Cognition and Learning - Sullins test 2

Which of the following sentences best illustrates the effect that Gestalt principles have on perception?

"Go beyond the information given."

In order to summarize the Gestalt psychologists' movement in a few words, one might say

"The perceptual whole is different than the sum of its parts."

The visual system relies on a _________________________________________

"divide and conquer" strategy

The photoreceptors stimulate ________________, which in turn excite _____________ _____________

(1) Bipolar cells (2) Ganglion cells

Advantages of parallel processing (simultaneous processing)

-The possibility of mutual influences among multiple systems - Speed: all analysis in brain areas go forward immediately when the input appears before eyes with no waiting time

What's lateral inhibition?

A pattern in which cells, when stimulated, inhibit the activity of neighboring cells.

Participants are shown pictures of two alternating scenes that are separated by a brief blank interval. The scenes are identical except for one small detail. In this, case participants find it hard to detect the change. Which of the following statements is most likely to be true?

A similar effect can also be found with movies and in actual live events (where participants fail to detect changes that have been made). A similar effect can also be found with movies (where participants fail

The lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) acts as

A way station between the eye and the occipital cortex, located in the thalamus.

The pattern "divide and conquer" can be seen in: _________

Area V1, the site on the occipital lobe where axons from the LGN first reach the cortex.

What traits do rods and cones share?

Both are light-sensitive cells at the back of the retina that launch neural processes of vision

Orientation-specific visual fields

Cells fire at their maximum only when a stimulus containing an edge of just the right orientation appears within their receptive fields. These cells can be thought as "edge detectors"

"movement detectors" cells

Cells that fire strongly if a stimulus moves.

Explain difference between center-surround cells

Center-surround cells have an increase neural firing frequency whenever light hits the center receptive field and a mild neural firing frequency whenever light hits the surround receptive field

Which of the following statements most accurately describes visual illusions?

Cognitive principles that generally help us can cause illusions in some cases.

The term "top-down processing" can be interchanged with the term "________ processing."

Concept-driven

________ are located primarily in the fovea, while ________ are located primarily in the periphery.

Cones; rods

Jose is walking toward Dan, who is standing still. As Dan watches Jose move toward him, a series of physical and perceptual events will occur. Which of the following is NOT one of those events?

Dan will consciously make the effort to calculate Jose's distance based on the size of the retinal image.

The neurophysiologists awarded for their exploration of the mammalian visual system:

David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel

How does lateral inhibition contributes to edge perception? (edge enhancement)

Edge enhancement is produced by lateral inhibition and it help us to perceive the outline that defines an object's shape.

If we overload attention by giving someone too much to do, we would expect to see what change in feature-binding abilities?

Errors in feature binding

Which of the following statements is FALSE about automatic tasks?

Executive control cannot override automaticity.

Participants in a tachistoscopic procedure are shown the sequence CQRN. Participants misperceive this string as CORN. In a feature-net account, which of the following statements probably does NOT contribute to this effect?

Feature nets are generally unable to identify non-words.

"Where" system

From the occipital lobe to the parietal cortex, this system guides your actions based on your perception of where an object is locate

All of the following statements are true of patients with unilateral neglect syndrome EXCEPT

If an object previously attended to is moved into the ignored half of the world, patients will start to ignore the object.

The face/vase example illustrates what important principle of perceptual organization?

If the input is ambiguous, the image can be interpreted in different ways at different times.

Shadowing can provide a cue for depth. For example, if a shadow appears on the bottom of a circle, the object appears convex. However, if the shadow appears on the top of the object, it appears concave. This happens because

In the real world, light comes from above more often than from below.

Which of the following would NOT be considered an advantage of parallel processing in the visual system?

Information is processed only once, making it efficient.

Jillian is participating in an experiment in which she was asked to shadow a message presented to the left ear while simultaneously ignoring a message presented to the right ear. Jillian is LEAST likely to detect which of the following changes in the signals?

Initially, the right ear's message contains a male voice reading a coherent passage, but this is then replaced by the same voice reading a sequence of random words.

