Cognitive Psychology Chapter 1 Questions

Widespread damage to the thalamus will affect which of the following sensory processes?

All of the above (Visual, Auditory, Tactile)

__________ measures how much glucose is being used at specific locations in the brain, whereas __________ measures how much oxygen is being consumed at specific locations in the brain.

PET; fMRI

What are the four lobes of the human cortex?

Parietal, Frontal, Temporal, Occipital

Which condition would produce the most accurate response?

Participants are asked whether they were shown a "d" or "b" when presented with the word "LARD."

Which of the following is a problem with the recognition by components model?

Memory for upside-down houses is a bit worse than memory for upright houses.

Cognitive psychology uses which of the following?

a diverse set of methodologies for collecting data

Which statement about visual attention is most accurate?

By priming our detectors, we make expected stimuli more likely to be noticed and remembered.

Which of the following approaches uses behavioral measures like response time and accuracy to make conclusions about mental processes?

Cognitive Psychology

Which of the following is NOT a form of perceptual constancy experienced in human vision?

Mass constancy

In one experiment, participants were repeatedly shown two lines and asked to judge which line was longer. Meanwhile, black dots appeared randomly on the other parts of the screen during each trial. For some trials, the dots moved to create "fins," as shown in Figure 5.5 in the textbook. Which of the following results were found?

Most of the participants reported the top line as longer, even though the lines are equal in length.

Who wrote a strong critique of behaviorism in the 1950s?

Noam Chomsky

Which of the following statements is true regarding the perception of briefly presented words?

Participants are better at recognizing words that were recently seen.

What effect does repetition priming have on a word recognition task?

Participants are more likely to recognize a word that was on a prior list of words.

In one experiment, participants were shown a stimulus preceded by a neutral cue, a correct prime, or a misleading prime. For some participants, the primes were usually correct (high validity), and for others they were usually misleading (low validity). Which of the following was NOT a result of this experiment?

Participants in the high-validity condition showed no difference between neutral and mislead trials, demonstrating that there is no cost of priming.

Participants are asked to report the shape of a visual stimulus that appears on the left side of a screen. Simultaneous with the presentation of this target stimulus, a second visual stimulus is flashed on the screen. Based on our understanding of inattentional blindness, which of the following is NOT sufficient to make the participants notice the second stimulus?

Participants' eyes are oriented toward the place where the second stimulus will appear.

Which of the following statements about coding is FALSE?

Patterns of activity of neurons do not overlap.

The existence of bigram detectors (detectors of letter pairs) helps to explain which of the following?

People are more likely to recognize the letters "TICE" when they are briefly presented than the letters "EITC."

What do patients suffering from unilateral neglect syndrome demonstrate about visual attention?

People have both space-based and object-based attention.

Which of the following statements is FALSE?

People with prosopagnosia cannot perceive faces.

Expectation-based priming suggests that

Perception works within a limited-capacity system

Which of the following is a failure of selective attention?

While you are working on your problem set in the living room, you are thrown off track when your sister changes the TV channel.

Which of the following is NOT a reason why performance might improve with practice?

With practice, individual elements of a task draw more on our resources.

Which of the following behaviors is most difficult to explain from a behaviorist perspective?

Your response to a stimulus is dependent on how you interpret that stimulus.

Basic life functions, such as the breathing and basic cardiac functions, depend primarily on activity in the

hindbrain.

If stimulating an area of the brain does not cause a behavior but disabling the same area with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) prevents the behavior, then that area is __________ for that behavior.

necessary but not sufficient

With current neuroimaging techniques, all the following things can be measured without in any way disturbing the participant EXCEPT

neuronal firing rates.

Edward Tolman's work with rats in mazes

showed that learning involves the acquisition of knowledge.

In the absence of attention,

stimuli may not be consciously perceived but can still have an influence on the perceiver.

A stimulus that is displayed for a very brief duration (perhaps 20 or 30 milliseconds) is said to be shown

tachistoscopically.

Divided attention requires enough mental resources to attend to both tasks. These limited mental resources include all of the following EXCEPT

task-general storage space like long-term memory.

Many subcortical structures, such as the hippocampus and amygdala, come in groups of

two.

Evidence suggests that

unattended stimuli are more fully processed if the attended input is particularly simple.

When reading a story about a child shaking a piggy bank because he or she wants to buy something, we understand the reasons for this action because

we provide additional background knowledge based on our own experience.

