Exam 1 Study Questions

Which of the following statements is the most accurate regarding specificity coding? - Research has found that specificity encoding does occur for lower animals such as dogs and cats, but not found in human beings. - Specificity encoding is one of the areas that is only theoretical and not applied, and thus there is no way to know if it truly exists in human beings - It is unlikely to be corrects because there are too many stimuli in the world to have separate neurons for each

- It is unlikely to be corrects because there are too many stimuli in the world to have separate neurons for each

Which of the following is the process by which features such as color form motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object?

- binding

What contains the words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated?

- dictionary unit

What are the main ways Anne Treisman's attenuator model analyzes incoming messages

- how sequences of words create meaningful phrases - how the message groups into syllables or words - whether the message is fast or slow

According to your text, the ability to divide attention depends on.... (hint there are a few)

- practice - the type of processing of processing being used - difficulty of the task

What does the field of neuropsychology study?

Behavior of people with brain damage

Josiah is trying to speak to his wife, but his speech is very slow, labored and often with jumbled sentence structure. Josiah may have damage to which area of the brain?

Broca's area

Which of the following could be considered taking a "working vacation" - temporal lobe - default mode network - Broca's area - Neural networks

Default mode network

Neurons that respond to specific qualities of objects, such as orientation, movement, and length, are called...

feature detectors

The first experiments in cognitive psychology were based on the idea that mental responses can be...

inferred from participant's behavior

The main point of the Donder's reaction time experiment was to...

measure the amount of time it takes to make a decision

The notion that faster responding occurs when enhancement spreads within an object is called...

same-object advantage

When Sam listens to his girlfriend Susan in the restaurant and ignores the other people's conversations, he is engaged in the process of _______ attention.

selective

Boradbent's model is called the early selection model because

the filter eliminates the unattended information right at the beginning of the flow of information

Brain imaging has made it possible to determine...

which areas of the brain are involved in different cognitive processes.

The study of the physiological basis of cognition known as

cognitive neuroscience

The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind is called...

cognitive psychology

Why can we consider Tolman on of the early cognitive psychologists?

Because he used behavior to infer mental processes.

The likelihood principle states that

we perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli we have received

Which of the following is consistent with the idea of localization of function? (Hint: there is more than 1)

- specific areas of the brain serve different functions - neurons in different areas of the brain respond vest to different stimuli - brain areas are specialized for specific functions

What are the main examples of physical regularity in the text?

- the oblique effect - the light-from-above assumption - having one object that is partially covered by another "come out the other side"

T/F: Our sense receptions detect the world as it really is.

FALSE

T/F: We are able to concurrently execute two or more tasks without performance decrease

FALSE

T/F: Context is a determining factor in how we perceive and interact with the environment.

TRUE

T/F: Processes outside conscious awareness are responsible for a very large amount of our day to day life and experience.

TRUE

How does the phenomenon of apparent movement work?

The perceptual system creates the perception of movement from stationary images.

The sequence of steps that included the image on the retina, changing the image into electrical signals, and resolving ambiguities based on past experience is an example of ________ processing.

Top-down processing.

When does bottom-up processing start?

When the environmental energy stimulates the receptors.

The key structural components of neurons are the...

cell Boyd, dendrites, and axons

The difficulty we have in recognizing even an obvious alteration in a scene is called ___________ blindness.

change

attention, perception, memory, and decision making are all different types of mental processes the mind engages in. These are know as different types of...

cognition

A mental conception of the layout of a physical space is know as a(n)

cognitive map

The idea that specific cognitive functions activate many areas of the brain is known as...

distributed representation

Proponents if multitasking would note _________ to support their opinion, whereas opponents of multitasking would point to _______ to justify their perspective.

divided attention; selective attention

Case studies from patients with brain trauma provide evidence that two or more mental processes function independently from each other. This is often observed when patient A has lost one mental function as a result of trauma to a particular location of the brain, while patient B has loss of another independent function resulting to injury to a different location in the brain. Taken together, these observations create what is known as:

double dissociation

You look at a rope coiled on a beach and are able to perceive it as a single strand because of the law of.....

good continuation

When we search a scene, initial fixations are most likely to occur on _________ areas.

high-saliency

Which of the following illustrates how we can miss things even if they are clearly visible?

inattention blindness

Viewpoint ________ is the ability to recognize the same object even if it is seen from different perspectives.

invariance

The task of determining the object responsible for a particular image on one's retina is called the...

inverse projection problem

Scene schema is...

knowledge about what is contained in a typical scene

Paul Broca's and Carl Wernicke's research provided early evidence for...

localized function.

The term semantics, when applied to perception, means the...

meaning of a scene, often related to what is happening within the scene

In Schnider & Shiffrin's experiment, in which participants were asked to indicate whether a target stimulus was present in a series of rapidly presented "frames," divided attention was easier

once processing had become automatic

What is a key difference between axons and dendrites?

one sends information and the other receives information

Speech segmentation is defined as...

organizing the sounds of speech into individual words

The use of a machine that tracks the movement of one's eyes can help reveal the shifting of one's _____ attention.

overt

Ebbinghaus's "memory" experiments were important because they...

plotted functions that describes the operation of the mind

According to Treisman's feature integration theory, the first stage of perception is called the _____ stage.

pre-attentive

The existence of transitional probabilities adds a(n) ________ quality to learning and using language.

predictive

Reaction time referee to the time between the _______ of a stimulus and a person's response to it.

presentation

Saccadic eye movement is a....

rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next

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

It's often said that "life doesn't exist in a vacuum." However, the emptiness of of _______ is critical for brain functioning.

synapses

If kittens are raised in an environment that contains only horizontal elements, you would predict that most of the neurons in their visual cortex would best respond to the visual presentation of a....

table

Strayer and Johnson's experiment (2001) involved simulated driving and the use of "hands-free" vs. "handheld" cell phones found that...

talking on either kind of phone impairs driving performance significantly and to the same extent.

The cocktail party effect is...

the ability to pay attention to one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli.

With the Stroop effect, you would expect to find longest response times when

the color and name differed

The results of Gauthier's "Greeble" experiment illustrates...

the effect of experience-dependent plasticity

The emergence of the "cognitive revolution"

was a gradual process that occurred over a few decades