PSY 3031 Midterm 2
Increasing the amplitude of a sound wave from 20 micropascals to 200 micropacals will increase the SPL from ______ to ______. Remember that the equation for calculating sound pressure level (SPL) is: SPL (dB) = 20log10(P/P0).
0 dB to 20 dB
As you increase the decibel level from 80 dB to 100 dB, the amplitude of the actual sound pressure wave increases from _____ to _____ . Remember that the equation for calculating sound pressure level (SPL) is: SPL (dB) = 20log10(P/P0)
0.2 Pa; 2 Pa
Humans are most sensitive to which of the following frequencies?
1000 Hz
The freuquencies that convey information about the phonemes in conversational speech are in the range of _____, which is conveniently located in the range of frequencies to which the human auditory system is most sensitive.
1000-3000 Hz
The range of human hearing is between _____ and _____ Hz.
20; 20,000.
An observer with typical visual acuity can resolve patterns of black and white stripes with spatial frequency up to
30 cycles per degree
The speed of sound through air is approximately
340 meters per second (1100 ft/s).
As a sound increases from 60dB to 80dB, you are most likely to perceive a ____ increase in loudness.
3X
As a sound decreases from 100dB to 80dB, you are most likely to perceive a ____ decrease in loudness.
3x
Visible light is defined as wavelengths between _____ and _____ for humans
400 ; 700 nanometers
For which frequency is there the smallest inter-aural level difference?
500 Hz
The two main categories of hearing loss are conductive and sensorineural. Give one common cause for each type of hearing loss, and describe what an audiologist can do to determine whether someone has conductive-type or sensorineural-type hearing loss.
A common cause for conductive hearing loss is infection. A common cause for sensorineural hearing loss and can be caused by exposure to loud noises. To determine the type of hearing loss someone has, an audiologist can determine where the hearing loss is taking place. If it is taking place in the ear canal, middle ear, or ear drum it is most likely conductive, if it is taking place in the inner ear it is most likely sensorineural.
Which statement best describes the use of hearing aides in the American population?
About a quarter of the people who could benefit from one use one
Which of the following is NOT part of the middle ear?
Auditory Canal
Which of the statements below regarding sound source localization is NOT true
Azimuth is an angle describing the location of a sound source in a vertical plane
"Tweet" the 3 primary kinds of aphasia.
Broca's aphasia, Wernickie's Aphasia, Anomic Aphasia
"Tweet" about how critical bands and auditory masking work.
Critical bands help one to distinguish between sounds and tones. Auditory masking occurs when the perception of one sound is affected by the presence of another sound.
Higher frequencies are associated with lower pitches and longer wavelengths.
False
Sensorineural hearing loss is
Generally not recoverable
Which of the following statements is most accurate?
Hearing loss is caused by a combination of natural aging processes and environmental damage.
"Place coding" refers to the fact that:
Inner hair cells representing different frequencies are located at different locations on the basilar membrane.
Having two ears allows people to determine where some sound is coming from (e.g., behind and to the left of your head). Specifically, the interaural ______ difference and the interaural _____ difference contribute to sound localization. How do these two phenomena help you localize the source of a sound?
Interaural time difference and interaural level difference. ITD helps you localize the source of low frequency sounds. ILD helps you localize the source of high frequency sounds.
When light reaches the retina at the surround of an on ganglion cell's receptive field, what happens to the cell's firing rate?
It decreases.
How is dark adaptation related to photo-bleaching of the retina?
Low sensitivity to light at the beginning of a dark-adaptation experiment is the result of photo-bleaching.
We only have high visual acuity in the fovea, but we need to see fine details at different image locations. What is the most energy-efficient way to solve this problem?
Make saccades with our eyes so we can look at different parts of the image.
One factor that often contributes to hearing loss is the loss of the _______ response of the outer hair cells, which amplifies the motion of the basilar membrane.
Motile
What is the standard unit for pressure (force per area)?
Pascal
What would be the result of having no cones in the peripheral retina?
Peripheral vision would be monochromatic.
What fact of the basilar membrane makes cochlear implants work?
