracts that interconnect many areas of the brain

Timo Mantyla presented subjects with 500 nouns and asked them to write down, for each noun, words that they regarded as properties of the object named by the noun. Later, he surprised the subjects with a test of their ability to remember the nouns, varying the types of retrieval cues available. The results provided evidence for which of the following ideas?

Cues that were present at the time of encoding and are again present at the time of testing facilitate retrieval from long-term memory more than do other types of cues

Suppose we measure shyness in siblings reared together and find a 0.09 correlation for adopted siblings who are biologically unrelated, compared with a 0.56 correlation for fraternal twins and a 0.93 correlation for identical twins. This suggests that:

Environment contributes comparatively little to variation in shyness

Which of the following were NOT actual discoveries that were consistent with the concept of localization of function in the brain?

Franz Galt's discovery that psychological characteristics such as benevolence could be mapped to bumps on the skull.

Robert Tyron bred rats selectively to show that their individual maze-learning ability has a strong genetic component. What happened?

He succeeded in breeding rat strains that differed substantially in maze-learning performance and concluded that at least this aspect of behavior is influenced by heredity.

Several species of North American Jay differ in their dependence on storing seeds during the winter. Which of the following brain areas was shown to vary among these Jays and to correlate with their dependence on storing seeds

Hippocampus

Which statement regarding hormones is TRUE?

Hormones are secreted into the blood by endocrine glands and other organs

Which of the following is NOT true of vocabulary development?

Infants use words at first to ask for things and later to name things that are already present.

How would the absolute threshold for white light measured for fully dark-adapted eyes compare with the absolute threshold for white light measured for minimally light-adapted eyes?

It would be lower

If Imani has an intense fear of jellyfish, _____ would predict that seeing and perceiving a jellyfish when swimming would lead Imani to feel the emotion of fear while her level of body arousal would influence the intensity of fear she feels.

James's peripheral feedback theory

According to the guinness book of world records, the man with the most wives was

Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty

Which statement is consistent with findings from studies investigating brain-based theories of compulsive gambling?

People who gamble compulsively are subject to unpredictable releases of dopamine due to random payoffs. Because of this, they experience dopamine release into the nucleus accumbens every time a payoff occurs, which results in repeated reinforcement and an unusually strong habit.

The text describes the case of a toddler who demanded large quantities of salt because deficient adrenal glands prevented his body from conserving enough salt. This case illustrates the:

Powerful influence of homeostasis on behavior

The bird is turning its head because its eyes have the greatest density of visual receptors on the top half of its eyes. What is the species of predatory bird?

Prairie falcon

Elizabeth was training for her upcoming boxing match when her training partner knocked her out, giving her a concussion. Since her injury Elizabeth has had troubles planning and organizing her days, probably meaning that she has received damage to what part of her brain?

Prefrontal lobe

According to Piaget's theory, children at a certain developmental stage can understand the static qualities of objects and events (e.g. their favorite toy exists even when they can't see it). However, they cannot understand the logical outcomes of certain types of actions on objects (e.g. pouring water from a tall, thin container into a short, wide one). Which stage of cognitive development would Piaget place these children in?

Preoperational

Studies show that the sex drive in nonhuman mammals is critically dependent upon the:

Preoptic area of the hypothalamus in males and the ventromedial area of the hypothalamus in females.

Imagine the following experiment and result: Rats, who unconditionally "freeze" in response to a loud sound, are conditioned to freeze to a light through pairing the light with the sound. Then the rats are habituated to the sound, so they no longer freeze to it. When the rats are tested with the light, it is found that their response to the light has not decreased. That is, the rats still show the same conditioned freezing response to the light. This finding would most directly support the:

S-R theory of classical conditioning

As Masako listens to Beethoven's 5th Symphony on the radio, her auditory receptors receive and produce electrical changes in response to both the loudness of the music and the different notes that are being played. This electrical preservation of both the quantity and quality of the stimulus is referred to as:

Sensory coding

Pavlov is to classical conditioning, as _____ is to operant conditioning.

Skinner

Suppose a drug addict usually takes his fix in an alley. One day the police are watching the alley, and the addict takes his fix in a bus depot men's room. He dies. Why would the same dose that he could tolerate in the alley kill him in the men's room?

