PSYC 208 - Dr. Pettibone - Ch 1 and 2 Quiz

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

analytical introspection

Which of the following is consistent with the idea of localization of function?

a. Specific areas of the brain serve different functions. b. Neurons in different areas of the brain respond best to different stimuli. c. Brain areas are specialized for specific functions. All of these are correct.

As a result of gaps in the behaviorist paradigm, the new cognitive paradigm began to emerge in which decade?

1950s

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

What is a key difference between dendrites and axons?

One sends information and the other receives information.

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.

Specificity coding

The key structural components of neurons are the

cell body, dendrites, axons

Attention, perception, memory, and decision making are all different types of mental processes in which the mind engages. These are known as different types of

cognition

The idea that specific cognitive functions activate many areas of the brain is known as

distributed representation

Neurons that respond to specific qualities of objects, such as orientation, movement, and length, are called

feature detectors

When recording from a single neuron, stimulus intensity is represented by the

firing rate of the action potentials

a synapse is

junction/gap between a sending neuron and a receiving neuron

What term did Edward Tolman use to describe the concept that organisms learn without positive reinforcement?

latent learning

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

neural networks

Which substance is released when signals reach the synapse at the end of the axon?

neurotransmitters

A 10-month-old baby is interested in discovering different textures, comparing the touch sensations between a soft blanket and a hard wooden block. Tactile signals such as these are received by the ______________ lobe

parietal

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

Ebbinghaus's "memory" experiments were important because they

plotted functions that described the operation of the mind.

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

If the intensity of a stimulus that is presented to a touch receptor is increased, this tends to increase the __________ in the receptor's axon.

rate of nerve firing

In Donders's experiment on decision making, when participants were asked to press a button upon presentation of a light, they were engaged in a

simple reaction time task

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