AP Psych Cumulative Test #2

Which of the following examples best illustrates the concept of interposition?

Because the chair partially obscured his view of the sofa, Brendan perceived the chair as being closer than the sofa.

Kimmie stood on the sidewalk rather than crossing the street because she saw that the approaching car was quite close to her. Which of the following concepts is best illustrated in this example?

Depth perception

Carl Wernicke discovered the region of the brain that is responsible for

language comprehension

Waking up frequently, loud snoring, silent pauses in breathing, and sleepiness during the day are symptoms of

sleep apnea

Which of the following concepts refers to the diminished sensitivity to a stimulus that occurs due to constant exposure to that stimulus?

Sensory adaptation

Which of the following is the best definition for absolute threshold?

The lowest strength of a stimulus that a person can detect 50% of the time

Which of the following best illustrates the most predictable effect of schemas on perception?

Grant has more difficulty recognizing a penguin as a bird than he does a blue jay.

Which of the following is true of the American Psychological Association?

It addresses a number of ethical guidelines for the practice of psychology

Which of the following best describes a major role of the thalamus?

It relays most sensory signals to the cortex.

What was the focus of traditional behaviorism

John B. Watson, observation, behavior, conditioning

Which of the following is the correct order of the eye-to-brain pathway of vision?

Retina, optic nerve, thalamus, occipital lobe

Which of the following anatomical structures is involved in the vestibular sense?

Semicircular canals

Which of the following is the process of detecting environmental stimuli and converting them into signals that can be detected by the nervous system?

Sensation

Denise has damaged her auditory nerve and now has difficulty understanding what people are saying. Which of the following descriptions explains how that damage impairs her hearing?

Sound messages fail to be transmitted directly to the brain.

According to the gate control theory of pain, which of the following contains a neurological gate that controls the transmission of pain messages to the brain?

The spinal cord

Money most often modifies people's behavior because it is a powerful

secondary reinforcer

The technique of strengthening behavior by reinforcing successive approximations is called

shaping

Michael Gazzaniga is best known for

studying split-brain patients

At a synapse, neurotransmitters released by the sending neuron do which of the following?

They bind to receptors at the receiving neuron, which opens ion channels

What effect do agonists have?

They increase the likelihood that a postsynaptic neuron will fire.

Which of the following best reflects contemporary interpretations of classical conditioning?

They take into account cognitive processes like expectancy.

When seeking approval to conduct an experiment using participants from her college psychology course

a student researcher should, apply to the institutional review board at the university

The principles of operant conditioning are best illustrated by

a token economy to reinforce adaptive behaviors

An adult with a healthy sleep cycle is most likely to enter REM sleep

after cycling through the NREM sleep stages

A neuron sends a signal along its

axon

Antagonists function by

blocking receptors to prevent other neurotransmitters from binding to the neural receptors

The medulla oblongata is a part of the

brain stem

Robert Rescorla's contingency model of classical conditioning states that

conditioning occurs only when one event reliably predicts another

A person whose body is not producing enough testosterone is most likely to exhibit

fatigue

The parietal lobe is most involved in

processing sensory information

Punishment is most effective in eliminating undesired behavior when the

punishment is delivered soon after the behavior

Of the following, which is essential for operant conditioning to occur?

A behavioral consequence

The phenomenon of declining physiological effects of taking a drug after sustained use is referred to as

tolerance

Which of the following scenarios is the best example of synesthesia?

Anastasia sees swirls of color when she hears music because stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to the experience of another sensation.

Audra is working on a puzzle book and comes across the following figure. The Gestalt law that would affect Audra's perception of the picture above is influenced by the law of

Closure

Which perspective looks at perception, learning, and memory?

Cognitive

Dr. Ramen recruited 100 adults to participate in her study. The taste buds of each participant were measured, and the participants tasted a number of foods. She found there was a relationship between the size of a participant's taste buds and the number of foods that a participant could taste. What research method did Dr. Ramen use, and what was she most likely studying?

Correlational; the sensitivity of supertasters

Which hormone is released when a person is under stress?

Cortisol

A drug that is used to treat seizures functions by preventing inhibitory neurotransmitters from returning to the presynaptic neuron. This slows the rate of neurons firing by increasing the amount of the inhibitory neurotransmitter in the synapse. The drug is most likely to be classified as a

GABA reuptake inhibitor (GRI)

(Blank) Psychologists were interested in how we perceive information in patterns and "wholes"

Gestalt

Madeline has previously been diagnosed with major depressive disorder. She has an identical twin sister, Josephine, and a nonidentical sister, Abigail. Neither of Madeline's sisters have previously been diagnosed with major depressive disorder. Which of the following statements is true of Madeline's sisters?

Josephine is more likely to be diagnosed with major depressive disorder than Abigail in response to a stressful or traumatic event.

Which of the following scenarios best illustrates the opponent-process theory of color vision?

Kayla sees afterimages of opposing colors when she stares at a poster for a long time.

Mr. Gregg wants to help his second-grade students improve their reading skills. He tests the students with 20 reading comprehension questions at the beginning of the year. Every week throughout the year he gives the students 30 minutes of reading comprehension tips. He tests the students at the end of the year with 20 reading comprehension questions that are similar in difficulty to those on the original test. He finds that the students' reading comprehension has increased and concludes that his tips worked. Which of the following describes the most significant problem with Mr. Gregg's study?

Mr. Gregg failed to account for changes in the students' maturity.

Madeline wants her son to be well-behaved when they go to church. For every five minutes he sits still, she gives him a piece of candy. What type of learning is Madeline employing?

