Psychophysiology Chapters 1-3 Study Guide

When did the Human Genome project take place?

1990s

How many chromosomes are found in cells of the human body?

46

Helmholtz calculated the velocity of the electrical nerve impulse to be about ______.

90 feet/second

Which of the following is true of gene activity?

A gene may become active at only a certain time of the life cycle.

Dr. Smith believes that both mind and the brain are made of physical matter. Which philosopher would agree most with Dr. Smith's views?

Democritus

Which observation has provided support for localization?

Broca's autopsy of the patient who had lost the ability to speak

Which of the following is a recent discovery in the field of behavioral neuroscience?

Genes for schizophrenia have been identified.

What is one concern that has been raised over explaining behaviors with a hereditary cause?

Hereditary explanations mean that individuals cannot be held accountable for their bad behaviors.

What impact does the gene Robo1 have on brain development?

It controls a chemical that repels developing axons from the brain's midline.

Which of the following is true about the prefrontal cortex in humans?

It is the largest area in the brain.

What is true of the blood-brain barrier?

It requires special transporters to move amino acids and vitamins into the brain.

Which of the following is true of local potential but not action potential?

It results from a depolarization of the cell membrane.

Keysha's mother is homozygous for a dominant allele for unattached earlobes and her father is heterozygous for a recessive allele for attached earlobes. Keysha has two siblings. What of the following is a true statement about Keysha and her siblings?

Keysha and her siblings will all have the same phenotype.

Which of the following scientists provided the first insights into the role of electricity in biological functioning?

Luigi Galvani

Which of the following is an accurate statement about neural networks?

Neural networks are responsible for a lot of the processing that is done in the brain.

Which of the following is true about the firing patterns of neurons?

Neurons can fire action potentials with varying intervals between spikes.

Which of the following is true of the migration stage of development of the nervous system?

New neurons move from the ventricular zone to their final location.

When depolarization of the cell membranes reaches the threshold, which of the following occurs?

Sodium ion channels open.

Which of the following conclusions was reached from observations at autopsy on the brain of a man who had an inability to speak?

Speech is localized in the left side of the brain.

Which of the following is a true statement about genes?

The Y chromosome has fewer genes than the X chromosome.

Which of the following statements is most consistent with the materialistic monist view of the mind-brain problem?

The brain and mind are both physical.

Which of the following statements is most consistent with the idealistic monism view of the mind-brain problem?

The mind and brain are not physical.

Which statement below is true of the vulnerability model?

The model shows how nature and nurture interact to produce a characteristic or disorder.

Intensity of a stimulus, such as the intensity of noise that a person eperiences, can be communicated through __________.

The number of neurons that fire action potentials.

Which of the following is true of patient with phantom pain?

The pain is a result of cortical reorganization following loss of a body part.

Which statement is true of the occipital lobe?

There are secondary areas detecting color, movement, and form.

Which of the following is an implication of the absolute refractory period?

This limits how often action potentials can occur.

What is one function of hyperpolarization in the nervous system?

This serves to keep excitatory signals in check.

________________ means that genes contribute a predisposition for a disorder that may or may not exceed the threshold to produce the disorder.

Vulnerability

Which of the following would be a question that a behavioral neuroscientist would investigate?

Which neurotransmitter systems are responsible for the development of drug addiction?

Which of the following statements is consistent with the vulnerability model as applied to mathematical ability?

Your ability to be successful in math classes can be expanded beyond genetic predispositions with good study habits.

Nicotinic and muscarinic receptors are two types of ________ receptors.

acetylcholine

Which of the following is a brief, rapid reversal of the neuron's potential from -70 mV to +30 or +40 mV and back?

action potential

Assuming that cortical development for color perception in the cat is similar to that for line orientation, a cat reared in an environment in which only the color yellow was present would most likely _________.

be able to experience only the color yellow.

While a mature gorilla may appear to display practically every anatomical feature in common with humans, we all have one proportionally larger feature in our brains. This is the ___________.

cerebral hemispheres

If you have ever awoken from sleep to scribble down a brilliant idea, you can probably relate to Loewi, whose own sleep was interrupted with notes with an insight about _________.

chemical transmission at the synapse.

