Psych Test 3: Week 9

The sentence "Never threaten someone with a chain saw" can mean at least two very different things. This sentence has one __________ and at least two __________.

surface structure...deep structures

The common mistakes children make as they try to learn language indicate that the children

are learning grammatical rules and over-applying them.

In which of these does a person have the LEAST amount of brain activity and responsiveness?

brain death

Which of the following is characteristic of a "minimally conscious state"?

brief periods of purposeful action and speech comprehension

What is one important function of sleep?

conserving energy

Which of the following often produces spatial neglect for half of the body?

damage in the right hemisphere of the brain

Research examining the content of dreams in American and Japanese college students found that

dream content was similar in both cultures.

The sequence of words as they are actually spoken or written is called the ____

surface structure.

Damage to the right hemisphere of the brain often leads to which of the following?

tendency to be unconscious of the left side of the body and the world

How many morphemes are in the word "chocolate"?

1

When most people read, they do so by seeing a "window" of about __________ letters.

11

At about what age do most children start saying two-word phrases such as "more page"?

2 years

How many morphemes are in the word "triangle"?

3

How many fixations per second does a typical reader have when reading an average page of text?

4

When researchers measured brain activity during a binocular rivalry task, what did they find?

A consciously perceived image activated large portions of the brain.

Re-synchronizing the circadian rhythm is easier after flying west, the same direction as the sun seems to rise. True or False

True

SCN stands for suprachiasmatic nucleus. True or False

True

Sleep progresses through a series of stages. True or False

True

Sleep spindles tend to occur during stage 2 sleep. True or False

True

The brain is an electronic device. True or False

True

To experience smell, our brain detects molecules. True or Fasle

True

Unpleasant dreams are called nightmares. True or False

True

Wernicke's area is critical for speech comprehension. True or False

True

How would the activation-synthesis theory explain why people dream of an inability to move?

It really is difficult to move the muscles during REM sleep.

What does it mean if you wake up and find yourself temporarily unable to move?

Part of your brain is awake and another part is asleep.

Detecting electric fields on the head is a way to detect and measure brain activity. True or False

True

In the context of the brain, a "nucleus" refers to a group of neuron cell bodies. True or False

True

Suppose people hear an ambiguous sound that is half-way between dent and tent. What determines what they hear?

A person may hear dent or tent, influenced by preceding context and the next two or three words.

Which of the following is true of a child's language development?

As early as age 2 1/2 to 3 years, children's language errors imply that they are using grammatical rules.

To what extent is infants' babbling influenced by what they hear?

At first, what they hear makes no difference; later they copy sounds they hear.

Why do cats sleep more than sheep?

Cats are in less danger while they sleep.

In the early 1900s, several psychologists reared chimpanzees as if they were children and tried to teach them to talk. What was one major reason for their failure?

Chimpanzees have trouble making human sounds.

Why is it difficult for chimpanzees to make human sounds?

Chimpanzees make sounds while inhaling and humans make sounds while exhaling.

Which of the following best describes the relationship between light-dark cycles (from the rising and setting sun) and circadian rhythms?

Circadian rhythms are generated by the body, but reset by light-dark cycles.

In which condition does the brain show a low, steady rate of activity and no response to any stimulus?

Coma

What evidence do we have that children exposed to no language at all would invent their own?

Deaf children who fail to learn spoken language generally invent a sign language.

Which of these is evidence AGAINST the idea that human language evolved as an accidental byproduct of brain size?

Dolphins and whales do not have language.

A lucid dream refers to a dream someone forgets. True or False

False

Most dreams do not include visual content. True or False

False

The ears are most like a radio antenna. True or False

False

The eyes take in information even while moving. True or False

False

What evidence indicated that a woman in a vegetative state may be conscious?

Her brain activity responded to commands such as "imagine playing tennis."

One explanation as to why animals sleep is to save energy. True or False

True

Which of the following is true of brain activity during sleep?

Increased inhibitory messages prevent excitation from spreading in the brain.

What evidence suggested that some people in a vegetative state are conscious?

Instructions to imagine something activated the same brain areas as in intact people.

How does dreaming differ from other thinking?

It has less sensory input and less voluntary control.

What does the "language acquisition device" do?

It helps children learn language.

When speed readers double or triple their reading speed, what happens to their comprehension?

It remains about the same as before, unless the material is difficult.

Which of the following is NOT characteristic of REM sleep?

Most of the body's muscles are tense and active.

A worker at International Amalgamated, Inc., is currently working from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. The company wants to shift her to a different work time. For the sake of her physical and mental health, which of the following would be best?

Move her to the 4 p.m. to midnight shift, then to midnight to 8 a.m. shift.

Why is "Be honest" generally more effective than "Do not cheat"?

Positive statements tend to be more effective than negative statements.

During which stage of sleep is the brain most active?

REM

The terms "light sleep" and "deep sleep" are not very useful because

REM sleep is deep in some ways and light in others.

If a person goes without sleep for several days, what happens?

Sleepiness decreases at the end of each sleepless night, as morning arrives.

After a prolonged period of sleep deprivation, what happens to the brain?

Some neurons are active but others are as inactive as in sleep.

What happens to the brain's representation of a sensory stimulus on occasions when people are conscious of it, that does not happen when they are unconscious of it?

The activity spreads through much more of the brain.

Someone with right-hemisphere damage ordinarily neglects the left side of objects. What happens if the person closes his/her eyes and tries to describe a scene form memory?

The description neglects the left side.

Why is it impossible for sleepwalking to occur during REM sleep?

The postural muscles are so relaxed that they would not support a person.