Which of the following statements about a feature-net model is FALSE?

It can be applied to recognition of faces.

Which of the following statements is NOT true of executive control?

It underlies habitual responding but not goal-directed behaviors.

Which of the following statements about the visual stimulus, light, is FALSE?

Light perceived as red is associated with longer wavelengths, relative to blue light.

Moore and Egeth (1997) asked participants to rate which of two lines was longer. Background dots were presented with the lines. On some trials, the dot pattern was a visual illusion, designed to manipulate the perceived length of the lines. Moore and Egeth found that

One can be influenced by events one is not conscious of

Which of the following statements best describes viewpoint-dependent object recognition?

One must match the current view of an object with a view of the object stored in memory, using the process of rotation.

________ cells in the LGN are specialized for spatial analysis and form detection, whereas ________ cells are specialized for the detection of motion and depth.

Parvocellular; magnocellular

"what" system

Plays a major role n the identification of visual objects. Passed along to the cortex of the temporal lobe

There are several reasons why practice can improve performance. Which of the following statements is NOT a good reason?

Practice means that the response selector is no longer needed

Single-cell recording technique

Procedure through which investigators can record, moment by moment, the pattern of electrical changes within a single neuron

Patients who have suffered damage to the occipital-parietal pathway (the "where" system) will have difficulties with which of the following tasks?

Reaching in the correct direction to retrieve the toothbrush

Which of the following statements is true about the recognition of inverted faces?

Recognition of inverted faces is harder than for upright faces.

In a study of spatial attention, participants are shown a neutral cue, a high-validity prime (correctly predicting the location of the target 80% of the time), or a misleading cue to prime the location of an upcoming target. Which of the following statements is true?

Response times to a neutral cue are faster than response times to a misleading cue

What are the two types of photoreceptors?

Rods and cones

Difference between rods and cones

Rods are responsible for vision at low light levels, while cones are active at higher light levels and are capable of color vision and high spatial acuity. (opposites)

In a variety of paradigms, priming the wrong detector leads to slower responding, compared to neutral priming. That is, getting prepared for one target seems to hinder performance for other targets. What does this finding reveal about selective attention?

Selective attention draws on a limited-capacity system.

Jenna sees a picture of a black lab standing in front of its owner. The dog is blocking part of the owner's leg, so that some of the leg is unavailable to Jenna. How is Jenna likely to perceive this image?

She will think the leg continues behind the body of the dog. people generally "fill in" missing perceptual information, guided by the Gestalt principles

What are photoreceptors?

Specialized neural cells that respond directly to the incoming light

"divide and conquer" strategy

Strategy with different types of cells in different types or areas of the cortex, each specializing in a particular kind of analysis.

The fusiform face area (FFA) is known to be an area that is specifically responsive to faces. Which of the following statements is also true about the FFA?

Tasks requiring other subtle distinctions within a category (e.g., identifying different birds or cars) also produce high levels of activation in this area.

Lateral inhibition leads to which perceptual experience?

The edge of an object is enhanced.

Recognition errors (like mistaking CQRN for CORN) lead us to what conclusion about feature nets?

The interactive nature of feature nets usually allows us to identify stimuli, but can also lead to errors.

The Necker cube is an example of an ambiguous figure. Which of the following statements regarding the cube is FALSE?

The lines on the page contradict one another, so that the perception has to "overrule" the information given.

The single-cell recording technique allows to define the cell's receptive field, which is_________________

The size and shape of the are in the visual world to which that cell responds

In which of the following situations would we expect the fastest response time?

The stimulus being presented to the participant is the stimulus the participant was expecting.

What's the fovea?

The very center of the retina. This is the region of the retina with the greatest acuity.

parallel processing

The visual system relies on a system in which many different analysis are going on simultaneously.

Which of the following statements about the retina is FALSE?

There are three types of photoreceptors.

Which of the following statements does NOT illustrate the difference between rods and cones?

There are three types of rods (for three different wavelengths of light) and only one type of cone.