Cognitive psychology is primarily concerned with which of the following?

what we know, what we remember, and how we think

H.M. was an important case from the field of

clinical neuropsychology.

Researchers in cognitive psychology rely on all of the following forms of data EXCEPT

anecdotes and testimonials.

Some resources are task-specific and others are task-general. Which of the following is a task-specific resource?

verbal resources for tasks involving words

Electroencephalography (EEG) measures which of the following?

voltage changes occurring at the scalp

What is Inattentional Blindness?

A phenomenon in which people who are paying attention to one visual object may fail to consciously notice another visual object that would otherwise be obvious

A researcher using which of the following approaches would not be interested in creating theories about the mental processes underlying decision making?

Behaviorism

Children routinely produce sentences for which they never receive any positive reinforcement. For example - When children tell their parents "I hate you". This example provides support against which of the following approaches to studying language acquisition?

Behaviorism

Which of the following is the LEAST accurate statement about behaviorism?

Behaviorism is primarily designed to explain why organisms believe their behavior is justified or reasonable.

How does the Reisberg's Feature Net model explain why pronounceable nonwords are easier to perceive than non-pronounceable nonwords?

Bigram detectors are ready to respond to common, pronounceable, combinations of letters

The recognition of which of the following classes of visual objects is most likely to involve holistic processing?

Face

Which of these types of visual object is least likely to be recognized in a viewpoint-independent manner?

Face

__________ is a brain-imaging technique that shows us precisely which areas of the brain are active at a particular moment in time; __________ is a technique that shows us the exact structure of each of the brain's parts.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI); magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

Which school of thought incorporates the assumption that studying a mental process as a whole provides far more insights compared to studying the components of the mental process?

Gestalt Psychology

Which of the following was NOT one of the problems associated with introspection as a research technique?

How people react to a stimulus is heavily influenced by past experience

Which of the following statements is FALSE?

In the primary somatosensory projection area, the larger the physical size of a body area is, the more cortical area is devoted to it.

Which of the following is one of the primary criticisms of behaviorism?

It fails to explain the mental states of individuals

Which of the following statements applies to expectation-based priming but not to stimulus-based priming?

It has a cost attached.

Which of the following is true of ADHD?

It involves multiple attentional systems, including "alerting," "orienting," and "executive" systems.

What does the word superiority effect tell us?

It is easier to recognize a letter when it occurs in a word compared to when it occurs in isolation

What is the purpose of using a mask in word recognition tasks?

It serves to stop participants from continuing to process the stimulus

What prediction could you make on the basis of the recognition via multiple views approach to object recognition?

It will be harder to recognize an object from some vantage points than from others.

Which of the following claims about the cognitive revolution is true?

Its methods and tools spread to many other areas of psychology.

Which of the following concerns is NOT addressed by adopting a cognitive approach to the study of psychology?

Just because something happens in a laboratory experiment does not mean it necessarily happens that way in real-life settings.

How did Kant's transcendental method influence the approach of cognitive psychologists?

Kant suggested that causes could be inferred from observed effects

Which of the following is most closely associated with learning and memory?

Limbic System

Which of the following would be the slowest to be recognized in a word recognition task?

Low Frequency and Unprimed words

Which of the following is a way in which cognitive psychology is different from physics?

Psychologists must take into account the way in which participants interpret their study.

Which of the following best describes the line of logic that came about through the cognitive revolution?

Psychology must study the mental world, the mental world cannot be observed, the mental world must be inferred from behaviors that can be observed

What is the most precise explanation for why many aspects of psychology (and most of cognitive psychology) rely on inferential methods?

Psychology often demands hypotheses about processes that cannot be observed directly in order to explain the capacities and the behaviors that we can observe.

What is one of the main differences between the recognition by parts model and the recognition by multiple views model?

Recognition by parts is viewpoint-independent, while recognition by multiple views is viewpoint-dependent

The hindbrain plays a major role in which of these?

Regulating basic life functions

Which of the following techniques has the best spatial resolution?

Single Cell Recording

If the corpus callosum is cut, what will happen to the two hemispheres of the brain?

Some information will be exchanged by other commissures.

What is the main reason why both late and early selection models can be true?

Some tasks require lots of resources, while other tasks require fewer.

Which of the following statements about speed reading is FALSE?

Speed reading is a good choice if you want to appreciate an author's style.

