Unit 3 Practice Quiz

Which of the following scenarios is the best example of synesthesia?

Anastasia sees swirls of color when she hears music because stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to the experience of another sensation.

Which of the following is the best definition for absolute threshold?

The lowest strength of a stimulus that a person can detect 50% of the time

Denise has damaged her auditory nerve and now has difficulty understanding what people are saying. Which of the following descriptions explains how that damage impairs her hearing?

Sound messages fail to be transmitted directly to the brain.

Which of the following scenarios best illustrates the opponent-process theory of color vision?

Kayla sees afterimages of opposing colors when she stares at a poster for a long time.

Helena did not recognize her English teacher when she unexpectedly saw him while traveling in Paris, even though she knew him well back in the classroom. The fact that Helena can recognize her teacher back home more easily than in Paris best demonstrates what concept?

Perceptual set

Which of the following is the process of detecting environmental stimuli and converting them into signals that can be detected by the nervous system?

Sensation

Which of the following concepts refers to the diminished sensitivity to a stimulus that occurs due to constant exposure to that stimulus?

Sensory Adaptation

Tracey was in pain from an ear infection, which her doctor said was in her inner ear. Which of the following is the most likely location of the infection?

The cochlea

A researcher wants to study the human sense of taste over a life span. The researcher has a group of participants taste foods that are salty, bitter, sweet, sour, and umami. Which study would best allow the researcher to test the sensation of taste as people age, and what is the likely outcome?

The researcher follows the same group of people over the course of 40 years. The researcher also measures the number of the people's taste buds throughout the 40 years. The researcher finds that as people grow older, their sense of taste diminishes and their number of taste buds decreases.

Bryan perceived a duck instead of other animals when viewing an ambiguous image because he watched a documentary about ducks the previous night. Which of the following best explains why Bryan perceived a duck?

Top-down processing, because his perception of the duck was influenced by past experience.