Student-made practice questions

When perceived magnitude increases more slowly than stimulus intensity, this is called:

Response Compression

Which of the following is a behavioural measure of perception?

Recognition testing

Faces tend to activate which brain region?

Fusiform Face Area (FFA)

Which Gestalt principle states that objects moving in the same direction tend to be grouped together?

Common fate

A small area of the fovea represented by a large cortical area on the visual cortex is called:

Cortical Magnification

Objects that are below the horizon and higher in the visual field are:

More distant

Objects that are above the horizon and lower in the visual field are:

More distant

The Feature Integration theory suggests that _____ occurs in two distinct stages

Binding

Illusory conjunctions are most likely to occur when:

Attention is divided

The experiment involving image flashing and then masking conducted by Fei Fei et al (2007) illustrated that:

The overall gist of the scene was still retained

Why does the fovea take up so much space in the visual cortex (V1)?

Higher acuity

What is an illusory conjunction?

A perceptual mistake in which features from multiple objects are incorrectly combined.

In the direct theory of perception, information in the visual field that remains constant is the:

Invariant

Two processes that when independently disrupted leave the other one intact are known as:

Double dissociation

The fovea contains a concentration of:

Cones

A model of perception that incorporates context and expectations into pattern recognition processes is called a _______ model.

Top-Down

Attention that spreads across an entire object rather than remaining fixed at a single spatial location is referred to as the same-________ advantage.

Object

According to perceptual load theory, distractors are most likely to be processed when:

Perceptual load is low

Which of the following best explains why decision-point landmarks receive greater attention during navigation?

They provide information about when and where to act.

Which of the following best explains why drivers tend to fixate on the tangent point when steering through a curve?

It provides immediate visual information for steering control, allowing drivers to keep the car within the lane.

Topographical agnosia involves difficulty recognizing landmarks despite intact vision and is most commonly associated with damage to which brain region?

Parahippocampal gyrus

What  happens to the speed of feature search vs conjunction search as display size increases?

Feature search speed remains constant, while conjunction search speed decreases 

If your FFA was damaged, you would experience ___, an inability to perceive faces.

Prosopagnosia

What did Ungerleider & Mishkin demonstrate in their lesioning experiment involving the removal of specific brain regions in monkeys?

Damage to the parietal lobe impaired the dorsal stream & damage to the temporal lobe impaired the monkey’s ability to look for food under a specific object

Neurons that respond best to corners, angles, or bars of a specific length moving in a specific direction are called ___ cortical cells

End-stopped 

In a selective adaptation experiment, after a participant views high-contrast vertical gratings for a while, how will their contrast threshold for vertical lines change?

It will increase, indicating reduced sensitivity to vertical lines

____ cells fire when in a specific location and ____ cells fire when facing a specific direction. 

Place, head direction

What type of coding is described by the following statement? Individual neurons respond to specific stimuli.

Specificity coding

What are the two visual streams and what lobes do they send information to? 

Dorsal (sent to parietal lobe) and ventral (sent to temporal lobe)

Jim is driving in heavy traffic while navigating through an unfamiliar downtown area. At the same time, colourful digital billboards along the road display animated advertisements. According to load theory, which outcome is most likely?

The billboards will have little effect because the driving task uses most of Jim’s perceptual capacity.

Which eye structure(s) focus light onto the retina?

Lens and cornea.

The color blue will appear brighter during the evening, due to:

Purkinje shift, in which rods will have increased sensitivity to shorter wavelength light.

Illusory conjunctions occur during the _______ _________ phase of Treisman's ________ ________ Theory.

Focused Attention, Feature Integration

The tradeoff present in neural convergence of rods onto ganglion cells results in: 

Increased neural sensitivity, but reduced spatial precision.  

What is NOT a reason why we don't tend to notice the blind spot present in our visual field?

The blindspot is right beside our fovea. 

The section of the optic flow in which no motion will be perceived is described as _____ _______

Focus of Expansion

The LGN receives the strongest signal from the _______

Cortex

Training the FFA results in the ability to respond to other types of stimuli. What does this suggest? 

The FFA can help you respond to things you have developed expertise in

How is the blind spot compensated for?

Top-down processing

This idea explains perception as the result of unconscious assumptions and inferences we make about our environment based on prior knowledge and personal experience:

Hemholtz Theory

Pricking your finger on a pin can be used as an example to demonstrate this concept discussed in class

Response expansion

What values influence the estimate of probability for a particular outcome in Bayesian Inference?

The prior probability and the likelihood of a given outcome or the extent to which the available evidence is consistent with the outcome.

_______ listening is an early paradigm used in studying selective attention, where each ear is given a different message and the listener is asked to focus on one. The ability for the listener to just focus on one of these stimulus is called the _____ _____ effect.

Dichotic, cocktail party

The smallest amount of energy necessary to detect a stimulus is called the:

Absolute threshold

Change blindness refers to when a person fails to notice change between two visual stimuli quickly presented one after the other, but it can be affected by...

Top-down mechanisms

In the experiment by Miller and Carson (2011) where participants were shown pre-recorded videos of someone doing virtual navigation in a museum, when shown decision point landmarks later...

The parahippocampal gyrus activated, even if the participant didn't remember the object.

Why does cone-mediated vision dominate the early portion of the dark adaptation curve, even though rods are ultimately more sensitive?

Rods are initially saturated due to pigment bleaching in bright light

Accommodation occurs when:

The ciliary muscles tighten, thickening the lens

Which sequence best describes the initial molecular events in visual transduction following the absorption of a photon?

Retinal absorbs a photon → retinal isomerizes → opsin changes configuration

Which concept best explains why unattended stimuli may not reach awareness even if they activate sensory receptors?

