Midterm 1 Sample Exam

Free Response:

  1. Describe Kant’s transcendental method, including what kinds of questions it answers and what kinds of methods are used. Given an example of this method at work.

    • Kant’s transcendental method looks at a persons action and then works backwards to then understand the mental processes that it took to retrieve that response. It answers questions about the working memory and helps to explain what behaviorism observes. An example of this method at work is by having participants repeat a span test. We give patients a list of words to remember and analyze their ability to recall the words in the correct order. These results can help an experimenter create inferences about the system they used to remember the words.

  1. Describe behaviorism. What is a potential drawback or challenge regarding behaviorism as a research approach?

    • Behaviorism looks at an humans response to stimuli by studying only what can be seen. A drawback of behaviorism is that it does not look at the internal processes that create an external response. It can not explain various responses like language or when humans respond the same way to various stimuli.

  2. What is a double dissociation and what does it signify about the brain regions/processes involved?

    • Double dissociation will take two patients with different types of brain damage and ask them to complete a task. When they try to complete the task, there will be different difficulties as they have different areas of brain damage. This signifies that each brain region has specific functions in our body. We can use double dissociation to prove that one specific brain region affects a particular function and that it is not just the result of general brain damage.

  3. I would like to see which areas of the brain are specifically engaged by seeing emotional faces. To do this, I have designed an fMRI study that will compare activity when participants view emotional faces to activity when people look at a blank screen. They will respond by nodding their heads when they see an emotional face. What are two major flaws with this study design?

    • The first major flaw within this study design is that in a fMRI, the participants must remain still for the machine to properly capture brain activity. By forcing the patients to nod their head when they see an emotional face they alter the results of the imaging. The other major flaw with this study is that there is not an effective control to this study. If the study were to show an emotionless face versus a face with emotion a difference can be drawn from the two, however this test only measures the brains engagement with a face or a blank screen not the specific engagement with an emotional face.

  4. What is the word superiority effect? How would the Interactive Activation Model explain that effect?

    • The word superiority effect shows that letters strung together in a word or word-like combination are easier to remember than random letters strung together that do not look like a word. In Interactive Activation Model explains this effect because it believes that both feature knowledge and word knowledge is useful in remembering letters. The word superiority effect proves that word knowledge is useful in remembering letters.

  5. What is viewpoint dependence with regard to object recognition? Give a piece of evidence that argues for or against this notion (be sure to state which).

    • Viewpoint dependence argues that we can only remember an object in one particular orientation and when we see an object not in the orientation we are used to, we mentally rotate it, causing a longer recognition speed. The multiple views approach argues for this notion because it argues that we must rotate the object to the orientation it is stored in our memory in to understand what the object is. The fact that we are able to detect items that are in between layers argues against this notion as we are able to quickly understand what an object it even if parts of it are covered or it is not orientated properly.

  6. You did a lexical decision task to explore the effects of word frequency and priming. What is the task in a lexical decision experiment? What was the two major findings from that demonstration?

    • In a lexical decision experiment you identify combined letters to either be a word or a non-word. That test revealed that more frequently seen words are detected as words much faster and are more accessible than words we see much more rarely. It also found that if participants were primed with a stimulus before taking the task they are able to detect words similar to the primed stimulus faster.

  7. Lucas suffered a blow to his right parietal lobe and now suffers from unilateral neglect. Answer the following questions about Lucas.

    ​a. In general, what behavioral tendencies will he exhibit?

    • Lucas will exhibit the tendency to refuse to acknowledge the right side of the world. When drawing he will only draw the right side of a flower etc.

    ​b. If Lucas is shaving his face in the morning, what odd outcome might we expect?

    • We would expect for only the right side of the face to be shaved.

    c. If you ask Lucas to fixate on an object and then move that object to his left visual field, how will he respond?

    • He would be able to move the object to the left but only if he puts in conscious effort to view that item. When not making an active effort to view the object he would not notice the object.

  8. What is change blindness? Describe a demonstration or lab study that we talked about that demonstrates change blindness.

    • Change blindness is the inability to detect change in an environment you are actively paying attention to. A demonstration of this would be when we were asked to watch a series of images click on the screen with black screens in between and look for changes in the image. We could not detect changes such as a change in tree.

