Psych chp 4-7.2
Psychologists and philosophers use the word qualia to refer to
a person's specific, subjective perceptual experiences
The main difference between binocular and monocular depth cues is that
binocular cues require information from both eyes, while monocular cues do not
Kohlberg described the type of moral reasoning used by most adults as
conventional
A circadian rhythm is a
cycle of sleeping and waking that occurs approximately every 24 hours.
In older people, a decline in cognitive functioning as a result of damage or disease, rather than aging, is called
dementia
If you are awake and concentrating on a task while an EEG machine is recording your brain activity, the EEG should record
desynchronized, relatively high frequency activity
Hypnosis can be effective in reducing pain, if the hypnotist trains the patient to
disconnect from the unpleasant emotions attached to the pain.
An allele is _______ when it affects an individual's phenotype, regardless of what other allele the individual carries for that gene
dominant
Nociceptors are free nerve endings that are specialized to sense
pain
Psychologists describe consciousness as one's
perception of his or her own mental processes
In a sense, phantom limb pain is a purely _______ phenomenon.
perceptual
When testing a split-brain patient, the key to accessing the information that the right hemisphere "sees" is having the participant
point to an object with his or her left hand.
Rats whose mothers were attentive and licked them more frequently as pups tend to
produce less stress hormone as adults
In philosophical terms, free will is essentially the opposite of
fate
All of the following are nucleotides that make up DNA except
glutamine
Jessica's parents are devout Christians, but she identifies more with agnostic views. When asked about her views on religion, however, she is tentative and reluctant to discuss the issue. Based on Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, Jessica is about what age?
17 (See chart)
During an experiment in which participants press a button whenever they have the urge to do so, when would you expect their motor cortices to become active?
A few hundred milliseconds before they press the button
Select the example that best illustrates the plasticity of the brain.
A stroke patient recovers some abilities as the brain reorganizes itself and moves functions from the damaged location to a new one
Which statement is most consistent with the concept of heritability of alcoholism?
Alcoholism is heritable, but this does not mean that a person with alcoholism in his or her family is destined to also have the condition.
Which of the following are subunits of proteins?
Amino acids
Based on the information in the table, which is a valid conclusion to make about Erikson's theory of psychosocial development?
As people go through their lives, their social spheres tend to expand.
Which of the following scenarios best illustrates size constancy?
As you approach a monument, you perceive that the monument remains the same size.
Which of the following people is likely to experience the most serious case of jet lag?
Brett, who flew for six hours from San Francisco to Boston
What can be concluded from developmental studies of children in daycare?
Children in high-quality daycare tend to perform better academically
Which of the following describes the easy problem of consciousness?
Connecting conscious experiences to different brain states
Which of the following statements best captures the essence of experiments on free will, consciousness, and brain activity?
Conscious decisions are immediately preceded by activity in the motor cortex
According to the trichromatic theory of color vision, which of the following people would be the most likely to suffer from colorblindness?
Cornell, whose long-wavelength cones lack sensitivity
_______ intelligence is the ability to reason abstractly and solve novel problems, and _______ intelligence is the accumulation of facts, experience, and historical references.
Fluid; crystallized
What conclusion is consistent with the results of twin studies of schizophrenia?
Differences in genes account for about 50 percent of the differences between people, in cases of schizophrenia
Which of the following conditions affects the appearance of the child's face and causes significant damage to the developing brain?
Fetal alcohol syndrome
Which term refers to specific lengths of DNA that carry information needed to make the proteins that are required for proper bodily functioning?
Genes
How do genes control the creation of proteins in the cell?
Genes on chromosomes specify which amino acids will be joined together, in order, to make each particular protein
Which of the following research questions is a psychophysicist likely to be most interested in asking?
How much louder must a sound be before a person can detect that it is louder than the original sound?
How does the figure illustrate the concept of a sensory threshold?
If the stimulus is weak enough, the sensory receptor will not reach threshold and will not produce an action potential. (see image)
Contrast neurogenesis with differentiation.