Stimuli in the alley that had become conditioned stimuli for physiological responses that counteract the drug's effect were absent in the men's room.

Suppose that neurons A and B both synapse on neuron C. The synapse between neurons A and C is too weak for A to cause C to fire, but the synapse between B and C is strong enough. Long-term potentiation in this situation would involve the:

Strengthening of the synapse between A and C

Every year the Goldwater Math competition awards scholarships to the three students earning the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd highest scores on the Goldwater Exam, a test of high school mathematics. Two teams entered this year: 100 students from Team Red and 100 students from Team Blue. On the Exam, the two teams had identical average scores. However, Team Red had a much higher standard deviation than Team Blue. Which of the following statements is most likely true?

Team Red had the most top place finishes, but Team Blue had the fewest bottom place finishes

Gregory Razran conditioned college students to salivate in response to a set of printed words. In testing, he found that the students salivated more to new words that had the same meaning as the original words than to new words that looked and sounded similar to the original words but had different meanings. If his results had been reversed (if there had been less salivation to words with related meaning), which perspective on conditioning would they have tended to support?

The behavioral perspective more than the cognitive perspective

According to Pinker, the cognitive revolution contributed five ideas to psychology. Which of the following ideas was NOT a contribution of the cognitive revolution?

The flexibility of learning shows that culture is the most important factor in explaining motivation

Robert Rescorla produced a conditioned fear response (freezing) in rats. The unconditioned stimulus was a loud sound, and the conditioned stimulus was a signal light. He then habituated half the rats to the loud sound. When he tested the rats with the signal light, the results were consistent with the S-S theory of classical conditioning. Knowing this, which of the following results should you choose as the most likely?

The habituated rats froze much less to the light, indicating that they had learned a connection between the light and the sound.

Brian, a 3-year-old, is attending a preschool that has recently implemented a program aimed at correcting grammar. What are the expected results?

The program will have little effect on Brian's tendency to say "mouses, sheeps, and childs," because such programs have little effect on rule acquisition

How does food-aversion learning differ from typical examples of classical conditioning?

The relevant events (eating the food and getting sick) need not occur close together in time.

What law of color mixing states that three different wavelengths of light can be used to match any color that the eye can see if they are mixed in the appropriate proportions?

The three-primaries law

What did Eibl-Eibesfeldt learn about facial expressions from studying them in children who were born blind or blind and deaf?

Their expressions were very similar and paralleled those of children with sight.

You are getting ready to take the GRE for entrance into graduate school. Given what you know about encoding rehearsal, which of the following strategies will most likely help you encode the word "jackanapes" and its definition (a mischievous person) into your long-term memory?

Think of a time when you behaved like a jackanapes yourself

Edward Tolman posited that operant conditioning can be understood as the learning of a means-end relationship. Which of the following experimental results supported this view?

Thirsty rats previously reinforced with sugar water for pressing a lever did so at a higher rate under extinction conditions than thirsty rats previously reinforced with dry food pellets.

Cognitive theorists would be most likely to agree with which of the following?

To understand the role of stimuli in conditioning one must consider their meaning to the individual being conditioned.

Which observation about white-crowned sparrows illustrates the point that species-typical behavior may depend on learning?

White-crowned sparrows develop the ability to sing their species-typical song only if they hear the song during the first summer after hatching

Which metaphorical image BEST describes how communication occurs between two neurons at a fast synapse?

a lock and key; a neurotransmitter acts as a molecular key that moves across the cleft and then enters a receptor lock in the postsynaptic neuron's membrane.

During the 1960s, experiments were conducted in which rats were housed in either enriched or deprived environments. Results showed that:

after weeks in the two environments, the brains of the groups showed few differences.

