AP Psych Midterm 2

Rods and cones; bipolar cells; ganglion cells; optic nerve

Which of the following is the correct progression of visual processing in the human eye?

Reduced clarity of the distant image(s) in the visual field.

As a depth and distance cue, texture gradient is characterized by

Place Theory

Hair cells at particular locations on the basilar membrane respond to incoming sound waves, and the auditory cortex interprets those locations to identify the pitch of a sound

Conduction Deafness

Damage to the tympanic membrane and ossicles would likely result in

Gestalt

The ability to accurately perceive common images even when there are slight gaps in those figures is best accounted for by

In the fovea

The visual acuity of the human retina is best

Absolute Threshold

One classic measure of the minimum amount of sound the typical human can detect at least half the time it is present is the tick of a watch under quiet conditions at a distance of 20 feet. This is an example of

Perceptual Set

Trisha was watching a scary movie while home alone.  She heard a storm rattling the window and interpreted that as the sound of an intruder trying to break in.  Her error was due to the influence of

Gustatory and Olfactory

Which of the following senses respond directly to chemical energy rather than physical energy?

Pitch

The volley principle is most directly relevant to our perception of

Weber’s Law

You and your friend are on a five-day hiking trip. Your friend decides each day to remove one light item from his 30-pound backpack and secretly place it in your similar backpack. At the end of the trip you have not yet detected a difference in the weight of your pack. Which of the following best accounts for this?

A false alarm

Two college roommates are studying in their dorm room when one asks "ls that a phone ringing next door?''. Her roommate responds "No, I don't think so, but I'll go check''.  She returns with the news that there was no phone ringing in the next room.  In signal detection theory, the first roommate's perception is called

Sensory Adaptation

When you first walk into a loud rock concert, the noise might seem unbearable. However, after a short time hair cells in your cochlea stop responding to that unchanging stimulus. Which of the following accounts for this?

Trouble mainting balance

Damage to the semicircular canals located deep in the inner ear would likely result in

Transduction

The process by which sound waves are transformed into electrochemical messages is known as

Sensory; perception

________ is receiving data from the external environment; ________ is how our brains make sense of that data.

Difference Threshold

The amount of stimulus required to determine that a stimulus has changed just a little bit is called the

Blind spot results from

The lack of receptors at the spot where the optic nerve attaches to the retina.

Amplitude is the height of a sound wave, whereas frequency is a measure of how frequently the sound waves pass a given point.

What is the principle difference between amplitude and frequency in the context of sound waves?

The nerve connecting the olfactory bulb sends impulses directly to the limbic system.

Our sense of smell may be a powerful trigger for memories because

Shape Constancy

In a perception research lab, you are asked to describe the shape of the top of a box that is slowly rotating.  Which concept are the researchers most likely investigating?

Opponent-process Theory

The theory of color that best explains color afterimage is

Red, blue, green

Trichromats (people with trichromatic color vision) can mix which three colors to perceive virtually any hue?

Gymnast

Which of the following occupations relies heavily on kinesthetic and vestibular senses?

Convergence

The binocular cue for depth perception based on signals from muscles that turn the eye to focus on near approaching objects is called

Smell

Olfactory cells are the receptors for what sense?

Retinal Disparity

Which of the following is NOT a monocular depth cue?

Rods

Black-and-white vision with greatest sensitivity under low levels of illumination describes the role of 

Top-down Processing

You are shown a picture of your grandfather's face, but the eyes and the mouth are blocked out.  You still recognize it as a picture of your grandfather.  Which type of processing best explains this example of perception?

Phi Phenomenon

When you restart your computer, you may see what appears to be a circle with spokes spinning until start-up is complete.  This is an example of

It is inborn

What conclusion can you draw from the visual cliff experiment about depth perception?

Spinal Cord

The classic gate-control theory suggests that pain is experienced when small nerve fibers activate and open a neural gate in the

MuGurk Effect

If we see a speaker mouthing day while actually hearing someone else saying may, we may perceive a third syllable bay that blends both inputs. This phenomenon is known as

Random Sampling

Which procedure helps to ensure that the participants in a survey are representative of a larger population?

In random sampling, it is essential that

All members of the target population have an equal chance of being chosen.

Primary limitation of the case research method

Individual cases can be misleading and result in false generalizations.

Scatterplot

To graphically represent the correlation between two variables, researchers often construct a

Informed consent, protection from harm, confidentiality, debriefing

Which of the following defines ethical principles that should guide human experimentation?

