Cognitive Psychology Exam 1 Multiple Choice
A bottom-up process is involved in fixating on an area of a scene that
Has high stimulus salience
If kittens are raised in an environment that contains only verticals, you would predict that most of the neurons in their visual cortex would respond best to the visual presentation of a
Picket fence
As a result of gaps in the behaviorist paradigm, the new cognitive paradigm began to emerge in which decade?
1950s
Neuroimage, a journal dedicated solely to reporting neuroimaging research, was founded in which year?
1992
The "Little Albert" experiment involving the rat and the loud noise is an example of which of the following types of experiments?
Classical conditioning
Which of the following terms is correct in context with "Pairing one stimulus with another?
Classical conditioning
Which of the following options would NOT be an important factor in automatic processing?
Close attention
The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli is called
Cocktail party effect
A mental conception of the layout of a physical space is known as a(n)
Cognitive map
The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind is called
Cognitive psychology
Which is the study of mental processes that includes determining the characteristics and properties of the mind and how it operates?
Cognitive psychology
The relationship between the ____ is NOT measured directly by cognitive psychologists.
Cognitive task and mental response
Illusory conjunctions are
Combinations of features from different stimuli
Your text describes the occurrence of a "cognitive revolution" during which dramatic changes took place in the way psychology was studied. This so-called revolution occurred parallel to (and, in part, because of) the introduction of
Computers
Determining the sequence of DNA in humans was a major scientific advance that opened the door to new ideas about illness and approaches to treatment. An individual's unique DNA sequence is similar to which of the following
Connectome
Which of the following adjective has the LEAST connection to perception?
Conscious
Early studies of brain tissue that used staining techniques and microscopes from the 19th century described the "nerve net". These early understandings were in error in the sense that the nerve net was believed to be
Continuous
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
Which of the following is NOT an example of a physical regularity in your text?
Angled orientation
The existence of transitional probabilities adds a(n) ________ quality to learning and using language.
Anticipatory
Which of the following psychologists is known for research on operant conditioning?
B.F. Skinner
Who proposed that children's language development was caused by imitation and reinforcement?
B.F. Skinner
Why we can consider Tolman one of the early cognitive psychologists?
Because he used behavior to infer mental processes
What does the field of neuropsychology study?
Behavior of people with brain damage
Who introduced the flow diagram to represent what is happening in the mind?
Donald Broadbent
According to Ebbinghaus's research on memory, savings is a function of
Elapsed time
Which of the following best describes the result of attention in the context of perception?
Enhancement
Each time you briefly pause on a face, you are making a(n) ______
Fixation
Verbal Behavior was written by
B.F. Skinner
Knowledge of what a scene typically contains.
Likelihood principle
Wundt's approach, which dominated psychology in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was known as
Structuralism
Edgar Adrian studied the relationship between nerve firing and sensory experiences by measuring how the firing of a neuron from a receptor in the skin changed as he applied more pressure to the skin. He found that
the rate of nerve firing increased as he increased the pressure
The "cognitive revolution"
was a gradual process that occurred over a few decades
Which of the following is an example of an effect of top-down processing?
Recognizing a crying friend's sounds as words in a sentence
Which of the following statements best describes how neurons communicate with another?
A chemical process takes place in the synapse
Which of the following statements best describes how neurons communicate with one another?
A chemical process takes place in the synapse
Donald Broadbent was the first person to develop which of the following?
A flow diagram depicting the mind as processing information in a sequence of stages
Which of the following would have the most semantic regularities?
A shopping mall
Which of the following is similar to early ideas scientists had about he brain's physical properties?
A web
The results of Gauthier's "Greeble" experiment illustrate
An effect of experience-dependent plasticity
Regarding children's language development, Noam Chomsky noted that children generate many sentences they have never heard before. From this, he concluded that language development is driven largely by
An inborn biological program
A technique in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli is known as
Analytic introspection
Action potentials occur in the
Axon
Your author points out that studying the mind requires both _______ and ______ experiments
Behavioral, physiological
A person with strong ______ would likely have a deeper experience of Bayesian influence.
Beliefs
If you stand very close to a pointillist painting, all you will see are tiny colored dots. But as you step away from the painting, larger areas of color become noticeable and eventually become recognizable objects such as flowers or clouds. This is similar to which of the following
Binding
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
_____ 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 include the image on the retina, changing the image into electrical signals, and neural processing is an example of _____ processing
Bottom-up
Josiah is trying to speak to his wife, but his speech is very slow and labored, often with jumbled sentence structure. Josiah may have damage to which area of the brain?
