CHAPTER 2

Which of the following statements best describes how neurons communicate with one another?

A chemical process takes place in the synapse

Which of the following is consistent with the idea of localization of function?

All of the above

Josiah is trying to speak to his wife, but his speech is very slow and labored, often with jumbled sentence structure.

Broca's area

The key structural components of neurons are

Cell body, dendrites, axon

Which of the following procedures can be used to help determine the exact way in which nerve fibers communicate with each other?

DTI

Ramon is looking at pictures of scantily clad women in a magazine. He is focusing on their body parts, particularly their chest and legs. Which part of Ramon's brain is activated by this viewing

Extrastriate body area (EBA)

Which of the following statements is the most accurate with regard to specificity coding?

It is unlikely to be correct because there are too many stimuli in the world to have a separate neuron for each

Which of the following brain imaging techniques, discovered in 1908, is now a standard technique for detecting tumors and other brain abnormalities?

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)

Sarah has experienced brain damage making it difficult for her to understand spatial layout. Which area of her brain has most likely sustained damage?

Parahippocampal place area (PPA)

Which part of the brain is important for touch, pressure, and pain?

Parietal lobe

Damage to Wernicke's area is in which lobe of the brain?

Temporal

Brain-imaging techniques can determine all of the following EXCEPT

The structure of individual neurons

A specific person's face is represented in the nervous system by the firing of

a group of neurons each responding to a number of different faces

Action potentials occur in the

axon

Early studies of brain tissue that used staining techniques and microscopes from the 19th century described the "nerve net." These early understandings were in error in the sense that the nerve net was believed to be

continuous

Brain imaging has made it possible to

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

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

distributed processing.

Neurons that respond to specific qualities (e.g., such as orientation, movement, and length) that make up objects are called

feature detectors

When recording from a single neuron, stimulus intensity is represented in a single neuron by the

firing rate of the action potentials

The ____ lobe of the cortex receives information from all of the senses and is responsible for coordination of the senses, as well as higher cognitive functions such as thinking and problem solving

frontal

You are walking down the street and see a really nice car drive by. You notice many features of it: its color, movement, shape, location, and so forth. All of these features are processed

in different parts of the brain

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

localization of function

Recording from single neurons in the brain has shown that neurons responding to specific types of stimuli are often clustered in specific areas. These results support the idea of

localization of function

Hemoglobin molecules in areas of high brain activity

lose some of the oxygen they are transporting

Groups of neurons or structures that are connected within the nervous system are called ____ .

neural networks

The concept of distributed neural coding proposes that a specific object, like a face, is represented across a number of

neurons

A grandmother cell responds

only to a specific stimulous

A 10-month-old baby is interested in discovering different textures, comparing the touch sensations between a soft blanket and a hard wooden block. Tactile signals such as these are received by the ____ lobe.

parietal

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

picket fence

The fusiform face area (FFA) in the brain is often damaged in patients with

propopagnosia

When conducting an experiment on how stimuli are represented by the firing of neurons, you notice that neurons respond differently to different faces. For example, Arthur's face causes three neurons to fire, with neuron 1 responding the most and neuron 3 responding the least. Roger's face causes three different neurons to fire, with neuron 7 responding the least and neuron 9 responding the most. Your results support ____ coding.

sparse

A synapse is

the gap that separates two different neurons

The occipital lobe is

the part of the cerebral cortex where the visual cortex is located

In a procedure called diffusor tensor imaging (DTI), the way in which ____ diffuse(s) along the length of a nerve fiber is measured to determine how different nerves communicate with each other.

water

The temporal lobe is

where signals are received from the auditory system