13. Cognitive Functions

Question 1

In humans, light from the right visual field strikes the ___ half of each retina, which sends its axons to the ___ hemisphere of the brain.

a. left . . . left
b. left . . . right
c. right . . . left
d. right . . . right

Answer 1

a. left . . . left

Question 2

At the human optic chiasm, which axons cross to the opposite hemisphere?

a. Those from the nasal (inside) half of each retina.
b. Those from the temporal (outside) half of each retina.
c. Those from the center of each retina.
d. All the axons from each retina.

Answer 2

a. Those from the nasal (inside) half of each retina.

Question 3

Under what circumstances, if any, can a split-brain person name an object?

a. After feeling it with the left hand
b. After feeling it with the right hand
c. Only after feeling it with both hands
d. Under no circumstances

Answer 3

b. After feeling it with the right hand

Question 4

After a split-brain person sees something in the left visual field, how can he or she identify the object, if at all?

a. By describing it in words
b. By pointing to it with the left hand
c. By pointing to it with the right hand
d. Not at all

Answer 4

b. By pointing to it with the left hand

Question 5

When the right hemisphere reacts to something it sees, causing a behavior that the left hemisphere can feel, how does the left hemisphere react?

a. It expresses surprise.
b. It pretends the action did not occur.
c. It tries to stop the action or do the opposite.
d. It invents a logical-sounding explanation.

Answer 5

d. It invents a logical-sounding explanation.

Question 6

Of the following, which can people with left-hemisphere damage do better than the average for other people?

a. Understand and describe a short story.
b. Learn to speak a foreign language.
c. Calculate statistics such as means and medians.
d. Listen to people and guess whether they are lying.

Answer 6

d. Listen to people and guess whether they are lying.

Question 7

At what age do anatomical differences emerge between the left and right hemispheres?

a. In infancy
b. When a child starts learning to talk
c. In early adolescence
d. In early adulthood

Answer 7

a. In infancy

Question 8

In one study, 3-year-old children were asked to feel fabrics and say whether they were the same or different. What evidence indicated that the corpus callosum was immature in these children?

a. They made more errors at the start of a session than toward the end.
b. They made more errors toward the end of a session than at the start.
c. They made more errors when feeling with two hands than with one.
d. They made more errors when feeling with one hand than with two.

Answer 8

c. They made more errors when feeling with two hands than with one.

Question 9

What is meant by the “productivity” aspect of human language?

a. The ability to convert a communication into action
b. The ability to repeat something after hearing someone else say it
c. The ability to read and write
d. The ability to rearrange signals to represent new ideas

Answer 9

d.The ability to rearrange signals to represent new ideas

Question 10

If human language did not evolve from other primates’ vocalizations, what else is a likely hypothesis?

a. Language evolved from nothing at all.
b. Language evolved from dancing.
c. Language evolved from gestures including mouth gestures.
d. Language evolved from the ability to perceive objects in three dimensions.

Answer 10

c.Language evolved from gestures including mouth gestures.

Question 11

What is the status of the hypothesis that language evolved as a by-product of overall intelligence?

a. It is supported by findings that total brain mass correlates highly with language ability.
b. It is supported by findings that teaching language to other primates causes an enormous amount of brain expansion.
c. It is contradicted by findings that brain damage has no effect on language.
d. It is contradicted by findings that some people have normal intelligence without language, and others have normal language despite mental retardation in many other regards.

Answer 11

d.It is contradicted by findings that some people have normal intelligence without language, and others have normal language despite mental retardation in many other regards.

Question 12

If a child is bilingual from infancy, how are the two languages represented in the brain?

a. The left hemisphere controls one language, and the right hemisphere controls the other language.
b. The left hemisphere controls both languages.
c. The right hemisphere controls both languages.
d. Both hemispheres control both languages

Answer 12

d.Both hemispheres control both languages

Question 13

Which of the following is characteristic of Broca’s aphasia?

a. Difficulty forming new long-term memories, especially episodic memories
b. Inability to describe anything seen in the left visual field or felt with the left hand
c. Poor pronunciation and difficulty using and understanding grammar
d. Good, fluent pronunciation but poor comprehension and difficulty remembering names of objects

Answer 13

c.Poor pronunciation and difficulty using and understanding grammar

Question 14

Which of the following is most damaged in Broca’s aphasia?

a. The ability to control the muscles of the jaw and tongue
b. The ability to hear the difference between one word and another
c. The ability to produce certain aspects of language
d. The ability to follow directions

Answer 14

c.The ability to produce certain aspects of language

Question 15

Which of the following is characteristic of Wernicke’s aphasia?

a. Difficulty forming new long-term memories, especially episodic memories
b. Inability to describe anything seen in the left visual field or felt with the left hand
c. Poor pronunciation and difficulty using and understanding grammar
d. Good, fluent pronunciation but poor comprehension and difficulty remembering names of objects

Answer 15

d.Good, fluent pronunciation but poor comprehension and difficulty remembering names of objects

Question 16

Which of the following activities strongly activates Broca’s area?

a. Folk dancing
b. Driving a car
c. Competitive swimming
d. Sight-reading music

Answer 16

d.Sight-reading music

Question 17

Which of the following is most seriously impaired in most people with dyslexia?

a. Vision
b. Ability to hear sounds
c. Ability to remember sequences of sounds
d. Motivation

Answer 17

c.Ability to remember sequences of sounds

Question 18

Which of the following best states the identity position regarding mind and brain?

a. The physical world could not exist unless some mind were aware of it.
b. Mental activity causes brain activity.
c. Brain activity causes mental activity.
d. Mental activity and brain activity are the same thing.

