Cognitive Psychology Exam 1

The first experiments in cognitive psychology were based on the idea that mental responses can be

inferred from the participant's behavior

When a double dissociation occurs, this indicates that two functions

involve different mechanisms

Damage to the temporal lobe makes the _____ more difficult.

object discrimination or recognition problem

Speech segmentation is defined as

organizing the sounds of speech into individual words

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

Generally, if we can see an object's geons, we are able to identify the object. This is known as the

principles of componential recovery

You are at a parade where there are a number of marching bands. You perceive the bands that are all in the same uniforms as being grouped together. The red uniforms are one band, the green uniforms another, and so forth. You have this perceptual experience because of the law of

similarity

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

Temporal

The pathway leading from the striate cortex in the occipital lobe to the temporal lobe is known as the

"what" pathway (form and identity of visual objects) ("where" pathway is for location & motion)

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

A chemical process takes place at the synapse that has resulted from a chemical-electrical change within the neuron.

A mental conception of the layout of a physical space is known as a(n)

A cognitive map

Angelina has received six stickers for cleaning her room this week. If she recieves one more, she'll get to have a special dessert of her choosing after supper. Angelina's behavior can be best explained by

A token economy

The procedure in which trained participants describe their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli presented under controlled conditions is known as

Analytic introspection

The field that studies how to make machines behave in ways that are intelligent if a human were so behaving is known as

Artificial Intelligence

In which neurological disorder might mirror neurons be most likely to be implicated as a potential cause of the disorder?

Autism

All of the following are mental abilities or processes involved in cognition except

Development

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

Broca's area

After seeing several commercials where celebrities are wearing "Boom" shoes, Steve really wants a pair. Steve's desire to have a pair of the shoes could best be explained by

Classical Conditioning

The "Little Albert" experiment involving the rat and the loud noise is an example of which of the following types of experiments?

Classical Conditioning

The cognitive revolution resulted in dramatic changes in the way psychology was studied and understood. This so-called "revolution" occurred parallel to (and, in part, because of) the introduction of

Computers

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 the same three neurons to fire, with neuron 1 responding the least and neuron 3 responding the most. Your results support ____ coding.

Distributed

The result of natural selection over many generations is

Evolution

In Selfrige's Pandamonium Model, features of a stimulus are detected at the level of the

Feature demon

Selfridge's Pandemonium Model describes processing at several levels or demons. The processing of vertical lines, horizontal lines, angles, or curves, for example, would occur at the level of the

Feature demon

Neurons that respond to specific details or parts 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

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 first processed

In different primary areas of the cortex

By comparing reaction times across different tasks, Donders was able to conclude how long the mind needs to perform a certain cognitive task. Donders interpreted the difference in reaction time between the simple and choice conditions of his experiment as indicating how long it took to

Make a decision about the stimulus

The neurons that respond while watching a demonstrator perform a task are called

Mirror neurons

People perceive vertical and horizontal orientations more easily than other orientations according to the

Oblique effect

In order to conduct research in psychology, which of the following was considered necessary by the behaviorists?

Observable behaviors

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)

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

The landmark or spacial discrimination problems are more difficult to do if you have damage to your _____lobe.

Parietal

Colin Cherry's experiment in which participants listened to two messages simultaneously, one in each ear, found that

People take in very little information about the ignored message

Ebbinghaus "memory" experiments were important because they

Plotted functions that described the operation of the mind

Suyen is arguing that humans have a unique capacity for language because of neurological changes that resulted from evolution. From this, Suyen is arguing for

Preparedness

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

Propopagnosia

One's psychology can be viewed as a continuum from________to________to________.

Reflex, Learning, Cognition

Newell and Simon were among the first to use computers in cognitive psychology. Their computer program

Solved logic problems

The idea of a grandmother cell is consistent with

Specificity coding

Which of the following is not consistent with the idea of localization of function?

Stimuli are processed throughout various primary and associative areas of the brain.

Jane is four, and when playing in the park recently, she saw a dog that she'd never seen before. Even though she had never seen the dog, she was able to label the dog as being a dog. This scenario causes problems for which explanation of perception?

Template Matching Theory

The way patterns of neural firing represent a specific stimulus or experience is known as

The Neural Code

All of the following are part of B.F. Skinner's three term contingency except

The perception 1. The Response 2. The Reinforcement 3. The Environment

Hollingsworth's studies of blobs indicate that we perceive information based on

The situation or context

Which of the following do PET and fMRI have in common?

The use of the subtraction technique

Given that populations grow exponentially and there are limited resources, Darwin inferred that

There would be competition for limited resources

All of the following are reasons to use models to understand cognition except

They provide an accurate description of cognition

"Perceiving machines" are used by the U.S. Postal service to "read" the addresses on letters and sort them quickly to their correct destinations. Sometimes, these machines cannot read an address, because the writing on the envelope is not sufficiently clear for the machine to match the writing to an example it has stored in memory. Human postal workers are much more successful at reading unclear addresses, most likely because of

Top-down processing (cognitive process that initiates with our thoughts, which flow down to lower-level functions, such as senses)

One problem with the Template Matching Theory of perception is that

We don't have templates for every possible experience

Shinkareva et al. (2008) conducted research mind reading that revealed

a computer could fairly accurately predict what category of object a participant was viewing.

The results of Gauthier's "Greeble" experiment illustrate

an effect of experience-dependent plasticity.

One problem with Selfrige's Pandamonium Model is that it

can't account for how we can process information both globally and locally

The study of the physiological basis of cognition is known as

cognitive neuroscience

Patients with associative visual agnosia might be able to correctly draw or copy an image but not recognize what it is. This is an example of a

disassociation

The occipital lobe is

first place in cerebral cortex where visual information is recieved

The _____ lobe of the cortex serves higher cognitive functions such as problem solving, decision making, attention, and information processing.

frontal

A synapse is

the space between neurons

The likelihood principle states that

we perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli we have received