Broca's area
The key structural component of neurons are the
Cell body, dendrites, and axons
The difficulty we have in recognizing even an obvious alteration in a scene is called ______ blindness.
Change
Donders's main reason for doing his choice reaction time experiment was to study
Decision making
Brain imaging has made it possible to
Determine which areas of the brain are involved in different cognitive processes
The technique where the participant's task is to focus on the message in one ear, called the attended ear, and to repeat what he or she is hearing out loud is known as
Dichotic listening
What contains the words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated?
Dictionary unit
Which stage in Treisman's attenuation model has a threshold component?
Dictionary unit
The idea that specific cognitive functions activate many areas of the brain is known as
Distributed representation
Proponents of multitasking would note _______ to support their opinion, whereas opponents of multitasking would point to ______ to justify their perspective.
Divided attention, distraction
What does the principal of neural representation state?
Everything a person experiences is based on representations in the person's nervous system
When recording from a single neuron, stimulus intensity is represented by the
Firing rate of the action potentials
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 function such as thinking and problem solving.
Frontal
Consider the following definition of the mind: The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals. Which element of the mind does this definition emphasize?
Functioning and survival
Taking clay and sand to create bricks, which are then used to build modular wall panels, which are then assembled to construct tall buildings , is similar to which of the following moral concepts?
Hierarchical processing
Which of the following is a basic principle of Gestalt psychology?
The whole is different from the sum of its parts
Which of the following does NOT characterize the information processing (IP) approach to the study of cognition?
IP emphasizes the stimulus-response relationships in cognitive processes
You are walking down the street and see a nice car drive by. You notice its color, movement, and shape. All of these features are processed
In different parts of the brain
The first experiments in cognitive psychology were based on the idea that mental responses can be
Inferred from the participant's behavior
Which of the following is statements is the most accurate with regard to specificity coding?
It is unlikely to be correct because there are too many stimuli in the world to have a separate neuron for each
Which of the following is a criticism of analytic introspection?
It produces variable results from person to person
Which of the following is not true of positron emission topography (PET)?
It replaced functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) because it was less expensive
A high threshold in Treisman's model of attention implies that
It takes a strong signal to cause activation
The use of the term artificial intelligence was coined by
John McCarthy
Scene schema is
Knowledge about what is contained in a typical scene
What is a scene schema?
Knowledge of what a scene typically contains.
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
In Donders's research on human decision making, he found that it took ____ to decide which of two buttons to push in response to a stimulus
Less than one second
The saying "If you've seen one, you've seen em all" best reflects which of the following?
Likelihood principle
Paul Broca's and Carl Wernicke's research provided early evidence for
Localization of function
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-level
Semantic regularity refers to the ____________
Meaning between properties of an object
The term semantics, when applied to perception, means the
Meaning of a scene, often related to what is happening within the scene.
The main point of the Donders's reaction time experiments was to
Measure the amount of time it takes to make a decision
Groups of interconnected neurons are referred to as
Neural circuits
Groups of neurons or structures that are connected within the nervous system are called ________
Neural networks
Which of the following statements is correct?
Objects in the central vision fall on the small area called the fovea
People perceive vertical and horizontal orientations more easily than other orientations according to the
Oblique effect
John Watson believed that psychology should focus on the study of
Observable behavior
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
The process by which small objects become perpetually grouped to form larger objects is the principle of perceptual
Organization
The use of a machine that tracks the movement of one's eyes can help reveal the shifting of one's _____ attention
Overt
Sarah has experienced brain damage making it difficult for her to understand spatial layout. Which area of her brain has most likely sustained damage?
Parahippocampal place area (PPA)
The landmark discrimination problem is more difficult to do if you have damage to your _____ lobe.
Parietal
Colin Cherry's experiment in which participants listen to two messages simultaneously, one in each ear, found all but which of the following
People who are deaf process auditory information on a nonconscious level
Which of the following is an example of unconscious inference?
Perceiving that a partially covered automobile continues beneath the cover
The Gestalt psychologists believe that ______
Perception is affected by experience, but built-in perception can override experience.
How does perceptual load differ from processing capacity?
Perceptual load is individual and processing capacity is universal
The "filter model" proposes that the filter identifies the attended message based on
Physical characteristics
The fact that trees are more likely to be vertical or horizontal than slanted is an example of ____.
Physical regularity
Behaviorists believe that the presentation of ____ increases the frequency of behavior
Positive reinforcers
The notion that every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible is called the law of
Pragnanz
Reaction time refers to the time between the ______ of a stimulus and a person's response to it
Presentation
Which memory is used for physical action?