When identifying non-word letter strings that are presented very briefly, participants tend to make specific kinds of errors. How would these errors be best described?

They tend to misidentify strange letter combinations as more common letter combinations.

Participants are asked to listen to a tape-recorded message and to shadow the message as they hear it. Which of the following tasks will be easiest to combine with this shadowing task?

Viewing a series of pictures, followed by a test measuring memory for the pictures

Some researchers have compared visual attention to a searchlight beam sweeping across the visual field. Which of the following claims about this beam is NOT currently supported by evidence?

Visual acuity is highest for objects appearing "within" the "beam."

Which of the following does NOT provide an example for parallel processing in the visual system?

Visual information is sent from the retina, to the LGN, to the visual cortex.

Posner, Snyder, and Davidson (1980) examined spatial attention using arrows as a prime. Most of the time the arrow pointed to the area where the stimulus would appear, but 20% of the time it did not. They compared reaction times (RTs) when the cue was valid, when it was invalid, and when a neutral cue was presented. Which of the following statements was NOT supported by their findings?

We can attend to two different locations without a reduction in performance.

Some people have sustained brain damage and lost the ability to identify color. Other people sustained damage to a different area of the brain and lost the ability to detect motion. What does this indicate about our visual system?

We have specialized areas for processing different kinds of visual information.

It seems inefficient to need to rely on so many different cues for depth perception. Why, then, do we have so many disparate cues?

We use different cues in different situations.

The distribution of the photoreceptors explains what?

Why we are better able to see very dim light out of the corner of our eyes.

Which of the following statements most accurately represents the order of events involved in interpreting a visual stimulus?

You perceive the components and interpret the stimulus in a parallel fashion.

Priming based on specific expectations about the identity of the upcoming stimulus produces

a benefit for processing if the expectations are correct but slows processing if the expectations are incorrect.

The word-superiority effect refers to the fact that it is easier to recognize

a letter within the context of a word than it is to recognize a letter presented by itself.

One way that we can perceive depth is through our awareness of the adjustment our lens is making. This cue would be

a monocular depth cue.

Which situation is the most difficult (and most dangerous)?

a novice driver talking on a cell phone

Ganglion cells A, B, and C are next to each other in the retina and inhibit each other laterally. If light is hitting the entire receptive fields of A and B, but only partially hitting the receptive field of C, what will happen?

a. A will be the most active cell. b. B will be the most active cell. c. C will be the most active cell. d. All cells will be equally active.

You are at the zoo watching a tiger sleep. It suddenly awakes and lurches in your direction. Spatial position would NOT provide information about the tiger's

a. form b. color c. motion patterns d. dangerous nature

The primary visual cortex is located

a. immediately behind one's eyeballs. b.in the middle of the brain, near the thalamus. c.at the part of the cortex that is farthest from the eyes. d.in the parietal lobe.

Attention is best characterized as a(n)

achievement

A response threshold is the

activation level at which a response occurs.

Brad is able to read a clock, but is unable to see the arms of a clock move from position to position. He is suffering from

akinetopsia.

Which of the following systems is responsible for achieving and maintaining an alert state in the brain?

alerting

"late selection" view of attention suggests that

all inputs are processed to a reasonable degree; however, only the attended input reaches consciousness.

A researcher wishes to define the receptive field for a particular neuron in the visual cortex. To do this, the researcher will need to specify

an area in the visual field within which targets will cause the cell to fire.

Bob suffered brain damage and now has difficulty recognizing objects. He was shown a clock and was asked to draw it, but drew only a square. However, when asked to draw a clock from memory, he was able to do it. Bob is likely suffering from

apperceptive agnosia.

Laura suffered brain damage and now has difficulty identifying objects. Specifically, she can see components, but has a hard time putting them together. She is likely suffering from

apperceptive agnosia.

In tachistoscopic recognition, participants often make over regularization errors. These are errors in which participants

are shown a pattern such a MJLK but perceive it as MILK.

Apperceptive agnosia and associative agnosia both involve difficulties with object recognition; however, they differ in that

associative agnosia involves problems linking visual forms together.