Individuals with a lesion to the parietal lobe perform normally when asked to search for an item with a single feature (e.g., "find the round shape") but have trouble when asked to search for an item with multiple features (e.g., "find the blue, round shape" among other shapes that are blue but not round or round but not blue). What conclusion do these findings support?

The detection of features is separate from the association of those features.

Which statement about feature nets is FALSE?

The input layer is particularly sensitive to the overall configuration of a pattern.

Where in the brain is visual information first sent via the optic nerve?

The lateral geniculate nucleus of the thalamus

Gestalt psychologists argued which of the following?

The perceiver is of central importance in organizing his or her own experience.

Which of the following conclusions can be drawn from the existing data on face recognition?

The recognition of faces is heavily dependent on orientation.

In a word recognition study, participants were briefly shown words that differed in frequency and familiarity. After each word was shown, participants were asked to report aloud what word they had seen. Their accuracy recognizing these words is represented in the graph. Which of the following is the best interpretation of the data?

The results demonstrate both a priming effect and an effect of frequency.

Which of the following statements on how people direct the "beam" of attention is FALSE?

There are cultural differences in how people direct attention, such that East Asians spend more time looking at individual people than Americans do.

Which of the following offers the most support for the idea that object recognition is viewpoint-dependent?

There are neurons in the "what" pathway that respond most to a certain type of object in a certain position relative to the eyes

Which of the following is FALSE about human vision?

There are three types of rods

What causes the blindspot?

There is an area where the optic nerve passes through the retina where there are no photoreceptors

Which of the following is most accurate with respect to our knowledge about the fusiform face area (FFA)?

There is an ongoing debate about the specificity of the FFA to processing faces.

In a study of spatial attention, participants were given a neutral, correct, or misleading cue about where on the screen a stimulus would appear. What is the best explanation for what happened on trials with misleading cues?

There were costs because the spotlight of attention had moved to the misled location and had to move back.

How do cognitive psychologists use speed to assess behavior?

They measure small differences in response times to gain insight into the mental processing that is necessary for those responses.

Which of the following findings does NOT support the existence of task-specific mental resources?

Two simple tasks are easy to do simultaneously, while two hard tasks are not.

In a dichotic listening experiment, participants can detect their own name even when it is part of the unattended speech stream. What can you NOT conclude based on this?

Unattended information is generally processed to the same extent as attended information

What is the best example of top-down processing?

We recognize the word "aardvark" more quickly if we were expecting to see an animal word.

A psychologist who adheres to the behaviorist school of thought would most likely attribute someone reaching for a slice of pie to

a learned behavior in response to specific environmental triggers.

Which of the following drivers is most likely to get into an accident?

a novice driver engaged in an important phone interview

The Rumelhart and McClelland model is different from the simple feature model in all the following ways EXCEPT that it includes

activation from the feature level to the letter level.

What was the crucial innovation that defined the recognition by components (RBC) model?

an intermediate level of detectors sensitive to geons (geometric ions)

Which of the following is the clinical term we use to describe a disturbance in the initiation or organization of voluntary action?

apraxia

Reading simple words is an example of a(n) __________ task, and saying the color of the ink in which that word is printed is an example of a(n) __________ task.

automatic; controlled

Face recognition is special in that ________

c.Both of the above. a.It is more sensitive to orientation compared to object recognition. b.Faces are processed holistically. c.Both of the above. d.None of the above.

In EEG recordings, alert wakefulness is indicated by __________ waves, while deep sleep is indicated by __________ waves.

beta; delta

All of the following are components of the limbic system EXCEPT the

cerebellum.

In this drawing of the limbic system, A, B, C, and D are the

cingulate cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, and thalamus.

Contemporary cognitive psychologists are MOST interested in examining the relationship between ________ and ________.

cognitive processes; behavior

Donald Broadbent used the language of __________ to describe important aspects of human cognition, including how we direct our __________.

computer science; attention

A "well-formed" letter string is one that

conforms to the usual spelling patterns of English.

The pathway from V1 to the _____ cortex is often referred to as the "what" pathway while the pathway from V1 to the _____ cortex is often referred to as the "where" pathway.

d. Inferotemporal; Parietal

Which of these part(s) of the brain has/have been identified as an area that is active during face recognition?

d.A and B a.Fusiform face area b.Superior temporal sulcus c.Lateral sulcus d.A and B e.A, B, and C f.None of the above

Which of the following statements regarding the neural processing of visual information is false?

d.All of the above a.The left LGN receives information only from the right eye b.The left LGN receives information only about the left visual field c.An individual neuron in the left LGN can receive information from both eyes. d.All of the above

An individual suffering from Capgras syndrome would most likely show an inability to

detect the familiarity of an often-viewed face.

