Last Psych Exam

Which brain area(s) is/are implicated in patient K.C.'s inability to recall autobiographical details of his life from many years before his accident?

Frontal and parietal cortex

Which region of cortex is crucial for face recognition?

Fusiform gyrus

Which structure is not required for the conditioned eye-blink response in the rabbit?

Hippocampus

Which symptom would not be a likely result of extensive damage to the right fusiform gyrus?

Impairment in recognizing the voices of coworkers

What was the important discovery in Moran and Desimone's study on attention, which involved recording the activity of individual neurons in the monkey visual cortex while attention was shifted within each cell's receptive field?

It showed that when attention was focused on the preferred stimulus the cell produced many action potentials, but when attention (not gaze) was shifted, the stimulus provoked far fewer action potentials.

The experience of having your attention suddenly captured by hearing your name from across the room is support for which type of attentional selection model?

Late-selection

Which form of habituation represents a faster and faster habituation response across days, eventually leading to no response at all?

Long-term habituation

Under resting conditions, NMDA receptors are unable to respond due to the presence of _______ in their central channels.

Mg2+ ions

In ERP studies of normal subjects, it has been found that a grammatically correct sentence containing a word whose meaning does not fit into the sentence provokes a(n) _______ wave from _______ cortex.

N400; temporoparietal

Which state is the deepest degree of unconsciousness?

Persistent vegetative state

Which type of nondeclarative memory is not affected by damage to the basal ganglia?

Priming

You are talking to a friend while waiting for a bus, and while you converse you are also aware of passing vehicles so you are sure not to miss your bus. Which structure is responsible for filtering out distracting stimuli while you talk to your friend and wait for the bus?

Pulvinar

Which of the following represents the correct sequence of the brain events that determine reaction time on a choice reaction time test?

Retina, LGN, V1, V2, V4, inferior temporal lobe, prefrontal cortex, premotor cortex, primary motor cortex, spinal cord, finger muscle

How do researchers obtain an ERP (event-related potential) reading?

They take EEGs of participants doing a task repeatedly, and then average those readings.

Which cue will typically elicit the fastest reaction time to the target in the symbolic cuing task?

Valid

Apraxia is

an inability to execute a learned sequence of movements.

Damage to the _______, which transmits information between Wernicke's area and Broca's area leads to _______ aphasia.

arcuate fasciculus; conduction

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) findings

are inconsistent with the connectionist model of aphasia.

The _______ bottleneck refers to a filter that results from the limits of our attentional capacity.

attentional

Male frogs seeking mates vocalize among birds, insects, and the chorus of other species of frogs. That females are able to locate male frogs of their species among all the ambient noise provides an example of the _______ effect.

cocktail party

According to some studies, stroke patients given _______ therapy can show about a 75% return of normal use of a paralyzed arm within a relatively short period of time.

constraint-induced movement

The phenomenon of "pop out" refers to the

distinguishing feature of a sought-after item that makes it sufficiently different from all distracters.

Studies using fMRI show that in addition to face recognition, the fusiform region is also activated when identifying

individual members of other categories, such as birds or cars, especially if the viewer has relevant expertise in those categories.

In monkeys, direction of attention to particular locations regardless of stimulus modality is correlated with neural activity in the

lateral intraparietal area (LIP).

Nonverbal visual stimuli, such as faces or shapes, are recognized more accurately if they are presented to the

left visual field.

TMS brain mapping has shown that _______ regions of Broca's area are important for _______ processing.

posterior; phonological

Bilateral damage to the fusiform gyrus results in

prosopagnosia

In humans, the _______ occupies the posterior quarter of the _______ and is involved in the orienting and shifting of attention.

pulvinar; thalamus

You and your friend are both looking at the cover of a green book. You both agree that the book is green but your personal experience of the green color may be different than your friend's. The purely subjective experiences of seeing the color is/are called

qualia.