Which of the following refers to the problem of reuniting aspects of a scene that were initially processed by distinct brain systems?

binding problem

Human brains have a distinct division-of-labor strategy. Each task is achieved as a result of multiple brain areas working together. But the work of the various parts of the brain must be compiled into a finished whole. The issue of how this reassembly works is referred to as the

binding problem.

The evidence from unilateral neglect patients and patients with normal attentional abilities suggests that

both space- and object-based attention are important in attention.

What sort of processing is dependent on factors in the environment or in the stimulus?

bottom-up

Imagine you are reading a puzzling email from a friend. You identify the words, but have a hard time "reading between the lines." In this example, word identification involves ________ processing while "reading between the lines" involves ________ processing.

bottom-up; top-down

If attention is like a spotlight, then feature search is a(n) ________ spotlight, while a search for a combination of features is a ________ spotlight.

broad; focused

What's the optic nerve?

bundle of nerve fibers. This is the nerve tract that leaves the eyeball and carries information to various sites in the brain.

According to the RBC model, geons are NOT

capable of identification if they are partially obstructed.

Participants are shown a pair of similar pictures separated by a blank interval. The pictures are identical except for a single aspect (e.g., a man is wearing a hat in one scene but not in the other). In these kinds of tasks, participants often find it hard to detect the change. This phenomenon is known as change

change blindness.

Patty is asked to find a red square among a display that also contains blue squares and red circles. This task requires what kind of search process?

combination

Which of the following is NOT one of the Gestalt principles governing perception?

complexity

Attention seems to be necessary for

conscious perception.

Despite the fact that sensory stimuli can change from moment to moment, we perceive the details (color, shape, etc.) of an image to be stable because of

constancy.

A researcher has identified the receptive field for a neuron and has determined that the receptive field has a center-surround organization. If the researcher were to shine light into the entire receptive field, including both the center and the surrounding areas, we would expect the neuron to

continue firing at its resting rate.

A tachistoscope is a device used to

display stimuli briefly.

Researchers have used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt portions of the healthy brain. When asking participants to search for a target, we expect TMS applied to the parietal lobe to

disrupt the search for a target defined by a conjunction of features (e.g., "Find the shape that is red and round").

Studies looking at electrical activity in the brain suggest that the processing steps for attended stimuli and unattended stimuli are

distinguishable as soon as 80 ms after stimulus presentation.

In a study of visual selection, participants were shown a video of people throwing and catching a ball. Some of the people were wearing white shirts and some were wearing black shirts. Participants were asked to attend only to the group of people wearing white shirts and count the number of times they threw the ball. In this study, participants

easily completed the task, but in the process failed to notice some other peculiar events that occurred.

Cells detecting the boundary of a surface are subject to less lateral inhibition than cells detecting the center of the same surface. This leads to an effect called

edge enhancement.

Mistakes in word reading occur under a feature-net model of recognition. This results because the feature net encourages ________ over ________.

efficiency; accuracy

Movements of attention are

faster than eye movements

Marcus is searching for a red square among an array of red and blue squares. Marcus is easily (and quickly) able to identify the red square because he is engaged in a ________ search

feature

When engaged in a ________ search, set size does not matter. However, when engaged in a ________ search, set size has an impact on performance

feature; combination

Which of the following would be considered a benefit of a feature net?

flexibility to deal with unclear inputs

Cones are more frequent at the ___________

fovea

The cues to depth perception:

generally rely on simple principles of physics.

The term "geons" is short for

geometric ions.

Compared to detectors that have not fired recently, a detector that has fired recently is likely to

have a higher activation level.

To perceive the visual world, we have to reunite various elements of a scene together so that these elements are perceived in an integrated fashion. Which of the following is NOT likely to be involved in this task?

iconic memory

In dichotic listening tasks, most participants are able to

identify physical attributes of the message on the unattended channel.

Julie has sustained damage to the "what" system in her brain. She will likely have difficulty with which of the following tasks?

identifying a chair

Mach bands

illusory light and dark bands near a light-dark border

The task of shadowing involves

immediately repeating, word for word, the contents of a message.