  9. Compare and Contrast stimulus-driven and expectation-driven priming.

    • Stimulus-driven priming encourages the observer to look for a change and does not take any effort where an expectation-driven priming encourages an observer to look for a specific piece of stimulus. This takes more effort and if given the wrong expectation can cause a person to miss other stimulus.

Fill in the Blank:

1) Introspection refers to the process of each person looking within, to observe his or her own thoughts and ideas.

 

2) In a neuron, the dendrite is responsible for receiving signals.

 

3) The key component of Biederman’s Recognition-by-Components Model is Geons , simple shapes that are the building blocks for objects.

 

4) Top-down processing reflects the effects of knowledge or expectation.  

 

5) The fusiform face area is a brain region known to be specifically responsive to faces.

 

6) Posner and colleagues proposed that there are three different aspects of attention and isolated them with the Attention Network Task. One of those aspects is called alerting, orientating, and executive control.

Multiple Choice:

1. The “cognitive revolution” is named as such because

a.

the focus changed from behaviors to the mental processes underlying those behaviors.

b.

the change was accompanied by violence.

c.

the focus changed from animals to humans.

d.

philosophers such as Kant were strongly opposed to the change.

 

2. Which of the following topics is NOT commonly studied within cognitive psychology?

a. language

b. dream content

c. memory

d. attention

 

3. Which lobe of cortex houses primary visual cortex?

a. frontal

b. parietal

c. occipital

d. temporal

 

4. Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) uses a strong magnetic pulse to

a.

record the amount of glucose a specific brain region used during a cognitive task.

b.

measure the blood flow using blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signals.

c.

produce a temporary disruption to the brain area, and thus brain function, where it is applied.

d.

create a detailed “map” of the different brain areas.

 

5. Among its other functions, the amygdala seems to serve as a(n)

a. important relay station between the eye and occipital cortex.

b. storage location for information received from the skin.

c. “emotional evaluator” or threat detector.

d. “index” for locating memories in the brain.

 

6. Imagine that researchers have developed a drug that (temporarily) disrupts a person’s ability to focus his or her attention. Let’s say that we give this drug to someone, and then ask that person to search through various displays, looking for certain targets. We would expect the drug to

a.

have minimal impact on visual search strategies.

b.

be equally disruptive if the person is searching for a target defined by a single feature (e.g., “Find the red shape”) or if the person is searching for a target defined by a conjunction of features (e.g., “Find the shape that is red and round”).

c.

disrupt the search for a target defined by a single feature (e.g., “Find the red shape”).

d.

disrupt the search for a target defined by a conjunction of features (e.g., “Find the shape that is red and round”).

 

7. English nonwords (e.g., “HICE”) are easier to perceive than strings of letters not resembling English words (e.g., “RSFK”) because

a.

they are encountered more often.

b.

bigram detectors for more-common letter combinations fire more readily.

c.

they are more distinctive.

d.

word detectors can be quickly created for strings that are nearly words.

 

8. Which of the following statements is true about the recognition of inverted faces?

a.

Recognition of inverted faces is harder than for upright faces.

b.

Face processing is affected only minimally by inverting the image.

c.

Inverting a nonliving object, such as a house, produces a bigger deficit in recognition than inverting a face, because we are less familiar with houses.

d.

Specialist neurons in the parietal cortex rapidly restore a face to its upright position for further processing.

 

9. Tasks involving dichotic listening are tasks in which

a.

two different visual stimuli are presented.

b.

two different auditory messages are presented, one to each ear.

c.

participants must identify subthreshold sounds.

d.

participants must dichotomize sounds into distinct categories.

 

10. Participants are asked to listen to a tape-recorded message and to shadow the message as they hear it. Which of the following tasks will be easiest to combine with this shadowing task?

a.

viewing a series of printed words, followed by a test measuring memory for the words

b.

simultaneously hearing a tape-recorded message, followed by a test measuring memory for the gist of the second message

c.

simultaneously hearing a tape-recorded list of words, followed by a test measuring memory for the word list

d.

viewing a series of pictures, followed by a test measuring memory for the pictures

 

11. Moore and Egeth (1997) asked participants to rate which of two lines was

longer. Background dots were presented with the lines. On some trials, the dot

pattern was a visual illusion, designed to manipulate the perceived length of the

lines. Moore and Egeth found that

a. one can be influenced by events one is not conscious of.

b. one cannot have perception without consciousness.

c. if one is not conscious of a stimulus, it is not important.

d. attention requires perception.