Sensation & Perception Practice Test

Two people look at the same photograph of a dress and disagree about its color. This best illustrates that ….

perceptual experiences can vary significantly among individuals

The columns of a building are physically vertical, but they do not look vertical to you. The best explanation is that

our experience of perception is subjective

Sensation is to a _______ response as perception is to a _______ response.

physiological; psychological

Transduction takes place _______.

at sensory receptors, where physical energy is converted into neural impulses

You read a sentence quickly and fail to notice that a word is misspelled, because your expectations filled it in. This is an example of _____.

top-down processing

According to the Gibsonian approach, perception is ___.

passive and direct, reflecting the rich sensory information available in the environment

Which approach involves asking individuals to describe their perceptual experiences without imposing experimental constraints?

phenomenological

Response expansion occurs when _______.

the perceived sensation increases more rapidly than the increase in stimulus intensity

 The Necker cube is a useful demonstration because it shows that _______.

the physical stimulus can stay exactly the same while the perception changes

Cross two fingers and roll a single small object between the fingertips. It feels like two objects. This is _______.

Aristotle’s illusion, a distortion of touch information

 Staring at a waterfall and then looking at the rocks beside it makes the rocks appear to drift upward. This happens because _______.

prolonged exposure to one stimulus alters how we experience other stimuli afterward

 Illusory contours, such as the edges people see in the Kanizsa figure, are explained by the process of _______.

edge completion

Which approach to studying sensation and perception is most closely tied to the development of artificial intelligence?

computational

The absolute threshold is _______.

the smallest amount of a stimulus required for detection about half of the time

You are holding a 200-gram object, and your JND for weight is 10%. About how much weight must be added before you notice a change half of the time?

20 grams

 In which psychophysical method are stimuli presented in a random rather than an ordered sequence?

method of constant stimuli

On a plot of Stevens’ power law, an exponent greater than 1 indicates _______.

response expansion, with the curve accelerating or bending upward

Which method has the advantage of quickly yielding a threshold for each participant?

method of adjustment

The just noticeable difference (JND) is _______.

the smallest perceptible change in a stimulus

In the method of adjustment, who controls the level of the stimulus?

the participant

The method of limits alternates descending and ascending series in order to prevent sensory adaptation.

True

A whale is present, and you shout "whale!" This outcome is a _______.

hit

You are watching for whales. A whale is present and you fail to shout "whale!" This outcome is a _______.

miss

 No whale is present, and you do not shout. This outcome is a _______.

correct rejection

A radiologist is told that missing a tumor will result in a lawsuit. She is most likely to _______.

adopt a more lax criterion, producing more hits but also more false alarms

In signal detection theory, the criterion is _______.

the cutoff value of evidence a person requires before responding that a signal was present

The Receiver-Operator Characteristic (ROC) curve _______.

summarizes all of the possible outcomes for a situation across all possible criteria

A researcher examining a slice of nervous tissue under a microscope would find it made up of _______.

neurons and glial cells

 Information generally enters a neuron through its _______ and leaves through its _______.

dendrites; axon

Compared with an unmyelinated axon of the same diameter, a myelinated axon conducts signals _______.

faster, because the myelin insulates the membrane

The junction where one neuron can influence the activity of another is called a _______.

synapse

A neuron carrying information from a touch receptor in your skin toward the spinal cord is best described as _______.

sensory, or afferent

Almost every sensory pathway headed for the cortex passes first through the _______.

thalamus

Which structure is the folded outer shell of gray matter where basic sensory information is assembled into meaningful perceptions?

the cerebral cortex

The resting potential sits much closer to the potassium equilibrium potential than to the sodium equilibrium potential because _______.

a resting neuron is far more permeable to potassium than to sodium

A neuron’s membrane potential moves from –70 mV to –85 mV. This change is called _______.

hyperpolarization

 Which of the following is true of a graded potential but not of an action potential?

Its size varies with the event that produced it, and it fades within a few millimeters.

One stimulus is twice as intense as another, and both are above threshold. Compared with the weaker stimulus, the stronger one produces action potentials that are _______.

the same size, but more frequent

Which technique for studying neural activity records from individual neurons rather than from populations of them?

single unit recording

Wernicke’s area is most often cited as evidence for _______.

modular organization, in which specific brain regions are specialized for particular functions