Where does the "attentional spotlight" reside in the brain?

in the visual system/occipital lobe

Attention is limited in many ways. Which of the following statements is FALSE about attentional limits?

inattentional blindness.

Participants are instructed to fixate on a point on a computer screen and report on a "+" sign that appears off to one side. After several trials, the fixation point is replaced by a new shape, but the participants do not notice this change. This is a study of

inattentional blindness.

Some models of word recognition include detectors that ________ one another, so that activation of one detector decreases activation in another detector.

inhibit

A horse is blocking the front of a barn door, obstructing your view of the door. This configuration allows you to determine that the horse is closer to you than the barn door is. This is called

interposition.

The blockage of one's view by another object can provide information about depth perception. This is termed

interposition.

You are shown an odd-looking image and asked to identify it. According to our knowledge of object recognition, your first step would be gathering the raw data, and the second would be ________ data.

interpreting the data

Cells A and B receive the same high levels of stimulation, but Cell A shows a lower level of activity relative to Cell B. A likely explanation for this fact is that Cell A

is being laterally inhibited by other nearby cells.

In a feature-net model, knowledge of spelling patterns

is distributed across the model, and therefore the knowledge is only detectable in the overall functioning of the network.

Executive control is likely engaged in all of the following situations EXCEPT when one

is working on "auto-pilot."

The middle layer of a basic feature net contains ________ detectors.

letter

Participants' recognition thresholds are

lower for frequently seen words.

Because of its center-surround organization, a neuron that has its entire receptive field exposed to bright light will

maintain the same rate of firing as if there was no light presented

Biederman's recognition by components (RBC) model

makes use of geon detectors, which in turn trigger detectors for geon assemblies

In dichotic listening experiments, some aspects of the unattended message seem to leak through and are heard despite the participant's intention to ignore the message. Which of the following statements reflects what is LEAST likely to leak through in this fashion?

material that is easily distinguishable from the attended message in its semantic content

"Bottom-up" (or "data-driven") mechanisms are

mechanisms for which activity is primarily triggered and shaped by the incoming stimulus information.

Recordings from neurons in area V4 of the visual cortex show that the neurons are

more responsive to attended inputs than unattended inputs.

Krista is sitting on a bench, watching the world go by. She notices the people who are near to her move across her retina more quickly than the cars in the distance move. This effect is called

motion parallax

The available data from patients with brain damage to circuits controlling attention indicate that

multiple brain mechanisms are responsible for the control of attention.

Which of the following models for object recognition emphasizes the role that rotation plays in object recognition?

multiple views.

A feature net is a

network of cognitive "detectors" organized in hierarchical layers.

As you move toward an object, the object gets larger on your retina. This is called

optic flow.

Single-cell recordings measure the ________ of individual neurons

pattern of firing

Change blindness demonstrates that

people routinely fail to see things directly in front of their eyes. So, attention is not sufficient for perception.

An experienced driver can drive while holding a relatively complex conversation. This combination of activities is difficult, however, for a novice driver. Which of the following explanations most likely explains the difference?

practice of a task leads to a decline in the resource demands for the task.

Which of the following neural areas is NOT likely to be activated when looking at a face?

prefrontal cortex

Top-down mechanisms suggest that

processing can be driven by knowledge and expectations.

Parvo cells are similar to magno cells in what way?

provide input for the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN).

Through single-cell recordings, researchers have identified the ________ neurons in the visual system.

receptive fields of

The form of brain damage identified as prosopagnosia is primarily characterized by an inability to

recognize faces.

Someone with akinetopsia would have difficulty with all of the following EXCEPT

recognizing faces.

The importance of vision for humans is reflected in the

relative size of the visual cortex.