In neurogenesis, neurons begin to form; in differentiation, neurons become specialized
Which conclusion about sleep is most consistent with the data shown?
It is normal to experience about five bouts of REM sleep during the night.
A recessive allele, such as the allele for white flower color in pea plants, affects an individual's phenotype only when
It is present on both chromosomes.
With which of the following do Lawrence Kohlberg's views on moral development agree most closely?
Jean Piaget's views on cognitive development
Which of the following is true regarding normal neuronal cell death?
Nearly half of the neurons that develop prenatally die before we are born.
In which of the following scenarios would signal detection be most difficult because of ambient noise?
Noticing the text-alert sound from the cell phone in your pocket while you walk throughout the supermarket
Which of the following shows Piaget's stages of development in the correct order?
Sensorimotor → preoperational → concrete operational → formal operational
Which is the most likely reason that Hester was the first of the Genain quadruplets to develop schizophrenic symptoms?
She had the lowest birth weight of the quadruplets
As we age, which type of sleep will eventually cease altogether?
Slow-wave (Stage 3)
Which statement best captures the concept of a sensitive period?
Some abilities, such as 3-D vision, will not develop if a child does not have proper sensory input early in life
All of the following statements regarding gene-environment interactions is true except
The environment has the same effect on behavior regardless of genes
What does this figure demonstrate?
The left visual cortex receives information about what we see in the right half of the visual field. (See image)
What was Mary Ainsworth trying to determine when she devised the "strange situation" experiment?
The nature of infants' attachment to their mothers
What was Kohlberg most interested in when examining people's responses to the fictional story of Heinz stealing a drug for his ailing wife?
The nature of their reasoning about their choice
Based on other epigenetic studies, which of the following findings would you expect from a study of dogs that were raised by adoptive mothers?
Their behavior would be similar to that of other dogs that were raised by the same adoptive mothers
Why would you feel pain when placing your hand on both a hot and a cold pipe at the same time?
Touch receptors are reporting the sensations of heat and cold, but the brain combines the two and perceives pain.
Which sense is the least mature at birth?
Vision
Neuropathic pain is caused by
a damaged or malfunctioning nervous system
Scientists estimate that the heritability of depression is around 37 percent. This suggests that
about 37 percent of the variability in depression in the population is due to the variability in the genes in the population
Genes with slightly different instructions for making the same protein are called
alleles
Without the _______ , you would not cycle through slow-wave sleep.
basal forebrain
Most stages of brain development are completed before
birth
The rod-shaped cellular structures that contain human DNA are called
chromosomes
The suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus regulates our
circadian rhythm.
The depth cue of motion parallax accounts for the fact that while you are moving forward, you will perceive the
closest objects as moving fastest and in the opposite direction
When a split-brain patient tries to describe in words why her left hand selected a stimulus card corresponding to an image presented in her left visual field, she engages in _______ to have her unconscious recognition make sense
confabulation
Your friend Tom lacks the ability to feel pain. Tom's condition is called
congenital insensitivity to pain
If you were an artist drawing a cityscape, you would apply the linear perspective depth cue by
drawing the streets converging with the edges of buildings at the horizon.
Factors that affect how our genes are expressed are involved primarily in the scientific study of
epigenetics
The Stanford hypnotic susceptibility test is used to
estimate whether or not you will follow hypnotic suggestions.
Next to each allele, a stretch of DNA contains instructions for
expression of the allele
When you eat a slice of pizza, your blissful experience, called _______, is the combined stimulation provided to taste receptors in the mouth and olfactory receptors in the nose.
flavor
Estimates of the heritability of risk-taking, parental warmth, and openness are between 38 and 57 percent. This implies that
genes account for some of the variation in those traits, but experience is also important
Variations in eye color are the result of alleles that differ in terms of
how much pigment they make ?
The social theory of hypnosis states that
hypnosis is likely a function of a person accommodating the hypnotist.