The action potential spreads through an axon by ___________.

depolarizing adjacent membrane to threshold, triggering another action potential

After Debbie's car accident, as the doctor asked her if it hurt here or if it hurt when he pressed this hard, Debbie understood why she could tell the differences in amount of pressure the doctor used; her sensory neurons coded the different pressures via _________.

different rates of firing in neurons

A typical lissencephalic individual would have major behavioral deficits, but the opening vignette of Karen illustrates that __________.

effects of apparently identical brain impairment can very greatly.

Reaching conclusions about the brain by observation is the method for obtaining knowledge called __________.

empiricism

Karl Lashley is known for developing the theory of __________, which stated that behaviors arise from equal involvement of all the parts of the brain.

equipotentiality

Which of the following results in the greatest amount of brain damage following a stroke?

excess calcium entering neurons in the affected area.

Muscles contain ________ receptors.

excitatory nicotinic

Two groups of rats were tested on how fast they could learn to run a maze. Group 1 was given enrichment (handled every day and had toys in the cage), while Group 2 had not enrichment. The result of enrichment on speed of learning the maze was most likely ____________.

facilitating; the group with enrichment learned the maze at a faster rate.

The plans for cellular processes are contained within our _______.

genes

Descartes used a _________ model for the activity of the human brain.

hydraulic

If the resting potential of a membrane changed from -70 mV to -75 mV, this would be ___________.

hyperpolarization

A(n) ___________ would be found bridging between a sensory neuron and a motor neuron in the spinal cord.

interneuron

In humans, synaptic construction and reconstruction _____________.

is strongly influenced by experience

Brian is studying for the licensing exam to become a social worker. He needs to retain the information from that exam for many years to be effective at his job. In order for that to occur, this information should be processed by ______________.

metabotropic receptors

A disease that destroys myelin is __________.

multiple sclerosis

You have been given the task of developing an animal that needs to have an efficient nervous system, and the animal can be no larger than a human. What feature can you include in the animal's nervous system to ensure it can respond quickly to its environment?

myelinated axons

Immature behavior during adolescence might be physiologically predictable because ___________.

myelination is not complete until that time, especially in the prefrontal cortex.

By stimulating taste pathways in the brains of rats who were not exposed to sucrose but using firing patterns of neurons that were recorded from rats who were drinking a sucrose solution, researchers determined that ________.

neural firing patterns can encode taste stimuli.

An organism's complexity is ________________ the number of its genes.

not correlated with

Organization in the spinal cord is ___________.

opposite of the brain's organization, with white matter on the outside and the grey matter in the interior.

Which of the following structures is not duplicated on both sides of the brain?

pineal gland

About 97% of our DNA does not encode __________.

proteins

An example of an X-linked trait is __________.

red-green color-blindness

The ______ is the difference in electrical potential between the inside and outside of an inactive neuron.

resting potential

Among humans, the relationship between brain size and intelligence is _______________.

small with high variability.

Jonas suffered a stroke in Broca's area. The result is most likely an inability to ____________.

speak in a coherent manner.

Just as many people want to mistakenly compare the brain's "information processing" capability and speed to that of a computer, the speed of neural impulses is often erroneously compared to the _______.

speed of electrical current

The lissencephalic individual in the chapter's opening vignette had a brain that lacked _________.

sulci

The parietal lobes are located __________.

superior to the lateral fissure and between the central sulcus and the occipital lobe.

As humans get older, the number of ___________ in the brain increases while the number of neurons decreases.

synapses

The ___________ takes in visual, hearing, touch, and taste information and passes these types of information on to the cortex.

thalamus

According to Descartes, ___________ was where the mind interacted with the body.

the pineal gland

The change in a neuron's potential caused by the arrival of neurotransmitter is called

the postsynaptic potential

In a resting neuron, which forces pushes potassium ions into the cell?

the sodium-potassium pump

In the midbrain, ____________.

the superior colliculi allow us to visually track a moving object.

The type of postsynaptic potential produced by a neurotransmitter depends on which neurotransmitter is released and ____________.

the type of receptor it binds to.

According to the 19th-century anatomist Bischoff, women were considered intellectually inferior solely because ___________.

they typically have smaller brains than men.

If you were able to build a time machine and wanted to travel back to observe the first psychology laboratory, where would you go?

to Wilhelm Wundt's lab in Germany

Sarah threw rocks of different sizes into a pond. Just as ripple size was a function of size of rock, graded potentials _________ as a function of stimulus intensity.

vary in magnitude