Eric Kandel's studies of the neural mechanisms of behavior is Aplysia suggest that:

all of the above

Amygdala is the Latin word for

almond

Wolves, killer whales, and army ants all live and hunt in packs. This is an example of:

an analogy

The key insight that led Wundt into his specific line of experimental research in psychology was that:

any mental processes takes some amount of time

Chad and Sally are both members of a band. Chad is the backup singer and Sally is the lead. Sally frequently gets upset when Chad sings at the same time as she does because she has trouble hearing herself. Which concept BEST describes this phenomenon?

auditory masking

When asked to estimate the average number of recorded terrorist acts per year since 1970, people will give higher estimates if there has recently been a highly publicized terrorist incident. This exemplifies:

availability bias

In his view of dualism, Descartes believed that any behavior common to both human beings and nonhuman animals must be produced by the _____ and not the _____.

body; soul

In a digit span test, Bill was able to recall the 12 individual number s 194719481949 by grouping the digits together to form higher-order units. His technique for remembering the numbers as three years 1947, 1948, 1949, rather than 12 individual digits is called:

chunking

Classical conditioning occurs best when the conditioned stimulus comes slightly before the unconditioned stimulus, and it typically does not occur at all if the conditioned stimulus comes slightly after the unconditioned stimulus. This observation supports which theory of classical conditioning?

cognitive theory.

It is easier to see a camouflaged animal when it moves than when it stays still. This illustrates the Gestalt principle of:

common movement

Karen's social psychology professor asked her to interview a group of high-school students in order to discover if they were extroverts or introverts. If she suspected they were extroverts, she asked such questions as, "Do you like to meet new people?" If she suspected they were introverts, she tended to ask if they were shy about meeting new people. The textbook describes this bias as the:

confirmation bias

Evidence that cooing and early babbling do not depend on the spoken sounds that infants hear comes from the fact that:

coos and early babbles are as likely to contain foreign-language sounds as native-language sounds.

"Everyone from Leipzig is German. Wilhelm Wundt is from Leipzig. Therefore, Wilhelm Wundt is German." This is an example of using _________ reasoning to arrive at a specific idea (Wundt is German) from more general premises (for example, everyone from Leipzig is German).

deductive

On the first trial of a psychology experiment, you are presented with two identical auditory tones. On subsequent trials, the intensity of the second tone is slightly increased, and you are asked to report the first time you hear a difference. The researchers are trying to discover your:

difference threshold

Kate supports the trichromatic theory. Her friend Oscar supports the opponent-process theory. Since you read the text, you explain to them that:

during the 1950s and 1960s, research showed that both theories are fundamentally correct.

A woodworker is paid for every dozen cabinet doors carved. This worker is operating under a _____ schedule.

fixed-ratio

Suppose a researcher measures intelligence by weighing participants on a highly accurate scale. This measure would have ______ reliability, _______ validity, and __________ face validity

high; low; low

Walter Cannon proposed that individuals can understand drives in terms of the body's need to keep internal conditions (for example, oxygen levels) within restricted ranges. He called this process:

homeostasis

If an experiment has the correlation coefficient of -0.25, this means that when one variable decreases the other variable:

increases

What kind of reasoning task is typified by the sequence-completion problem 2,4,8,_____?

inductive

Denita just jabbed herself with a needle while hemming a pair of pants. She noticed that she felt the pressure of the pin before she felt pain. This sequence of sensations would make sense if sensory neurons for pressure are ________ and those for pain are ________

large and myelinated; thin and unmyelinated

Among the Kalikuli people of New Guinea, babies are not spoken to until they can speak themselves. However, these babies are constantly exposed to the speech of adults and children. Research on language development among Kalikuli children strongly suggests that:

large variations can occur in the language-acquisition support system without impairing children's ability to learn language.

Research on genetically altered Doogie mice showed that long-term potentiation (LTP):

leads to significantly improved memory

If the nervous system is organized hierarchically with respect to motor control, then the structures that should be thought of as forming the top of the hierarchy are the:

limbic system and association areas of the cortex

If hair cells on the portion of the basilar membrane closest to the oval window were destroyed, what would be the most noticeable effect on hearing?

loss in ability to hear high frequencies

In order to solve insight problems such as the mutilated checkerboard problem or the candle problem, people most abandon their well-established habit of perception or thought, known as a(n) ________, and then view the problem in a different way.

mental set

To protect his potential customers from harassment by local teenagers, an enterprising store owner took advantage of age-differences in the absolute threshold for high-frequency tones by inventing a device called the

mosquito

Polygenic characteristics like aggressiveness in mice and conscientiousness in people typically approximate a normal distribution, meaning that:

most individuals fall near the middle of the range of scores for these characteristics and the frequency tapers off toward the two extremes

Emotions are important because they:

motivate us and help us communicate.