Place coding of frequency
Wernicke's aphasia is also called
Receptive aphasia
Dark adaptation experiments, which test how observer's sensitivity to light when they move from bright to dark environments, show that:
Sensitivity to light increases in two phases, first dominated by cone vision, then rod vision.
The electromagnetic spectrum covers a huge range where
Short wavelength corresponds to high frequency
What is the basic reason that human observers make saccades when viewing an image?
So we can use the high visual acuity of the fovea to see fine detail at different image locations.
We usually have little trouble understanding speech, but research has shown that understanding speech actually requires a lot of neural processing. Describe one way that speech is complex/ambiguous/difficult, and describe one specific non-auditory cue used to understand speech when it might be ambiguous.
Speech can be difficult because everyone speaks differently. A non-auditory cue used to understand speech when it might be ambiguous would be lip reading. This cue can help one to understand what the person is saying.
"Tweet" a summary of what the cornea does for your vision.
The cornea controls and focuses the entry of light into the eye.
The fact that low frequencies are represented by hair cells at the apex of the basilar membrane and high frequencies are represented by hair cells at the base of the basilar membrane gives rise to:
The place code
Changing the harmonics of a note alters the quality of the resulting sound. This means that the manipulation of harmonics changes the
Timbre
What component of a complex sound is often called its quality, and results from components of a sound besides pressure level and frequency?
Timbre
Which of the following is FALSE about timbre?
Timbre is amplitude.
If a first sound is double the frequency of a second sound, the first sound is one octave higher in pitch than the second.
True
A cochlear implant is
a linear electrode array inserted into the cochlea
A phoneme is
a single sound.
Since neurons cannot fire ______, higher frequencies of sound are encoded by using a _____.
above 500 hz, timing code
Nearsightedness (myopia) occurs when the focusing power of the cornea is so strong that light rays from distant objects come to a focus before they reach the retina, and diverge again by the time they reach the retina. This is commonly corrected by:
adding a concave (diverging) lens in front of the cornea
Which of the following improves visual acuity?
adjusting the pupil diameter to between 2 & 5 mm AND increasing light levels AND using the fovea (all of the above)
Hearing aids work by
amplifying sound pressure in the ear canal
Loudness is primarily determined by the _____ of the sound wave.
amplitude
For the cochlear implant to be effective, a patient needs to have
an intact auditory nerve
Mach bands are illusory lines of light or dark to the right or left of an abrupt luminance change (e.g., a light gray/dark gray edge). Mach bands can be explained by.
antagonistic center/surround receptive field organization in the retina
The brain areas that have an impact on sound localization (where)
are located in dorsal cortical regions
In the human auditory system, different frequency channels
are preserved all the way to the auditory cortex, where we see tonotopic organization
The inter-aural timing difference (ITD) helps us localize signals along which spatial dimension?
azimuth
In the retina, _______ cells are found in the (middle) processing layer and _______ cells are in the (inner) output layer.
bipolar; ganglion
When a computerized voice changes the way that the first letter of the word "lake" is shaped, so it varies continuously from "rake" to "lake," most people hear an abrupt transition from "rake" to "lake," even though the change is actually very gradual. This is an example of
categorical perception.
A spectrogram is a representation of
changes in sound intensity over time with frequency represented on one axis, time on the other axis, and sound intensity represented by different shades of grey (or color)
Your brain uses prior experience to solve the distance problem for sounds. This means that something that sounds like a whisper, if it is loud, will seem:
close
The function of the middle ear is to
convert air pressure waves to vibrations in liquid.
Which factor commonly leads to permanent hearing loss:
damage from exposure to loud environments AND natural aging processes
The function of the outer ear is to
direct sound waves to the tympanic membrane.
Which of the following is an example of conductive hearing loss?
ear wax blocking the auditory canal
The head related transfer function (HRTF) relies on the fact that the shape of the pinnae changes the ____________ of sound are collected and funneled into the ear.
effectiveness with which different frequencies
We are most likely to assume sounds have different sources if they have different __________.
estimated locations, pitches, and timbres
Your brain uses prior experience to solve the distance problem for sounds. This means that something that sounds like a yell, if it is quiet, will seem:
far away
Pitch is primarily determined by the _____ of the sound wave.
frequency
A spectrogram shows:
frequency information as a function of time.