The median value will be higher than the mean value.

Scores in a distribution are negatively skewed

Her sample is not representative of “Smith High School”, and her use of two different versions of the question confounds the results.

A writer for a local newspaper enters the high school and stops the first twenty students she encounters, asking them to take a brief survey. She takes half of them and asks, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy are you with the idea of lengthening the school day by one hour?” Meanwhile, her assistant takes the remainder of the volunteers and asks them if they are “very unhapopy”, “unhappy”, “neutral”, “happy”, or “very happy”. When the writer tallies the responses she finds 89% of the students responded with a ‘2’ or below or said they were “very unhappy”about lengthening the school day. The title of her article the next day is *Smith High School Students Strongly Oppose Lengthening the School Day*. Which of the following statements explains two errors in her methodology?

Placebo

In a study of the effects of alcohol consumption, some participants drank a nonalcoholic beverage that actually smelled and tasted like alcohol. This nonalcoholic drink was a

Population from which he selected the mice

Dr. Bissell conducts an experiment to see whether hunger makes mice run faster through a maze. He randomly assigns 25 mice to a control group and an experimental group. Which cannot be a confounding variable?

Independent Variable

In an experiment, Sydney is going to investigate how alcohol affects aggression. The number of alcoholic drinks the subject ingests is called

Possibility; causation

Correlation indicates the ___ of a casual relationship, but it does not prove ___

0\.08

Which of the following correlational coefficients indicates the weakest relationship between two variables?

A relationship exists between studying and exam grades

Marc, a psychology major, collected survey data about the number of hours that college students study for finals and their grades on those finals. His data indicates that students who spend more time studying for finals tend to do better than other students. What can Marc now conclude?

Compare the means of the control group and experimental group.

To determine whether a research finding is statistically significant, researchers

Experimental Research

If a researcher is trying to establish a causal relationship between eating breakfast and work performance, the researcher should use which of the following methods of research?

Repeated research with similar results increases confidence in the reliability of the original findings.

Why is replication important to science?

Naturalistic Observation

Professor Shimabukuro carefully observes and records the behaviors of children in their classrooms in order to track the development of their social and intellectual skills. Professor Shimabukuro is most clearly engaged in

The mean is 6, there is no mode, and the median is 6

Which of the following accurately describes the three measures of central tendency for the following scores on a quiz? 3, 7, 6, 10, 4

Advantage of case study over a survey

There is often a significant difference between what individuals report they would do in a certain circumstance and what they actually do  in such a circumstance.

82%

In a normal distribution of IQ scores with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15, approximately what percentage of scores wold fall between one S.D. below and 2 S.D.s above the mean?

Operational Definition

A specification of how a researcher measures a research variable is known as a(n)

10, 22, 8, 9, 6

For which of the following distributions of scores would the median most clearly be a more appropriate measure of central tendency than the mean?

Negative Correlation

The observation in a classroom that the higher the room temperature, the lower the academic student performance would be an example of

Students' scores tended to be very similar to one another.

Professor Teruya noticed that the distribution of students' scores on her last biology test had an extremely small standard deviation. This indicates that the

Surveys; experiments

Random sampling is to ________ as random assignment is to ________.

Inferential Statistics

Jordan runs an experiment testing the effects of sugar consumption on aggression levels in children. He randomly assigns 20 subjects to either a control group given sugar-free candy or to the experimental group that was given the same candy that did contain sugar. He then tests the subjects’ response to several different puzzles, each with increasing difficulty. Jordan's hypothesis is that sugar levels do indeed play a role in aggression in children. In order to know whether his hypothesis has been supported, Jordan will need to use:

Illusory Correlation

The sequential occurrence of two highly unusual events is most likely to contribute to

Double-blind Procedure

Both the researchers and the participants in a memory study are ignorant about which participants have actually received a potentially memory-enhancing drug and which have received a placebo. This investigation involves the use of

Hypothesis

Professor Raza suggests that because people are especially attracted to those who are good-looking, handsome men will be more successful than average-looking men in getting a job. The professor's prediction regarding employment success is an example of

Random Assignment

What technique do researchers use to reduce the impact of confounding variables?

Synapses

The spatial junctions where impulses are chemically transmitted from one neuron to another are called

Nature via Nurture

Which statement best reflects current psychology's understanding of the relationship between nature and nurture?

