AP PSYCHOLOGY: Sensation and Perception

The absolute threshold is defined as the stimulus intensity that an organism can detect

50% of the time

The process in which the lens adjusts its shape depending on the distance between the eye and the object viewed in order to project a clear image onto the retina is

Accommodation

Subliminal means

Below threshold

Which of the following is NOT one of the four basic tastes?

Citrus

Damage to the ossicles of the ear is going to cause

Conduction Hearing Loss

Light first enters the eye through a transparent structure on the surface of the eye called

Cornea

Which of the following best describes how we hear according to place theory?

Different sound frequencies vibrate different portions of the basilar membrane, producing different pitches.

According to the signal detection theory, if a subject detects a stimulus when no stimulus is actually present, this would be a

False Alarm

Cells in the cerebral cortex that respond selectively to specific features of complex visual stimuli are called

Feature Detectors

Rather than provide details about the party she just attended, Patty tried to give her overall impression, operating on the assumption of ____, that the whole may be greater than the mere sum of its parts

Gestalt psychology

Eric has been wearing red welding goggles for the past 30 minutes. Based on the opponent-process theory of color vision, when Eric takes off the red goggles he should expect that objects will temporarily appear to be

Green

Imagine that biologists have discovered an animal that has eyes very similar to human eyes, but that the only receptor cells in the retina are rods; there are no cones. Based on what is known about human vision you might expect that this animal would

Have no color vision

If a radio play-by-play announcer describing each pitch during a baseball game fails to notice a naked fan running across the infield, the announcer would be demonstrating

Inattentional blindness

The structure that controls the size of the pupil is the

Iris

Which of the following is an example of visual capture?

McGurk Effect

The fact that the corner of a building thrust toward the viewer looks shorter than an inside corner thrust away from the viewer can be accounted for by the

Müller-Lyer illusion

As a result of the pathway through which visual information travels from the eye to the visual cortex, images seen in the left visual field are received in

Only in the right visual cortex

Two identical lines are drawn on railroad tracks. The tracks appear to move away from us due to linear perspective. We will perceive the higher line as larger because of the lack of relative size depiction. What is the name of this phenomenon?

Ponzo Illusion

The fact that we are generally much more aware of the changes in our sensory environments than we are of the constants is the general idea behind

Sensory Adaption

The fact that your criterion for "hearing" mysterious noises at night may change after a rash of burglaries in your neighborhood can best be explained by

Signal Detection Theory

The gate-control theory suggests that incoming pain sensations may be blocked at the

Spinal Cord

The visual cortex is to the auditory cortex as the occipital lobe is to the

Temporal Lobe

Reversible figures (old and young woman) illustrate the observation that

The same visual input can result in different perceptions.

Our perception of the brightness of a color is affected mainly by

Wavelengths

Which of the following statements is the best summary of the concept of size constancy?

We perceive an object's size as unchanging even though the image on the retina grows smaller as the object moves farther away.

Which of the following is NOT one of the primary skin sensations?

Wetness

The lens in the eye

bends entering light rays and focuses them onto the retina.

Vanessa describes a new melody that she heard at a concert by telling you each of the individual notes, in the order that they were played. In providing this type of description, it appears that Vanessa processed the melody using

bottom-up processing

When Justin looked up at the night sky, he perceived the three stars that make up the belt in the constellation Orion as a single complete figure, rather than as individual stars. Justin's perception of the night sky illustrates the Gestalt principle of

closure.

The structure of the ear that transduces sound vibrations into nerve impulses is the

cochlea

The retina is to the eye as the

cochlea in the ear

The wavelength of light mainly affects our perception of

color

When we view cars parked on a distant parking lot we know that the cars are not actually the size of toy cars because of a perceptual

constancy

As the large butterfly flew toward Richard, he could tell it was getting closer because he could feel his eyes turning inward toward his nose as he watched it. In this instance, Richard was able to judge how far away the butterfly was using the depth cue of

convergence

The visual cliff is a laboratory device for testing ________ in infants.

depth perception

Which of the following is NOT a structure of the inner ear?

eardrum

The correct order that auditory information travels as sounds enter the ear is from the auditory canal to

eardrum - ossicles - oval window - cochlea.

Relative height is a cue involving our perception of objects higher in our field of vision as:

farther away

Noticing a brown rabbit running through a field of brown grass depends on which of the following Gestalt principles?

figure-ground

Food generally tastes bland when you have a severe head cold because

flavor is influenced by smell as well as taste, and with a reduced sense of smell your sense of taste will be diminished.

When a clarinet plays a high C followed by a low C, these two notes are perceived differently because they differ in

frequency

Which theory of hearing states that the perception of pitch depends on the rate at which the entire basilar membrane vibrates?

frequency theory

The maximum firing rate for individual neurons is 1000 neural impulses per second. This biological limitation would make it difficult for

frequency theory to fully explain pitch perception

The sense associated with the perception of taste is referred to as the

gustatory system.