Procedural memory
The fusiform face area (FFA) in the brain is often damaged in patients with
Prosopagnosia
Saccadic eye movement is a _________
Rapid ,jerky movement from one fixation to the next
Which part of the nervous system picks up information from the outside environment?
Receptors
The notion that faster responding occurs when enhancement spreads within an object is called
Same-object advantage
Entering a church service and seeing someone selling hot dogs and cotton candy from a cart near the altar would be perceived as a violation of
Scene schema
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.
Endel Tulving, one of the most prominent early memory researchers, proposed that long-term memory is subdivided into all of the following components except
Short-term memory
In Donders's experiment on decision making, when participants were asked to press a button upon presentation of a light, they were given a
Simple reaction time task
In the text's use of the Olympic Ring example, which Gestalt law contributes to the correct perception of five interlocking circles rather than nine separate segments?
Simplicity
Which of the following events is most closely associated with a resurgence in interested in the mind within the study of psychology?
Skinner's publication of the book, Verbal Behavior
When conducting an experiment on how stimuli are represented by the firing of neurons, you notice that neurons respond differently to different faces. For example, Arthur's face causes three neurons to fire, with neuron 1 responding the most and neuron 3 responding the least. Roger's face causes three different neurons to fire, with neuron 7 responding the least and neuron 9 responding the most. Your results support ______ coding.
Sparse
Before the advent of intercoms, old mansions had a sash in each room. Each sash was connected to a bell on a master board in the servants' office. When someone pulled a sash in a particular room, a bell corresponding to the room would ring on the master board, informing a servant where to go to provide assistance. The system is similar to which of the following?
Specificity coding
The idea that an object could be represented by the firing of a specialized neuron that responds only to that object is called
Specificity coding
When Carlos moved to the United States, he did not understand any English. Phrases like "Anna Mary Can Pi and I Scream Class Hick" didn't make any sense to him. Now that Carlos has been learning English, he recognizes this phrase as "An American Pie and Ice Cream Classic". This example illustrates that Carlos was not capable of _____ in English.
Speech segmentation
What is the gap between the end of a neuron's axon and the dendrites or cell body of another neuron known as?
Synapse
It's often said that "life doesn't exist in a vacuum." However, the emptiness of _______ is critical for brain functioning
Synapses
Strayer and Johnston's (2001) experiment involving simulated driving and the use of "hands-free" versus "handheld" cell phones found that
Talking on either kind of phone impairs driving performance significantly and to the same extent
According to your text, the ability to divide attention depends on all of the following EXCEPT
Task cueing
Which book was written by Thomas Kuhn?
The Structure of the Scientific Revolution
With the Stroop effect, you would expect to find longest response times when
The color and the name differed
Why is it easier to study brain tissue from newborn animals than brain tissue from adults?
The density of cells in a newborn brain is small compared with the density in an adult brain
A synapse is
The gap that separates two different neurons
How is the term mind used in this statement: "when he talks about his encounter with aliens, it sounds like he is out of his mind"?
The mind as a healthy mind being associated with normal functioning, a nonfunctioning mind with abnormal functioning
How is the term mind used in this statement: "If you put your mind to it, I'm sure you can solve that math problem"?
The mind as problem solver
What differentiates bottom-up processing from top-down processing?
The source of information
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
Perceiving machines are used by the U.S. Postal Service to "read" the addresses on letters and sort them quickly to their correct destinations. Sometimes, these machines cannot read an address because the writing on the envelope is not sufficiently clear for the machine to match the writing to an example it has stored in memory. Human postal workers are much more successful at reading unclear addresses, most likely because of
Top-down processing
The Stroop effect occurs when participants
Try to name colors and ignore words
Members of a security team are stationed on rooftops surrounding a large city plaza before a scheduled rally. Suddenly, three team members in different locations radio in to the command center, each stating that they have spotted a suspicious box on the ground with a pipe coming from the top. What enables the security team members to report seeing the same object despite being stationed on different rooftops?
Viewpoint invariance
Which term best reflects what we do with an image projected onto our retina?
We interpret it.
The likelihood principle states that
We perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli we have received.
Imagine that lawmakers are considering changing the driving laws and that you have been consulted as an attention expert. Given the principles of divided attention, in which of the following conditions would a person have the most difficulty with driving and therefore pose the biggest safety risk on the road?
When the person is driving an unfamiliar vehicle that is more difficult to operate.
Anne Treisman's attenuator analyzes the incoming message in terms of all of the following EXCEPT
Whether the perceptual load is low or high
Which of the following word strings refer to the same pathway?
dorsal , where, action