The Bloodstream

Endocrine glands secrete hormones directly into

The interaction of nature and nurture

People have always responded so positively to Alyssa's good looks that she has developed a socially confident and outgoing personality. This best illustrates

Mature and Affluent

Women are most likely to be sexually attracted to men who seem

The personalities of adopted children

Are not very similar to the personalities of their adoptive parents.

Drug Tolerance

Reduced effect of a drug resulting from its regular usage.

Genes, DNA, Chromosomes

Put the following terms in order, from smallest to largest.

Sensory Neurons

For you to experience the pain of a sprained ankle, ________ must first relay messages from your ankle to your central nervous system.

REM; NREM-3

Paradoxical sleep is to slow-wave sleep as ________ sleep is to ________ sleep.

“Everything psychological is simultaneously biological.”

Your friend is taking her first psychology class. She comes to you saying, “I don't understand why we are studying the brain; I thought this was a psychology class.” Because of your background in psychology, your best response should be

HE

Psychologist Michael Gazzaniga asked split-brain patients to stare at a dot as he flashed HE·ART on a screen. HE appeared in the left visual field, ART in the right. When asked to point to the word with their left hand, patients pointed to

Antagonist

LSD and other powerful hallucinogens are chemically similar to, and therefore block the actions of, a subtype of the neurotransmitter serotonin. At the synapse, these drugs act as a(n)

Polarization; depolarization

Resting potential is to action potential as ________ is to ________.

Melatonin

When light strikes the retina, it signals the suprachiasmatic nucleus to alter ________ production by the pineal gland.

Sympathetic Nervous System

While you are hiking in the mountains, a rattlesnake slithers across your trail. Which of the following triggers the “fight-or-flight” response, increasing your heart rate and blood pressure, as you run away?

Depressant

Alcohol is considered a(n)

Because heritability accounts for variations among people, not in specific individuals

Why is it incorrect to say that 50 percent heritability of intelligence means that the cause of your intelligence is 50 percent genetic and 50 percent environmental?

Myelin Sheath

The speed at which a neural impulse travels is increased when the axon is encased by a(n)

Narcolepsy

Which of the following sleep disorders would have the most negative impact for a commercial bus driver?

Conscious awareness is one part of the dual processing that occurs in our two-track minds.

Until reading this question you were unaware that your shoes are pressing against your feet. This focusing of your conscious attention, or selective attention, illustrates that

Antagonists

Molecules that are similar enough to a neurotransmitter to bind to its receptor sites on a dendrite and block that neurotransmitter's effects are called what?

Physical Dependence

Which of the following provides the clearest indication of a drug addiction?

Evolutionary

Professor Assad suggested that a cautious attitude toward sexual encounters has proven to be more reproductively advantageous to women than to men because the birth process is time-consuming. This suggestion best illustrates the logic of a(n) ________ theory of sexual behavior.

As sleep progresses, NREM-3 sleep diminishes while REM sleep increases.

Which of the following is most accurate about a typical night's sleep?

Providing hindsight explanations for human behaviors.

Evolutionary psychologists are most likely to be criticized for

REM Rebound

Tendency for REM sleep to increase following REM sleep deprivation.

Amphetamines

François was dismayed to discover that some of his football teammates were using drugs to enhance their footwork and endurance on the playing field. Which of the following drugs were the players most likely using?

Relaxed but awake state.

Alpha waves are associated with

Natural Selection

If a genetic predisposition to fear darkness contributes to reproductive success, that trait will likely be passed on to subsequent generations. This best illustrates

Dreaming

Three hours after going to sleep, Shoshanna's heart rate increases, her breathing becomes more rapid, and her eyes move rapidly under her closed lids. Research suggests that Shoshanna is

Endocrine messages tend to outlast the effects of neural messages

After a car swerves in front of you on the highway, you notice that your heart is still racing, even though you know you are no longer in danger. Why do the physical symptoms of fear linger even after we cognitively realize the danger has passed?

Manifest

Freud called the remembered story line of a dream its ________ content.

Night Terrors

About three hours after he falls asleep, Bobby often sits up in bed screaming incoherently. His mother tries to awaken him, but with no success. His pulse races and he gasps for breath. The next morning, he remembers nothing. It appears that Bobby suffers from

EEG

Sleep researchers who are interested in brain wave activity are likely to use which kind of brain scan?

Plasticity

The capacity of one brain area to take over the functions of another damaged brain area is known as brain

MRI scans show structural details of the brain, fMRI scans show structure and activity levels

What is the main difference between an MRI scan and an fMRI scan?