The delay, measured in milliseconds, between presentation of a stimulus and an individual's response to it is called _______ time.

reaction

Prosopagnosia is the inability to

recognize faces

You are at a train station and hear an extremely loud crash. You, and everyone else, immediately orient their attention to the location of the sound. This is an example of _______ attention.

reflexive

People with conduction aphasia are unable to

repeat words or sentences

The goal of constraint-induced movement therapy is to encourage stroke patients to use the afflicted arm by _______ the unaffected arm.

restraining

You are riding on bus and catch a very brief glimpse of a ravine with rushing water as you pass over a bridge. The impression you have of the view is called an iconic memory, or

sensory buffer.

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test is used to test executive function. A subject doing the test is asked to

sort cards into piles according to the number, color, or shape of symbols on card, and every 10 cards the sorting rule changes.

The challenge facing researchers who seek to study the functions of the two brain hemispheres is that the hemispheres have many connections and function as one. The solution to this has been to study _______ patients in which the _______ has been cut, thereby separating the connection between the hemispheres.

split-brain; corpus callosum

In posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), when a traumatic memory is reactivated it returns to a labile state; it becomes even stronger when reconsolidated in the presence of

stress hormones.

In monkeys, stimulation of the _______, but not of the _______, results in vocalizations.

subcortical regions; cortex

In the _______ task, a single stimulus or stimulus location is held in an attentional spotlight.

sustained-attention

You are walking on a calm but drizzly evening when an unexpected lightning bolt suddenly flashes in front of you. Your involuntary reaction to move your attention to the flash relies on the _______ system.

temporoparietal

Speech mechanisms may have evolved from more ancient systems controlling gestures of the face and hands, in agreement with

the motor theory of language.

Consistent with the motor theory of speech perception, deaf people who use American Sign Language use _______ language-related regions of the left hemisphere as hearing people who use spoken language do.

the same

The overall level of alertness of an individual is called _______, as distinguished from the process by which we select and focus on one or more stimuli, which is called _______.

vigilance; attention

In a symbolic cuing task, _______ attention is shown to enhance processing, reducing reaction time to the stimulus, and _______ cues decrease reaction time the most.

voluntary; valid

In patients with aphasia following a stroke, the greatest amount of language recovery is likely to be achieved _______ after the episode of brain damage.

within 3 months

Nondeclarative memory is said to deal with _______ questions.

"how"

Which of the following is correct about the word "unbreakable"?

Able is a morpheme.

A 45-year old individual that played football all his life is showing signs of confusion and memory loss. If you were to examine his brain, what would you expect to find?

Abnormal expression of tau

Which intervention has been shown to reduce the symptoms of ADHD and improve task performance in affected children?

Allowing children to fidget and engage in more intense physical activity

Which research finding is inconsistent with the notion of free will?

Brain activity associated with making a decision appears to be evident well before consciousness is aware of it

A large frontal lesion in the left hemisphere can produce _______ aphasia.

Broca's

A patient who has difficulty speaking but has good comprehension of verbal material is most likely suffering from _______ aphasia.

Broca's

_______ neural processing operations cannot be experienced through introspection and are therefore unconscious.

Cognitively impenetrable

Which of the following best describes the Wernicke-Geschwind model of aphasia?

Connectionist

Which symptom is not associated with Balint's syndrome?

Hemispatial neglect

A proposed treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder involves using beta-adrenergic antagonists drugs either just before or after the traumatic event. What is the effect of this treatment?

It blocks the effects of epinephrine in the amygdala.

Which statement about childhood aphasia true?

Language abilities impaired by childhood brain injury are usually restored by adulthood.

Which symptom is not one of the forms of brain pathology associated with long-time boxers?

Micropolygyria

_______ is an anatomical abnormality of developmental dyslexia that is associated with excessive cortical folding in areas such as the temporoparietal junction.

Micropolygyria

Which component of an averaged-out ERP waveform is believed to reflect auditory attention?

N1

Which type of drugs have been found to improve the symptoms of ADHD?

Stimulants

Which attention network is responsible for top-down control of endogenous attention?

The dorsal frontoparietal system

A patient speaks in a fluent manner, although her speech contains many paraphasias that make it unintelligible. She also demonstrates poor comprehension of verbal material. This patient is most likely suffering from _______ aphasia.