Baby chicks born on a farm will often follow the human that they first see when they hatch. This is a result of _______, the innate process of learning to recognizing a parent.
imprinting
One problem that sufferers of _______ face is _______, a disorder in which people seem to be unaware of when they actually are asleep
insomnia; sleep-state misperception
According to the duplex theory, we use both _______ differences and _______ differences to localize sounds.
intensity; latency
Stage 3 sleep is also called slow-wave sleep because the EEG
is defined by very low-frequency waves
Weber's fraction expresses the _______ as a proportion of the original stimulus.
just noticeable difference (JND)
If you could recall a dream from non-REM sleep it would likely be
less vivid than an REM dream
An absolute threshold is the
lowest intensity of a stimulus that a person can detect half the time
Before scientists fully understood the cause of PKU, infants with the disorder often developed
mental impairment
Occlusion is a _______ depth cue
monocular
The brains of patients with Alzheimer's disease are typically littered with clumps of dead and dying neurons, called
neuritic plaques
The olfactory system routes information directly to the _______ of the brain.
olfactory bulb
The _______ at one end of the cochlea is sensitive to the vibrations of the bones of the middle ear.
oval window
Your roommate wakes up and reports that she was dreaming about a large insect chasing her around your dorm room. She was likely in _______ sleep
rapid eye movement (REM)
A warm and nurturing home environment could affect the future of a baby with a family history of schizophrenia by
reducing or eliminating controllable sources of stress
The alpha rhythm is a pattern of brain waves that occurs during
relaxed wakefulness
Developing a sense of morality is one of the toughest challenges for adolescents because it
requires higher-order thought processes and conflicting information
All of the following activities have been shown to prevent the development of Alzheimer's disease except
resting the brain by avoiding complex cognitive tasks
Electrical stimulation of the _______ will rouse a sleeping animal from its slumber
reticular formation
The visual cliff is a method used by researchers to measure an infant's ability to
see a steep drop under the clear surface on which they are crawling
Gene expression is fundamentally linked to experience because
sensory experience from behavior affects gene expression in many neurons.
You volunteer for a sleep study and the researchers discover that your blood oxygen level drops many times during the night. It is likely that you have
sleep apnea
One of the best methods of determining the influence of confounding variables on the heritability of human traits is to conduct a
study of identical twins.
The key aspect of the hard problem of consciousness is the _______ of each individual's conscious experience.
subjectivity
The observation that adolescent brains show thinning in the top region of the cortex is evidence of the neural developmental process called
synapse rearrangement
Harmful dominant alleles, like those for the huntingtin gene, are not common because in most cases
the carrier does not survive long enough to pass on the allele via reproduction
In psychology, the word "noise" is defined as
the firing of a sensory cell without a stimulus or in response to an irrelevant stimulus.
The delta waves seen in the EEG when someone is in stage 3 sleep can be likened to
the slow movement of "the wave" around a stadium
A seven-year-old is typically better able to understand his friends' feelings than a three-year-old. In other words, a seven-year-old has acquired a
theory of mind
Researchers can tell if an infant prefers a visual stimulus, such as a face, to another stimulus by
tracking how long an infant looks at each stimulus
The classic theory about hypnosis being a uniquely altered state of consciousness is known as the _______ theory of hypnosis.
trance
The fact that we have short-, medium-, and long-wavelength cones that each respond to lights of different colors is most supportive of the _______ theory of color vision.
trichromatic
The cochlea relays information to the brain about sound when
vibrations in the cochlea bend the hairs of the hair cells, producing an action potential in a neuron underneath the hair cells.
The Gestalt rules of perception seek to explain the ways in which
vision organizes images
According to the process of natural selection, a mutation
will accumulate in the genomes of future generations if it improves survival and reproduction
According to the activation-synthesis hypothesis about dreaming, the content of dreams results from
your brain attempting to make meaning out of random bursts of neural activity.
You do not act out your vivid dreams because
your brain inhibits motor neurons, and you cannot move