The McGurk effect is demonstrated by a speaker who is producing a sound that is inconsistent with the way his mouth is moving. When watching and listening to this demonstration, an observer will:
hear a third syllable that is predicted by neither the auditory cues nor the visual cues
Age-related hearing loss typically affects
high frequencies more than low frequencies.
Which of the following is an example of conductive hearing loss?
immobilization of the ossicles due to an ear infection
Phototransduction occurs when retinal changes shape in response to light. Retinal is found Group of answer choices
in rods and cones AND in the membranes of the disks in the outer segments of photoreceptors AND attached to one of four different types of opsin molecules (all answers are correct)
Sensorineural hearing loss typically results from damage to the ________ ear, while conductive hearing loss can result from damage to the ________.
inner ; middle
Retinal changes shape when
it absorbs energy from a photon with the right wavelength.
We know that there is plasticity in auditory cortex, which means that learning or practice can change the cortical representation of auditory stimuli. This predicts that the area of the auditory cortex that responds to musical notes should be
larger for musicians than non-musicians.
Which structures primarily control the pitch of speech?
larynx and vocal cords
Which of the following is not a direction in the coordinate system used to describe the location of a sound source?
longitude.
Which of the following is an example of sensorineural hearing loss?
loss of cilia on inner hair cells at base of basilar membrane.
Tinnitus is
often an indication that you have experienced hearing damage AND phantom ringing that you hear (both answers are correct)
Which part of the auditory system is NOT located in the brainstem?
organ of Corti
Which of the following contains the inner hair cells?
organ of corti
The bending of the cilia of the the ___ provides amplification of the motion of the basilar membrane.
outer hair cells
Tinnitus is
phantom ringing that you hear
The average voice onset time (VOT) for the sound /da/ is 18 ms, and the average VOT for the sound /ta/ is 91 ms. By 12 months of age, you learned a ________ that helped you decide whether the speaker was saying "da" or "ta", even though different speakers have different VOTs.
phonetic boundary
Hearing aids are:
placed inside or around the outer ear.
Grouping sounds together because they are similar in pitch is a _______ strategy for auditory scene segmentation, while picking a broken melody out of a lot of background clutter because it is familiar is an example of using a ________ strategy.
primitive; schema-based
A person with Wernicke's aphasia
produces fluent speech (syntax intact), but in nonsensical "word salads."
What is the term for the normal eye movements that occur rapidly and subconsciously while we're looking at a picture?
saccades
Rooms with lots of soft surfaces reflect sounds very poorly, creating ____ reverberation times.
short
Different kinds of indoor spaces should have different reverberation times. Lecture halls should have relatively _____ reverberation times, so words don't get mixed together, but concert halls should have relatively _____, so music blends.
short; long
The azimuth and elevation are sufficient to describe
the direction of the sound source but not its exact location
When you're looking at a baseball diamond, and your blind spot lands on one of the bases, what do you see where the base should be?
the ground around the base
Far-sightedness occurs when
the light from near objects focuses behind the retina
Destructive interference happens when
the pressure peak of one sound wave combines with the pressure "valley" of another
Constructive interference happens when
the pressure peaks of two sound waves add together
When a thunderstorm is coming, we see the lightning before we hear the thunder. This is because
the speed of sound in air is less than the speed of light.
Sometimes hearing is more useful than sight because
we can hear sounds coming from all directions but only see in front of us
When an ascending stream of beeps crossed a constant stream of beeps, we hear a "galloping" effect. This is because
we perceptually grouped the tones from the different streams only when they were similar in pitch.
We all produce language slightly differently. The McGurk Effect (when lip-reading vs. listening-only vs. lip-reading + listening produce different perceptions) demonstrates that
we use both visual and auditory cues to figure out what someone is saying
After exposure to very loud noise, you experience a temporary threshold elevation. This means that:
you have experienced some hearing damage, which will probably be hidden by the fact that your detection thresholds go back down after a few days
Damage to dorsal regions of cortex is most likely to affect
your ability to localize the source of a sound
As you get older, your near point (the point closest to your face where you can still focus) changes. This is because:
your lens is getting harder.