Wernicke's

In the Wada test, a short-acting _______ is injected into the carotid artery first on one side of the brain, then on the other.

anesthetic

The most striking impairment suffered by Henry Molaison (patient H.M.) was

anterograde amnesia.

In most split-brain patients, words presented to the left visual field

cannot be repeated verbally.

Eye-blink conditioning is an example of _______ conditioning and has been used to study mammalian cerebellar circuits.

classical

Information about corneal stimulation is transmitted to an area of cerebellar neurons via

climbing fibers.

In classical conditioning, a previously neutral stimulus, when repeatedly paired with an another (important) stimulus, becomes the

conditioned stimulus.

A person credited with having "eyes in the back of their head" more probably is skilled at

covert attention.

The human brain shows a clear _______, during which exposure and practice with language must occur in order for language skills to develop normally.

critical period

Unusual groupings of cells in the outer layers of the cerebral cortex have been seen in postmortem studies of

dyslexia

Metacognition has thus far been identified in all of the following species except

elephants

The _______ is (are) critically important for establishing gaze in accordance with _______ processes and cognitive goals.

frontal eye fields; top-down

Patients with _______ lobe lesions struggle with task shifting and tend to _______ (continue beyond a reasonable degree in any activity).

frontal; perseverate

Adult rats living in enriched conditions have more neurons in the

hippocampus.

One of the revealing finds of neuroeconomics is that

humans are risk-averse.

Inhibition of return refers to

impaired detection of stimuli at the previously attended location.

In general, brain injury suffered _______ has less severe consequences than brain injury suffered _______.

in childhood; in adulthood

Astereognosis is the

inability to identify objects by touch or manipulation.

A viewer closely focused on a complex task, such as being asked to count how many times a group of people throw a ball back and forth, may miss other nonattended stimuli such as dancers moving through the group of people. This is due to an attentional phenomenon called

inattentional blindness.

Anthony is an accomplished gamer, playing all the popular video games. There is some evidence to support the claim that upon analysis of his brain there would be

longer-latency ERP components compared to nongamers.

The study of brain mechanisms at work during economic decision making is called

neuroeconomics

An inability to reach for objects using visual guidance is referred to as _______. This phenomenon is typically seen in _______.

optic ataxia; Balint's syndrome

As a result of an industrial accident, Phineas Gage suffered bilateral damage to the _______ cortex.

orbitofrontal

Reflexive attention is

oriented on the basis of sensory events.

Reaction time is slower for the processing of complex versus simple stimuli because the processing of complex stimuli

participation of more brain pathways.

Hillyard's classic study of auditory attention found that ERPs for attended stimuli are

particularly evident in the N1 component.

The sounds that make up a language are called _______, and the system of rules for producing sentences is called _______.

phonemes; grammar

A prominent structural asymmetry in the brains of typical humans is apparent in the _______, which is located on the superior surface of the _______ lobe.

planum temporale; temporal

All the following may aid in stabilization and reorganization after brain damage except

reverse transcription.

The _______ hemisphere plays a major role in the perception of music. The _______ hemisphere plays a major role in prosody.

right; right

Anna has been diagnosed with deep dyslexia. The most obvious symptom she has is

she interprets a word when reading not as the word on the page but as a semantically related word.

A friend gives you a phone number but you don't have your phone with you with so you concentrate on committing it to memory. As soon as you have called the number you forget it. The memory of the number would be classified as a _______ memory.

short-term

A patient is shown a hammer and a wrench but can only attend to and identify one of these objects at a time. This condition is called _______ and is associated with _______.

simultagnosia; Balint's syndrome

A native English-speaking person with _______ dyslexia would have great difficulty reading the title The Tough Coughs as He Ploughs the Dough.

surface

Williams syndrome provides evidence for

the heritability of language.

Wernicke's aphasia is usually associated with lesions of

the left posterior temporal region.

The "hard problem of consciousness" refers to understanding

the neural processes that result in a person's unique subjective experience.