What do cognitive psychologists mean by the "framing effect"?

The way you phrase a question changes people's answers.

What problem do people with sleep apnea experience?

They often stop breathing while they are asleep.

Researchers wanted to present a stimulus that would become conscious on some trials and not on others, while keeping the stimulus itself the same. Which of these methods did they use to make the stimulus unconscious?

They presented interfering stimuli before and after the stimulus.

What usually happens if deaf children cannot learn to speak, and no one teaches them sign language?

They try to make up their own sign language.

A "saccade" is movement of the eyeballs while reading. True or False

True

A less synchronized bran is a "more" active brain. True or False

True

A person is considered conscious if they are aware of themselves and their surroundings. True or False

True

An average reader makes 4 fixations per second while reading. True or False

True

Broca's area is critical for speech production. True or False

True

What evidence suggests that we sometimes consciously perceive a stimulus afterward, instead of simultaneously with it?

We don't perceive a brief masked stimulus, but a slightly longer one seems to last the whole duration.

We read some blurry or partly obscured letters as RED, although in other contexts we might see the letters as P, F, and B. This observation supports which conclusion?

We recognize a word as a unit, not one letter at a time.

What condition is marked by fluent speech despite few nouns, and impaired language comprehension?

Wernicke's aphasia

Brain-damaged patient A speaks fluently but is hard to understand, and she has trouble understanding other people's speech. Patient B understands most speech, but he speaks slowly and inarticulately, and he leaves out nearly all prepositions, conjunctions, and word endings. Patient A has _____ and patient B has _____.

Wernicke's aphasia... Broca's aphasia

For which of these questions would you be most likely to use System 2 instead of System 1?

What is the time in days between September 14 and February 6 of the next year?

If you were on a submarine with constant artificial light and no sunlight, what would happen to your sleep-wake cycle?

You would alternate between sleep and wakefulness on a 24-hour cycle.

What is meant by the "language acquisition device"?

a built-in mechanism for acquiring language

Our tendency to feel wakeful and sleepy on a 24-hour basis depends mainly on

a cycle generated by a mechanism in the brain.

Narcolepsy may be caused by

a deficiency of the brain chemical orexin.

Someone who stays in a cave with no light alternates between sleepiness and wakefulness on about a 24 hour cycle. Why?

a rhythm generated within the person's own brain

A saccade is

a voluntary eye movement.

A repetitive procedure for testing every possible answer is _____, whereas a strategy for simplifying a problem and finding a good-enough answer is _____.

an algorithm... a heuristic

In binocular rivalry, you see one image in the left eye and an incompatible image in the right eye. What do you perceive?

an alternation between one image and the other

During REM sleep,

dreaming is likely to occur.

After staying awake late many nights, Gloria has become accustomed to going to sleep late and awakening late. Now she tries to shift to going to bed earlier and waking up earlier. This shift is similar to the difficulties people face when they travel

east

A typical adult reader can see and read about how much during one eye fixation?

eleven letters

During reading, the eyes alternate between fixations and saccades. Reading--in the sense of understanding the words--occurs during

fixations only.

Fox and Crow are both thirsty. They come upon a large crock with some water in it, but cannot lift the pitcher or reach down to the water. There happens to be a bucket of baseballs nearby and Fox steps back to throw the baseballs to try to break the crock. Crow reminds him that this will only spill the water, and uses the more clever solution of dropping the baseballs into the crock to raise the water level to within reach. Fox's problem was

functional fixedness.

Compared with normal readers, speed readers

have briefer fixations.

The availability heuristic is based on the assumption that

if we can easily remember examples of something, it must be a common event.

What are algorithms?

mechanical, repetitive mathematical procedures for solving a problem

Each unit of meaning in a word is called a

morpheme

For most people, REM sleep occurs

mostly toward the end of the night's sleep.

When 2- to 3-year-old children speak, they

overgeneralize grammatical rules.

The "word superiority effect" is the observation that on the average,

people recognize a letter within a familiar word more easily than a letter by itself.

Each letter or short combination of letters in a language that forms a unit of sound is known as a

phoneme

For thinking and problem solving, we use System 1 for _____ and we use System 2 for _____.

quick automatic processes... slow processes that require attention

When chess experts were shown a chess board and asked to recall the pieces, they

remembered better than novices if the pieces were arranged as in a game, but about the same if they were arranged randomly.

The tendency to assume that if an item is similar to members of a particular category, it is probably a member of that category itself, is known as the

representativeness heuristic.

In decision making, searching until you find something that is good enough is called

satisficing

What is typical for the language of a one-year-old?

some language comprehension, but not much production

Who would be LEAST likely to show the word-superiority effect?

someone who is just learning how to read

The brain activity associated with REM sleep is most similar to that associated with

stage 1 sleep.

What is meant by the "productivity" of human language?

the ability to create new sentences

A recording plays the word "legislatures" but a cough replaces the first s. What do you hear?

the full word "legislatures"

When a normal, healthy person falls asleep, REM sleep is least likely when

the person has been asleep less than an hour.

What is meant by "parentese?"

the way parents simplify their speech to help infants learn language

The system for converting a deep structure into a surface structure in language is called

transformational grammar.

Common chimpanzees that learned to communicate by sign language or visual symbols

use their symbols almost exclusively to make requests.

In an experiment a cough or a tone replaced the first "s" in the word "legislatures" in a sentence the subjects were listening to. The results of this experiment support the idea that

we hear words as a whole, rather than a group of separate sounds (letters).

In which situation would a heuristic be most useful?

you have too many hypotheses to test