Cognitive Psychology Exam 1

If a Gestalt psychologist was baking a cake for an event, what would they be most focused on?

The cake

The use of a machine that tracks the movement of one's eyes can help reveal the shifting of one's __________ attention.

overt

Reaction time refers to the time between the _______ of a stimulus and a person's response to it.

presentation

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

prosopagnosia

What differentiates bottom-up processing from top-down processing?

the source of information

When Sam listens to his girlfriend Susan in the restaurant and ignores other people's conversations, he is engaged in the process of __________ attention.

selective

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

In the text's use of the Olympic Rings example, which Gestalt law contributes to the correct perception of five interlocking circles rather than nine separate segments?

simplicity

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

could focus on one message and ignore the other one at the same time

The key structural components of neurons are the

Cell body, dendrites, axon

Donders's main reason for doing his choice reaction time experiment was to study

decision making

If a word is identified more easily when it is in a sentence than when it is presented alone, this would be an example of _____ processing.

top-down processing

Which term best reflects what we do with an image projected onto our retina?

we interpret it

Groups of neurons or structures that are connected within the nervous system are called__________.

Neural networks

Action potentials occur in the

axon

You look at a rope coiled on a beach and are able to perceive it as a single strand because of the law of

good continuation.

Suppose you are in your kitchen writing a grocery list, while your roommate is watching TV in the next room. A commercial for spaghetti sauce comes on TV. Although you are not paying attention to the TV, you "suddenly" remember that you need to pick up spaghetti sauce and add it to the list. Your behavior is best predicted by which of the following models of attention?

late selection

Broadbent's model is called the early selection model because

the filter eliminates unattended information before the recognition process begins

The likelihood principle states that

we perceive the objects that are most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli we have received.

Eye tracking studies investigating attention as we carry out actions such as making a peanut butter sandwich found that a person's eye movements

were determined primarily by the task.

Which of the following options would NOT be an important factor in automatic processing?

Close attention

When we search a scene, initial fixations are most likely to occur on __________ areas.

High-saliency

The demonstration in your text that asks you to visualize scenes such as an office, a department store clothing section, a lion, and a microscope often results in more details in the scene of the office or department store than the scene with the lion or microscope. The latter two tend to have fewer details because most individuals from modern society have less knowledge of _____ in those scenes.

Semantic regularities

Which of the following is the process by which features such as color, form motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object?

binding

The sequence of steps that includes the image on the retina, changing the image into electrical signals, and neural processing is an example of _____ processing.

bottom-up

The study of the physiological basis of cognition is known as

cognitive neuroscience

Brain imaging has made it possible to

determine which areas of the brain are involved in different cognitive processes

Each time you briefly pause on one face, you are making a(n) __

fixation

The __________ lobe of the cortex receives information from all of the senses and is responsible for coordination of the senses, as well as higher cognitive functions such as thinking and problem solving.

frontal

In the mid-20th century, the study of the mind began using which technique or model inspired by digital computers?

Information procession model

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

A chemical process that takes place at the synapse

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli is called

Cocktail party effect

Which of the following is an experimental procedure used to study how attention affects the processing of competing stimuli?

Dichotic listening

What contains the words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated?

Dictionary unit

Which of the following word strings all refer to the same pathway?

Dorsal, where, action

The saying, "If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all" best reflects which of the following?

likelihood principle

If you are folding towels while watching television, you may find that you don't have to pay much attention to the act of folding while keeping up with the storyline on the TV show. Folding the towels would be an example of a(n) ________ task.

low-load

In Schneider and Shiffrin's experiment, in which participants were asked to indicate whether a target stimulus was present in a series of rapidly presented "frames," divided attention was easier

once processing had become automatic.

With the Stroop effect, you would expect to find longest response times when

the color and the name differed

A high threshold in Treisman's model of attention implies that

only a strong signal causes activation