Final Exam pt. 2

Nonfluent aphasia, in which the victim is unable to speak fluently, is due to brain damage that includes ____.

Broca's area

Chemically, what is the route from genes to their expression?

DNA to RNA to proteins

Why does the fovea provide the clearest, most detailed visual information?

It has tightly packed receptors

What is the effect of MPTP?

It kills the neurons that release dopamine.

Huntington's disease is a genetic disorder caused by _____.

a dominant gene on chromosome 4

On a given trait, high heritability suggests that ____.

adopted children will closely resemble their biological parents

What is the intensity of a sound wave called?

amplitude

Breeding some animals selectively because they possess some desirable characteristic is called ____.

artificial selection

A tonotopic map refers to a(n) ____.

auditory cortex map of sounds

The structure composed of the caudate nucleus, putamen, and globus pallidus is the ____.

basal ganglia

According to the frequency theory, the ____

basilar membrane vibrates in synchrony with a sound, producing action potentials at the same

What does fMRI directly measure?

concentration of deoxyhemoglobin in the blood

Most of the information passing from one hemisphere to the other does so by passing through which structure?

corpus callosum

A split-brain patient is someone who has had their ____.

corpus callosum severed

Brittanie has had damage to the dorsal stream of her visual system. She now has trouble with _____.

describing what is seen

Genetic factors have their greatest impact on Parkinson's disease in cases that involve ____.

early onset of the disease

A condition in which brain neurons have repeated episodes of excessive, synchronized activity is called ____.

epilepsy

What type of experimental design does the following statement describe: "Stimuli from two or more conditions are presented randomly or inter-leaved"?

event-related design

The Decarlos just had a new baby. Their baby is more likely to pay attention to ____ than anything else at this time.

faces

Suppose "A" is a dominant gene for the ability to taste phenylthiocarbamide (PTC) and "a" is a recessive gene for the inability to taste it. Which couples could possibly have both a child who tastes it and a child who does not?

father Aa, mother Aa

Lateralization refers to the ____.

functional asymmetries of the brain

The optic nerve is composed of axons from which kind of cell?

ganglion cells

Cortical blindness restricted to one half of the visual field (associated with damage to the primary visual cortex in one hemisphere) is known as:

hemianopia

A person with two recessive genes is considered to be ____ for that trait.

homozygous

Which structure has the largest receptive fields and greatest sensitivity to highly complex visual patterns, such as faces?

inferior temporal cortex

What is responsible for sharpening contrast at visual borders?

lateral inhibition

Cutting the left optic nerve in front of the optic chiasm would result in blindness in the

left eye

What sound characteristics can be compared between the two ears to locate the source of the sound?

loudness and timing

In the auditory system, hair cells are specialized receptors that respond to ____.

mechanical displacement

Watching another person shoot a basketball is most likely to activate ____ neurons in the brain of the person who is watching.

mirror

The brain's ability to change as a result of experience is referred to as:

plasticity

In which part of the brain does synaptic density not reach adult levels until adolescence?

prefrontal cortex

The motor cortex produces a kind of activity called a(n) ____ before any voluntary movement.

readiness potential

The ____ of any neuron in the visual system is the area of the visual field that excites or inhibits it.

receptive field

A trait not expressed when combined with a dominant trait is called a(n) ____ trait.

recessive

Color constancy is the ability to ____.

recognize the color of an object despite changes in lighting

In addition to having difficulty recognizing faces, people with prosopagnosia may have difficulty____.

recognizing different kinds of plants and animals

Someone with prosopagnosia has difficulty with ____.

recognizing faces

An example of a sex-linked trait is ____.

red-green color vision deficiency

A sensory map coded relative to the position of eye gaze is called:

retinocentric

The left hemisphere is connected to skin receptors mainly on the ____ half of the body, and controls muscles mainly on the ____ side of the body.

right; right

Horizontal cells receive their input from ____, and they send output to ____.

rods and cones; bipolar cells

When cells in the middle temporal cortex respond to visual stimuli, their response depends mostly on the ____.

speed and direction of movement

In Parkinson's disease, which pathway in the brain degenerates?

substantia nigra to caudate nucleus and putamen

What is subitizing?

the ability to rapidly detect the number of items in a small collection without counting

Most auditory information is sent to which hemisphere of the brain?

the contralateral side

The current view of how we perceive sounds less than 100 Hz is based on ____.

the frequency of action potentials

Several months after split-brain surgery, the number of incidents of conflicts between the two hemispheres diminishes because ____.

the hemispheres learn ways of cooperating with each other

What would be the likely outcome of a person who was blind at birth, and had vision restored later in life by the removal of cataracts (clouded lenses)?

trouble describing the shapes of objects

An inability to recognize objects despite otherwise satisfactory vision is called ____.

visual agnosia