For some people, electric shocks, boring conversations, and headaches serve as:

negative reinforcers

Communication between neurons occurs when the action potential reaches the end of the presynaptic cell's axon, and:

neurotransmitters released from axon terminals cross the synaptic cleft and affect the functioning of the postsynaptic neuron

University of Virginia researchers recently completed an extraordinary study of IQ in 7-year-olds, some of whom did and did not live in poverty. Results indicated that 60% of the variance in IQ among children raised in poverty could be attributed to the shared environment, whearas the contribution of genes was close to 0%. In contrast, among children raised in affluent households, the result was nearly the reverse. These results dramatically illustrate what concept?

norm of reaction

One way to make a white circle appear green is to stare at a red circle for a period of time before looking at the white circle. This phenomenon, known as an afterimage, can be accounted for by the ___ theory of color vision.

opponent-process

The system which is MOST explicitly related to regenerative, growth-promoting, and energy-conserving functions is the:

parasynaptic division of the autonomic system

In a study of college students' deductive reasoning, participants were given the following problem: All living things need water. Roses need water. Therefore, roses are living things. Although the correct answer to the problem is indeterminate, about 70% of the participants got the problem wrong because they thought the conclusion that roses are living was valid. Why did so many participants incorrectly answer this problem?

participants were influenced by their knowledge of the real world, which interfered with their ability to think purely in terms of logic.

When Ekman and his colleagues showed photographs from their atlas of facial expressions to individuals from many different cultures, the researchers found that:

people in every culture, even very isolated ones, identified the facial expressions in the same way Americans did.

Fechner stated that the magnitude of the sensory experience of a stimulus is directly proportional to the logarithm of the physical magnitude of the stimulus. The logarithmic nature of the relationship represents the fact that:

proportionally greater physical changes are needed to produce a jnd when the initial stimulus is large

The insight that led Pavlov to his first experiments on conditioned reflexes was that the salivary response of the dogs to the sight of food or the sound associated with its delivery was:

reflexive and could be studied objectively

Jack, a college freshman, is trying to remember the name of his first grade teacher. The transfer of information from Jack's long-term memory to his working memory is called:

retrieval

Andy recently moved to Columbus, Ohio from Seattle. He was surprised to find Starbucks and skyscrapers downtown. This scene was contradictory to his _____ of a typical Midwest city as consisting mainly of some low-profile office buildings, a Dairy Queen or two, and maybe a park with dairy cows.

schema

In the somatosensory cortex, the amount of cortical space corresponding to a given part of the body is related to the ______ of the body part

sensitivity

Ascending tracts in the spinal cord carry:

sensory information but not motor information

Suppose your are concentrating on driving through a busy intersection when your passenger asks you a question you don't attend to. You say "What?" but before the question is repeated, you "hear" it from your own memory. Presumably, a trace still existed in your:

sensory memory

In Biederman's theory of object recognition, a geon is a(n)

simple geometric form that is the building block of more complex forms

John Wayne watches the bad guy ride away from him into the sunset. Although John's retinal image of the man decreases as he rides away, John does not perceive him as physically shrinking due to:

size constancy

The basal ganglia are MOST important for what aspect of movement?

slow, deliberate movement like that involved in reaching for an object

Which of the following provides evidence for the language-acquisition device posited by Chomsky?

the fact that brain damage can affect the ability to learn particular aspects of language

Every time Jane gets an A on an exam, her parents take her out for an expensive dinner. Whether or not they know the technical term for it, they are hoping to take advantage of _____ to get Jane to continue bringing home those As.

the law of effect

One line of evidence for the distinction between working memory and long-term explicit memory comes from studies of:

the patient H. M. and patients with similar brain damage

Bertha has just returned home from a class field trip to a museum. Her mother asks her to describe one of the dinosaurs she saw. In order to do so, Bertha recreates a picture of the dinosaur in her mind. The part of memory that allows this mental image of the dinosaur to be formed is:

the visuospatial sketch pad

Support for the S-S theory of classical conditioning comes from experiments showing that, after conditioning, weakening the:

unconditioned reflex (through habituation) also weakens the conditioned reflex

What magic words were uttered in an effort to improve test performance on the Impossible neuroscience quiz?

walla walla walla