Operant conditioning

Helena did not recognize her English teacher when she unexpectedly saw him while traveling in Paris, even though she knew him well back in the classroom. The fact that Helena can recognize her teacher back home more easily than in Paris best demonstrates what concept?

Perceptual set

In a study on taste, what would researchers need to do to test participants' ability to distinguish umami from similar sensations?

Place disks soaked in MSG on the participants' tongues. Then replace those disks with disks that have been soaked in water. Compare the participants' reactions.

Human tactile sense is actually a mix of which of the following distinct skin senses?

Pressure, warmth, cold, pain

Jenna suffers from a nervous tic of washing her hands repeatedly and being unable to stop washing them again and again. Which perspective would explain Jenna's hand washing behaviors as a result of repressed conflicts in her unconscious mind?

Psychoanalytic

Julie is interested in developing a test to measure achievement levels of middle school students. Which of the following domains of psychology is most applicable to Julie's interest?

Psychometric

A researcher is training laboratory rats to run a complex maze. Each time the rats learn a new part of the maze, they are rewarded with a pellet of food. Within a few hours, the rats have learned the entire maze. Which of the following did the researcher use to teach the rats the maze?

Shaping

Marlene had an infection that led to deafness in her left ear. Which of the following will be the most likely impact of losing her hearing in her left ear?

She will have trouble locating the source of sounds.

The idea that there is a part of the mind that is not directly accessible to awareness but still drives a person's thinking and behavior is most directly attributable to

Sigmund Freud

What is the primary advantage of conducting a survey rather than using other types of research methods?

Surveys can gather information from a diverse representation of and a large number of people.

For extinction to occur, which of the following must be true of the conditioned response (CR), the conditioned stimulus (CS), and the unconditioned stimulus (UCS) ?

The CS is repeatedly presented in the absence of the UCS, and the CR loses strength.

Tracey was in pain from an ear infection, which her doctor said was in her inner ear. Which of the following is the most likely location of the infection?

The cochlea

Orville is talking with his friends at a cafeteria table when suddenly he is distracted by hearing his name at a neighboring table. Orville's shift of attention most clearly illustrates which psychological concept?

The cocktail party phenomenon

A researcher was interested in studying the effects of a new medication on depression. One group received the new medication and another group received a standard medication for depression. The researcher asked participants to answer a series of questions rating their mood levels before and after six weeks of taking the medications. Which of the following is the control condition in this study?

The group receiving the standard medication

In the definition of psychology, the term mental processes means...

The hidden and internal activity of the mind, such as thinking, feeling, and remembering.

Which of the following describes what happens when a neuron sends a signal?

The neuron goes from being negatively charged to briefly being positively charged, and finally returns to being negatively charged again. The magnitude of the negative charge is fixed regardless of the strength of the input signal it receives.

If a body does not have enough potassium, how might that affect neuronal firing?

The neurons will struggle to fire because there will not be enough positively charged ions to trigger the firing of the neuron.

A researcher wants to study the human sense of taste over a life span. The researcher has a group of participants taste foods that are salty, bitter, sweet, sour, and umami. Which study would best allow the researcher to test the sensation of taste as people age, and what is the likely outcome?

The researcher follows the same group of people over the course of 40 years. The researcher also measures the number of the people's taste buds throughout the 40 years. The researcher finds that as people grow older, their sense of taste diminishes and their number of taste buds decreases.

Bryan perceived a duck instead of other animals when viewing an ambiguous image because he watched a documentary about ducks the previous night. Which of the following best explains why Bryan perceived a duck?

Top-down processing, because his perception of the duck was influenced by past experience.

Which of the following is a partial reinforcement schedule that is most resistant to extinction?

Variable ratio

The Father of psychology who is also associated with the technique of objective introspection

Wilhelm Wundt

Which early theorist developed his perspective on psychology by basing it on Darwin's 'survival of the fittest'?

William James

Samantha experienced a traumatic brain injury and afterward began to exhibit bizarre symptoms that no one had ever documented before. The best research method to study Samantha would be

a case study

Dr. Rodriguez is interested in finding out if stress levels throughout the year have a relationship with students' grades. The research method she most likely used is

a correlational study

The psychodynamic theory of dreaming would postulate that

dreams fulfill unconscious wishes

The hormone most associated with the fight or flight response is

epinephrine

Which perspective assumes that human behavior may have developed in certain directions because it served a useful function in preserving the species?

evolutionary

A psychologist is interested in finding out why identical twins have different personalities. This psychologist is most interested in the goal of...

explanation

When a conditioned stimulus is presented without the unconditioned stimulus, a resulting decrease in the conditioned response is called

extinction

Which perspective focuses on free will and self- actualization

humanistic

The advantage of an experiment is that it allows a researcher to

infer cause and affect

Deception can be used in research when

it is appropriate for what is being studied

Ruth and Debbie are identical twins who were raised by the same family. Vince and Frankie are identical twins who were separated at birth and raised by different families. According to research on the heritability of personality traits, Ruth's and Debbie's personalities are statistically

likely to be as similar and dissimilar to one another as are Vince's and Frankie's personalities

The benefit of using inferential statistics is that it allows a researcher to

make generalizations about a population

The fatty casing that helps speed up the neural transmissions of a neuron is called the

myelin sheath

Psychologists who give potential employees tests that determine what kinds of jobs those employees might be best suited for is interested in the goal of...

prediction

Dr. Sampson follows the structuralist school of thought. Her techniques would most likely include

presenting a participant with an object, such as a can of soda, and having the subject report his or her perceptions or experience of the can