A participant reads a list of words in which the word "elephant" appears several times. Later, the participant tachistoscopically views another list of words. When the word "elephant" appears in the second list, the participant's response rate is faster than for other words not found on the previous list. This effect is called

repetition priming

The ________ is the part of the eye involved in transducing light energy into neural energy.

retina

In portions of the retina more distant from the fovea, the _________ predominate as well into the periphery

rods

The frontal lobe does NOT contain neural areas responsible for

shape processing

Which of the Gestalt principles states that we tend to perceive objects in groups?

similarity

Which of the following is NOT considered a monocular cue for depth perception?

similarity

A researcher wishes to determine exactly when a particular neuron is firing. A technique well suited to this purpose is

single-cell recording

Patients with unilateral neglect ignore one side of their visual field. This problem illustrates the importance of

space-based attention

Cell's firing rate is measured in:

spikes per seconds

Different forms of priming can be distinguished in several ways. For example, the effects of ________ priming can be observed almost immediately after the relevant cue is provided; in contrast, the effects of ________ priming require a half-second or so to appear after the relevant cue.

stimulus-based; expectation-based

McClelland and Rumelhart's model of word recognition suggests detectors on separate levels can interact in a bidirectional manner. Biological evidence ________ this notion because ________.

supports; visual processing is bidirectional

Visual agnosia is associated with damage to which of the following?

the "what" system, which carries information from the occipital cortex to the temporal cortex

What's acuity?

the ability to see fine detail

Which of the following would NOT be considered part of the fovea?

the area of the retina found far out in the periphery

We often encounter ambiguous letters when reading handwritten words but can still interpret them. For example, the same shape can be interpreted as an A in CAT but an H in THE. At what level of analysis does the feature net resolve this issue?

the bigram level

Facial recognition differs from recognition of other objects in all of the following ways EXCEPT

the component parts of a face have no influence on perception.

Acuity is much higher for the ________ than it is for the _________

the cones than it is for the rods

Facial recognition depends on recognition of

the configuration of the parts.

A participant who has just participated in an experiment involving dichotic listening is LEAST likely to remember

the meaning of the words presented on the unattended channel.

Gestalt psychologists

the organization is contributed by the perceiver. The perceptual whole is often different from the sum of its parts.

Visual illusions often occur because

the perceiver's interpretation of the input

Which of the following characteristics is NOT used to diagnose visual stimuli by neurons in the visual system?

the shape of the neuron

Binding problem

the task of reuniting the various elements of a scene, elements that are initially addressed by different systems in different parts of the brain.

If a participant is asked to perform two activities at the same time, performance will be improved if

the two activities are highly dissimilar, drawing on different task-specific resources.

The specialization evident in visual processing shows that

the visual system relies on parallel processing.

A participant is shown a series of stimuli and is asked to name the color of the ink in which the stimuli are printed. The eighth stimulus happens to be printed in green ink. We should expect a relatively slow response if the stimulus happens to be

the word "RED" printed in green.

Imagine you are putting together a puzzle. The lid of the box comes with a picture of the completed puzzle, and you reference that while you are working. The picture on the lid is acting as a

top-down influence

If visual information conflicts with other information, we usually

trust visual input

Tasks involving dichotic listening are tasks in which

two different auditory messages are presented, one to each ear.

Attention is limited in several ways. Sometimes we can complete competing tasks at the same time, but sometimes we cannot because the tasks interfere with each other. Which combination of tasks is likely to cause the LEAST amount of interference?

two tasks that require different task-specific resources

A patient has suffered brain damage and, as a result, now seems to ignore all information on the left side of her world. If shown words, she reads only the right half of the word; if asked to copy a picture, she copies only the right half. This patient seems to be suffering from

unilateral neglect syndrome.

We can often recognize an object even if some of the object's parts are hidden from view. Evidence indicates that this recognition from partial viewing will be easiest if

we can see enough of the object to identify some of its geons.

The language we use and manner of speaking changes across situations. Imagine that you need executive control to facilitate the words you select. In which of the following situations might you most need executive control?

when presenting your work at a meeting with your boss

The action pathway corresponds with the ________ system, while the perception pathway corresponds with the ________ system.

where; what

Stroop interference demonstrates that

word reading is automatized.