Selective attention

Which scenario best illustrates attentional capture driven by bottom-up processing?

A sudden flash of light pulling attention away from an ongoing task

After prolonged exposure to high-contrast vertical gratings, a participant shows reduced sensitivity to detecting vertical lines but not oblique lines. This pattern supports which conclusion?

Neural fatigue in orientation-tuned neurons alters perception

The process by which environmental energy is converted into neural signals in the retina is called __________

Transduction

Processing that is driven by prior knowledge, expectations, and context is referred to as __________ processing.

Top-down 

Neurons that fire when an organism is located at a specific position in an environment are called __________ cells, while neurons that fire when near environmental boundaries are called __________ cells.

Place, border

Suspected to play a role in navigation, what is the difference between Head Direction Cells and Border Cells?

Head cells fire depending on the direction the animal is facing, Border cells fire when an animal is near the edge of the environment

What is the Purkinje Shift?

Enhanced sensitivity to short wavelengths during dark adaptation when the shift from cone to rod vision occurs

Which of the following is false regarding the superior colliculus?

Located in the dorsal hindbrain

____ ____ area responds best to spatial layout.

Parahippocampal place

____ ____ area responds best to pictures of full bodies and body parts.

Extrastriate body

Which Gestalt principle explains why objects in the same region tend to be grouped together?

Common region

According to Feature Integration Theory, illusory conjunctions occur when:

Attention is divided or insufficient

A feature search is different from a conjunction search because it:

Produces a pop-out effect

Gibson’s concept of affordance refers to:

The actions an object allows

What is neural mind reading?

Predicting perception based on brain activity patterns

What phenomenon relates to prolonged exposure to a specific stimulus property and reduces the sensitivity of that same property?

Selective adaptation

Which type of neuron in the primary visual cortex (V1) responds best to moving and particularly oriented bars?

complex cortical cells

In the dark adaptation curve, the rod–cone break is:

The transition from cone-mediated to rod-mediated vision

Macular degeneration is common in older individuals. What type of damage does it cause?

Damage to the fovea, affecting high acuity vision

Why are rods more sensitive to light than cones?

Rods show greater neural convergence onto ganglion cells

the ________ occurs when still images are perceived as moving due to the quick alternation between different locations

Phi Phenomenon

Which refers to the sensory coding where only a relatively small number of neurons are necessary to code for each concept?

Sparse coding

Accommodation occurs when…

ciliary muscles are tightened 

In Simons and Chabris' (1999) experiment, many people failed to notice a person in a monkey costume entering the scene partway through. This provided an example of?

Inattentional Blindness

Which of these structures accounts for 80% of the focusing power of our eye?

The cornea

In Hamid et al. (2010) an eyetracking study was conducted in a virtual environment, this study consisted of what two phases?

Training phase and Testing phase

What area accounts for an estimated 10% of nerve fibres leaving the eye?

Superior colliculus

Visual scanning can be referred to as “visually exploring the environment”. We make fixations which are linked by saccadic eye movements, typically how many saccades every second?

3 saccades per second.

The visual cortex is organized, the organization can be referred to as _____?

Orientation columns 

“Objects moving in the same direction tend to be grouped together” can be defined as ?

Law of common fate

Which photoreceptor is primarily responsible for vision in low-light conditions?

rods

Cones are most concentrated in which part of the retina?

Fovea

Which of the following is a key functional difference between rods and cones?

Cones provide high visual acuity

____ are photoreceptors specialized for color vision and function best in bright light.

Cones

Rods contain the photopigment _____, which is highly sensitive to low levels of light.

Rhodopsin

All things being equal, we might expect that things which have adaptive/evolutionary significance (i.e. help out survival) to be more likely to result in...

Response expansion

What are sometimes referred to as our ‘medium cones’ (or ‘green cones’) can absorb…

Short, medium, and long wavelengths.

__________ neural convergence increases the probability that __________ cells will fire in response to a stimulus.

More, ganglion

This statement about neurons and receptive fields is true.

Not all neurons have receptive fields.

If a wolf is raised on a strange planet that consists entirely of horizontal lines, we could predict that the wolf should...

Only have cortical cells that respond to horizontal lines.

One reason why the cortical magnification factor occurs in humans is because...

The small area on the fovea accounts for a large area on the cortex.

_____ coding occurs when a particular object is represented by a pattern of firing of only a relatively small number of neurons, with the majority of neurons remaining silent.

Sparse

Which of the following is a general determinant of figure-ground segregation?

A lower region is more likely to be perceived as a figure than an upper region.

A masking stimulus is primarily used to do what?

Stop persistence of vision (eg. an image lingering after the screen turns off.

Types of regularity:

Vertical and horizontal lines, scene schemas, light-from-above assumptions.

People tend to fixate first on high contrast or unique (relative to the surrounding area) points in a visual scene. This is a result of _____ and is a _____ process.

Stimulus salience, bottom-up.

Imagine that you walk into a friend's bathroom and see a blender next to the sink. You spend more time looking at that blender than you would have spent looking at a soap dispenser in the same position. Your increased gaze is a reflection of a _____ in action.

Scene schema

If you didn't realize that you could 'cross out' responses that you think are incorrect while responding to multiple-choice questions on a Canvas-based exams until someone pointed it out to you, what concept could be relevant for explaining that? 

Inattentional blindness

Which statement is an accurate reflection of flow when you are driving in a car?

Optic flow does not occur for the FOE (Focus of Expansion.)

The structure in the thalamus, which receives input from the retinas and passes these signals onto the visual cortex, is known as the…

LGN