Sensory adaptation can explain all of the following EXCEPT

hearing your name spoken in a noisy room.

The place theory of pitch perception BEST accounts for the perception of ____ frequency sounds.

high

Gibson and Walk's visual cliff experiments demonstrated that very young infants won't move over the visual cliff. These findings indicate that:

humans may be born with some depth perception.

When your psychology professor is lecturing to your class, your professor can tell which students are sitting in the first, second, third, etc., row, in part because students in the closer rows obstruct his/her view of students in more distant rows. This illustrates the depth perception cue of

interposition

Juanita was drinking some warm punch and she thought she could just detect a faint taste of nutmeg in the punch. However when she took another sip the taste wasn't there. On the third sip she could just make out the taste of nutmeg again. It is very likely that the amount of nutmeg in the punch was

just at her absolute threshold for taste.

If your roommate slowly and carefully turns up the volume on the stereo until you can determine "now it's louder than it was before," it would be MOST accurate to say the volume increased by a

just noticeable difference.

As the farmer looked across her field, the parallel rows of young corn plants appeared to converge in the distance. This provided her with a distance cue known as:

linear perspective

Which of the following principles does the Ponzo illusion use to achieve its effect?

linear perspective

The depth perception cue based on the observation that parallel lines converge in the distance is

linear perspective.

Hue is to pitch as brightness is to

loudness

The perception associated with the amplitude of a sound wave is

loudness

The Gestalt principle of proximity refers to the idea that

objects nearer to each other are seen as forming a unit.

Of the following, the only sensory system that does not project upward to the cerebral cortex through the thalamus, is

olfaction

The sensory receptors for smell are referred to as

olfactory cilia

Which theory of color vision states that color perception depends on receptors that make antagonistic responses to three pairs of colors?

opponent process theory

The main pathway visual signals travel from the eye to the visual cortex is

optic nerve - optic chiasm - thalamus - occipital lobe

A perceptual set implies that

people often see what they expect to see

Charlie's eyes function normally but he is unable to recognize familiar faces. Charlie is suffering from

prosopagnosia.

If an object of known size appears small, your brain assumes it to be far away from you. This rule describes the monocular depth cue:

relative size

The structure of the eye that absorbs light, processes images and sends visual information to the brain is the

retina

Someone who loses sight in one eye would also lose which of the following depth

retinal disparity

The binocular depth cue that relies on the fact that objects within 25 feet project images to slightly different locations on the right and left retinas, so that the right and left eyes see slightly different views of the object is known as

retinal disparity.

Night and peripheral vision depend mainly on ____, while daylight and acute vision depend mainly on ____.

rods; cones

Which of the following statements is the best example of lightness constancy?

seeing a white t-shirt as still white even in a room with very dim lighting

While ____ involves the stimulation of sense organs, ____ involves the selection, organization, and interpretation of sensory input.

sensation; perception

If one is subjected to prolonged stimulation, eventually

sensory adaptation will occur.

Although textbooks frequently cast a trapezoidal image on the retina (when turned on an angle), students typically perceive the books as rectangular objects. This illustrates the importance of:

shape constancy.

A person without depth perception would have the most difficulty with which of the following tasks?

shooting a free throw in a basketball game

According to ____, the ability to detect a stimulus depends not only on the intensity of the stimulus but also on other variables such as your motivation and your expectations.

signal detection theory

Blake was at a football game, and even though people wearing green jackets were spread fairly evenly throughout the stands, he still perceived all the people in green jackets as a single group of visiting fans. Blake's perception is most consistent with the Gestalt principle of

similarity.

Your friend Jim creates a flip cartoon during a boring meeting by drawing a slightly different image in the bottom right corner on all the pages in his notepad. When you flip the corners, it appears Jim's flip cartoon is moving because of:

stroboscopic movement.

The sand at Jason's feet appeared coarse, and he could see the individual grains of sand. However, the sand down the beach appeared to be much finer and less granular. This apparent difference in the sand may have partially resulted from the depth cue of

texture gradient.

According to psychologists, the smallest difference between two stimuli that a specific sense can detect is

the just noticeable difference (JND).

As Briana drove down the highway, the pickets of the fences moved past her in a blur, but the mountains in the distance didn't appear to move at all. Briana was experiencing

the monocular cue for depth called motion parallax.

Which theory of color vision BEST explains why the color of an afterimage is the complement of the original color?

the opponent process theory

The lights around the movie marquee flashed on-and-off in succession. However, Jerome did not perceive them as separate lights flashing, but instead saw a continuous band of light moving around the edge of the marquee. Jerome's perception illustrates

the phi phenomenon

Our sense of balance is called the _____________ sense and its receptors are located in the ____________.

vestibular; semicircular canels

The blind spot in the eye is

where the optic nerve exits the back of the eye.

One key gender difference that has been found with respect to tasting is that

women are more likely than men to be supertasters.