Which of the following tasks has NOT been connected with the amygdala?

discriminating between internal and external events

If the word "trum" is presented, people are most likely to recognize it as

drum.

Which of the following methods is a noninvasive way of measuring brain activity?

e.B and C a.Single cell recording b.fMRI c.EEG d.A and C e.B and C f.A, B, and C

Martin is trying to understand why he has been forgetting things lately. As a well-trained cognitive psychologist, Martin is likely to investigate this puzzle by

examining the circumstances associated with his memory failures, including the complexity or familiarity of the material and how fully he paid attention to the material during learning.

Fire alarms are designed to control attention __________, but outside such demanding stimuli, one can often control his or her own attention __________.

exogenously; endogenously

Which of the following is TRUE about visual perception?

f.Both B and D a.It is impossible to switch between interpretations of ambiguous figures b.The visual system can allow us to see the same stimulus in multiple ways c.The visual system only allows us to perceive exactly what is presented d.The visual system can "fill in" missing information e.Both A and D

Intellectual functions like making judgments, retrieving memories, and paying attention depend primarily on tissues specialized for these purposes, which are located in the

forebrain.

At a conference you meet a researcher who says she is of the same school of thought as the famous nineteenth-century scholars Wilhelm Wundt and Edward Titchener. You can gather from this statement that she feels that the best way to study thoughts is to

have only highly trained and qualified people introspect about their own thoughts.

John has apperceptive agnosia. This means that he cannot

integrate perceptual information to perceive intact objects.

The famous psychologist Edward Titchener claimed to have identified and catalogued nearly 10,000 sensations that he observed within himself. What method best describes his approach?

introspection

When listening intently to one message, you are likely to detect your name if it is spoken in a different message. This is likely to be because your name

is a stimulus for which you are well primed.

Damage to a specific area of the brain is called a(n)

lesion.

Modern psychologists follow the lead of Immanuel Kant in arguing that the solution to the impasse between introspectionism and behaviorism lies in a method in which we begin with __________ and then proceed to __________.

observable facts; likely internal causes

When Betty, an English speaker, is shown a nonsense string of letters tachistoscopically, she misreads it in a way that follows the rules of common English spelling. This is because

of a lifetime of strengthening of the bigram detectors for common English letter pairs.

Most participants in a dichotic listening task are

often able to notice personally relevant words like their names in the unattended channel.

In this drawing, parts A, B, C, and D are the

parietal lobe, the frontal lobe, the temporal lobe, and the occipital lobe.

Which of the following would be LEAST likely to serve as an effective prime for the word "bread"?

pie

Donovan looks in a mirror and perceives his own face, but he thinks he is seeing a stranger. Donovan most likely has

prosopagnosia.

Patients with unilateral neglect resulting from damage to the right hemisphere will

read only the right half of words shown to them.

If a patient were to suffer amnesia similar to the amnesia suffered by H.M., which of the following would pose a particular problem?

remembering his or her divorce, which occurred after brain surgery

The left cerebral hemisphere receives its main input for vision from the

right half of the visual field in both eyes.

Which effect can NOT be explained by feature nets?

the effects of sentence context

A central problem in Capgras syndrome seems to be difficulty with

the emotional analysis of faces.

A synapse is usually composed of

the end of an axon, a space, and the receiving membrane on another neuron's dendrites.

Frederick Bartlett contributed which of the following to the field of cognitive psychology?

the idea of a "schema," which is a perception and mental framework

The statements "Please pass the salt" and "Gee, this food really needs some salt" are both likely to produce the same salt-passing response at the dinner table. This illustrates that

the meaning of an utterance, not the physical stimulus, is most important for predicting behavior.

Suppose you are at a cocktail party conversing with a friend. In this situation, you are LEAST likely to hear whether

the person behind you is speaking intelligently or foolishly.

The all-or-none law states that

the signal traveling down a neuron's axon does not vary in size or strength.

The existence of functional localization is supported in part by the fact that

the symptoms produced by brain damage depend on exactly where in the brain the damage is located.

Which is NOT a factor in explaining why the postsynaptic neuron's initial response may vary in size?

the width of the gap between the presynaptic and postsynaptic cells