MSSTATE COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY EXAM 1

Developments in which of the following did not influence the emergence of cognitive psychology?

Cognitive science

Neurons communicate by releasing chemicals called:

Neuronrtransmitters

A synapse is

the point at which an axon from one neuron passes communication to the dendrite of another

A bulge in the cortex is called a:

Gyrus

Which of these lobes is NOT a cortical lobe?

anterial

The _________ portion of the brain is disproportionately larger in primates than in most mammals.

frontal

By comparing reaction times across different tasks, Donders was able to to conclude how long the mind needs to perform a certain cognitive task. Donders interpreted the difference in reaction time between the simple and choice conditions of his experiment as indicating how long it took to:

make a decision about the stimulus

Billy and Mac were in a car accident. Billy suffered damaged to Broca's area, while Mac suffered damage to Wernicke's area, as a result:

both suffered from language deficits

The left hemisphere is associated with:

Analytic and perceptual processing

According to ____________, psychologists should NOT try to analyze the working of the mind.

behaviorism

Which neuroimaging technique relies exclusively on detecting differences in blood oxygenation levels in different regions of the brain?

fMRI

Which neuroimaging technique relies on detecting voltage changes on the scalp associated with neural firing?

EEG

Visual images are projected onto the light-sensitive layer of the eye called the:

retina

Hubel and Wiesel discovered cells in the cat's visual cortex that respond positively to light on one side of a line and negatively to light on the other side. These cells are called:

edge detectors

To convert a 2-D retinal image to a 3-D neural representation, the visual system uses cues such as:

stereopsis, texture gradient, and motion parallax

The fact that each eye receives slightly different views of the world is referred to as ______, a process that aids in ____.

stereopis; depth perception

How do template-matching models compare to human pattern recognition?

Template-matching models are more rigid than human pattern recognition

Object recognition is similar to feature analysis in that:

objects can be viewed as configurations of simple elements

Biederman suggested that there are 36 sub-objects that combine to create ever 3-D object in our environment. He referred to these as:

geons

When we listen to a foreign language, the flow of speech sounds like a continuous stream. This illustrates:

a absence of clear boundaries or markers for words.

The basic perceived units of speech are called

phoneme

Subjects are most likely to confuse consonants that vary in only feature. This evidence supports that idea that:

Phonemes are recognized by their features

Subjects can better discriminate between two letters when the letters are embedded in words than when the letters stand alone. This effect is called the :

word superiority effect

Which of the following is NOT a theory of object perception?

Feature selection and memorization

How is the Interactive Activation Model different other feature-based theories of object recognition (e.g. Triesman's feature-integration theory)?

it includes a top-down processing component

Lateral inhibition facilitates which of the following is visual processing?

edge detection

The fact that you can read the above image shows:

That top-down processing is important for perception

You are at a museum. Which of the following is an example of something likely to lead to an exogenous attention shift?

a brightly-colored painting against a white wall

In studies of dichotic listening, psychologists have found that subjects:

could identify only the physical characteristics of the message (speech vs. noise) heard in the non-attended ear

Imagine that you are at a party with many conversations going on around you. Your attention is "grabbed" by a conversation that includes your name. This event suggests that:

the meaning of a message is sometimes more important than the physical characteristics of the message for attention

Triesman and Geffen compared the attenuation theory with the late-selection theory. They asked subjected to indicate when they heard a target word, but the word could occur either in the shadowed or unattended ear. Their results suggest that:

a attenuation theory is supported since most subjects detected the shadowed, but not the unattended, target words

In a visual array, subjects must identify the location of the target letter O. This should be easiest when the distracters are:

I's and X's

The term that cognitive psychologists studying perception use to describe the difficulty in explaining the fact that individuals are able to remember the proper combination of features of stimuli (e.g. a red A vs. a blue A) that they have seen previously is called:

the binding problem

Patients with right parietal lobe injury generally have:

difficulty disengaging attention from visual information presented to to the ipsilateral (same, right) side of the visual field.

If we have looked at a particular region of space, we find it harder to return our attention to that region of space. This phenomenon is called:

inhibition of return

In the study of attention, automaticity refers to:

performance of a skill that has been practiced repeatedly with little or no direct attention.

The strong tendency for the reading of words to be faster than the naming of colors is seen in the:

Stroop effect

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 come on TV. Although you are not paying attention to the TV, and are not aware of whats on, you "suddenly" remember that you need to pick up spaghetti sauce and you add it to the list. Your behavior is best predicted by which of the following models of attention?

Deutsch & Deutsch's late selection

The phenomenon of illusory conjunction refers to:

the tendency to report combinations of features that had not appeared together in the original display

Experiments demonstrating the inhibition of return phenomenon in attention suggest that attention is:

space-based and object-based

What pattern of performance might be expected when observing someone who is multitasking?

performance will always be hindered when multitasking compared to single tasking, but much less if the two tasks do not share a cognitive module

In a spatial cueing task subjects:

respond faster to valid cues

Which of the following is the best description of the attentional blink effect?

there is an attention bottleneck which makes it difficult to detect a second target just after a prior target

A mental experience that does not have any functional role in information processing is referred to as a(n):

epiphenomenon

It is clear for Roland and Friberg's study examining brain activity during mental walks or jingles that:

verbal information is processed in a brain region distinct from the region where visual information is processed.

Santa presented an array of three words arranged, regions where

subjects were faster when the arrangement of words was linear

What evidence supports the notion that mental rotation tasks, subjects rotate one object until is it congruent with the other?

Judgement time is linear function of the number of degrees of rotation required to complete the rotation

Brooks asked subjects to point, tap, or verbalize responses to diagrams or sentences. What statement best explains the outcome?

Subjects took longest to classify diagram in the pointing condition than in the verbal condition

The combined results of Brook's study on verbal vs. visual/ spatial tasks and Baddeley's study on verbal vs. spatial vs. visual tasks suggest that the interference of that occurs when scanning an image while also processing spatial information is:

a spatial conflict, not visual

Research on mental rotation and scanning seems to suggest that:

the mental processes people go through in such tasks seem to be analogous to the physical process of rotating or scanning

Which of the following would subjects take the shortest time to answer?

Which is larger, a flyer or a cow?

Subjects asked to look at the reversible figures, such as the ambiguous duck-rabbit, and form an interpretation were:

unable to find a second interpretation for the metal image of the figure, but were able to form a different interpretation when drawing the figure

A map that acts like a spatial image of the environment is referred to as a:

survey map

With regard to navigation, cognitive psychologists differentiate representing space as we see it (______ representation) and representing space free of any particular viewpoint (_______ representation).

egocentric; allocentric

Which of the following brain structures has been strongly implicated in the ability to navigate through the environment using a cognitive map?

hippocampus

Reaction time data from mental rotation experiments have demonstrated that:

the time required to perform a rotation increases at a constant rate relative to the distance of the rotation

Results from Gunzelman and Anderson's (2002) study with maps led to the theory that the processes used in navigational tasks are similar to those involved in mental imagery by showing that:

participants were faster to find an object when their starting orientation matched the map's orientation

Which of the following is NOT a mnemonic technique talked about in class?

Imaginal method

Research indicates that eidetic or photographic memory is:

more common in children than adults

Which of the following best represents the similarity between visual perception and imagery?

They share many common processes and brain regions but not all