Answer 18

d.Mental activity and brain activity are the same thing.

Question 19

What is “hard” about the “hard problem”?

a. To solve it, we would need to conduct extremely expensive research.
b. The research to solve this problem would raise difficult ethical issues.
c. The question is philosophically challenging, and we don’t know where to begin.
d. We already know the answer, but it is hard to get most people to accept it.

Answer 19

c.The question is philosophically challenging, and we don’t know where to begin.

Question 20

Which of the following questions, if any, can current research methods answer?

a. Why does consciousness exist at all?
b. What behaviors become possible because of consciousness that we could not do otherwise?
c. What types of brain activity occur during consciousness that don’t occur otherwise?
d. Current methods do not enable us to answer any of these questions.

Answer 20

c.What types of brain activity occur during consciousness that don’t occur otherwise?

Question 21

What procedure is used in backward masking?

a. A participant views a stationary dot surrounded by bright flashing dots.
b. Researchers present a brief visual stimulus followed by a longer stimulus.
c. A participant views one scene in the left eye and an incompatible scene in the right eye.
d. A participant views a dot in one position alternating with a similar dot nearby.

Answer 21

b.Researchers present a brief visual stimulus followed by a longer stimulus.

Question 22

What is the purpose of experiments using flash suppression, backward masking, and binocular rivalry?

a. To measure how effectively a person can control attention
b. To find what happens in the brain during consciousness
c. To study the brain mechanisms responsible for consolidation of memory
d. To describe changes in the brain as someone recovers from a stroke

Answer 22

b.To find what happens in the brain during consciousness

Question 23

If your left eye views red vertical stripes and your right eye views green horizontal stripes, what do you perceive?

a. Red and green stripes superimposed
b. Yellow diagonal stripes
c. A white field without stripes
d. Alternation between seeing red stripes and seeing green stripes

Answer 23

d.Alternation between seeing red stripes and seeing green stripes

Question 24

What theoretical conclusion do the studies on binocular rivalry support?

a. Unconscious processes control much of human behavior.
b. A stimulus activates much of the brain when you are conscious of it.
c. Damage to the right hemisphere leads to a tendency to neglect the left side of space.
d. Certain people who appear to be in a vegetative state may nevertheless be conscious.

Answer 24

b.A stimulus activates much of the brain when you are conscious of it.

Question 25

People are conscious of a prolonged stimulus, but not one with an extremely short presentation. What happens at an intermediate duration of presentation?

a. People report being partly conscious of it.
b. People are sometimes conscious of it and sometimes not, and the difference depends only on what happens at that moment.
c. People are sometimes conscious of it and sometimes not, and stimuli after the event can influence the outcome.

Answer 25

c.People are sometimes conscious of it and sometimes not, and stimuli after the event can influence the outcome.

Question 26

Certain people in a vegetative state gave possible indication of consciousness by doing what?

a. Laughing or crying in response to what someone said.
b. Moving their eyes to the left or right to answer yes/no questions.
c. Responding to directions to think about tennis or walking around a house.
d. Squeezing the hand of a loved one.

Answer 26

c.Responding to directions to think about tennis or walking around a house.

Question 27

For people to do well on the Stroop task, activity must increase in the ___ areas of the brain and decrease in the ___ areas.

a. color-vision . . . word
b. word . . . attention
c. attention . . . auditory
d. auditory . . . color-vision

Answer 27

a.color-vision . . . word

Question 28

Suppose someone who is trying to divide a horizontal line in half picks a spot far to the right of center. This result suggests probable damage or malfunction in which part of the brain?

a. The left hemisphere
b. The right hemisphere
c. The prefrontal cortex
d. The primary visual cortex

Answer 28

b.The right hemisphere

Question 29

If someone has spatial neglect of the left side, which of these procedures, if any, would increase attention to a touch sensation on the left side?

a. Ask the person to look to the left during the touch sensation.
b. Ask the person to look to the right during the touch sensation.
c. Ask the person to listen to music during the touch sensation.
d. None of these procedures would have any noticeable effect.

Answer 29

a.Ask the person to look to the left during the touch sensation.

Question 30

Which hypothesis best summarizes our current understanding about oxytocin?

a. Oxytocin increases love and trust.
b. Oxytocin helps people restrain their emotional responses.
c. Oxytocin helps people overcome bad habits.
d. Oxytocin increases attention toward social cues.

Answer 30

d.Oxytocin increases attention toward social cues.

Question 31

When people with psychopathic traits try to imagine someone else’s suffering, how does their brain response compare to that of other people?

a. People with psychopathic traits show less response in the cognitive areas of the brain.
b. People with psychopathic traits show less response in the emotional areas of the brain.
c. People with psychopathic traits show less response in both the cognitive and the emotional areas of the brain.
d. People with psychopathic traits show the same responses in both the cognitive and the emotional areas of the brain.

Answer 31

b.People with psychopathic traits show less response in the emotional areas of the brain.

Question 32

The left hemisphere of the brain is connected to the right eye in guinea pigs. In humans, the left hemisphere is connected to the left half of each retina. Explain the reason for this species difference.

Answer 32

In guinea pigs, the right eye is far to the side of the head and sees only the right visual field. In humans, the eyes point straight ahead and half of each eye sees the right visual field.

Question 33

In humans, the left half of the retina receives visual information from the ______ side of the visual field and sends its axons to the ______ hemisphere of the brain.

Answer 33

right . . . left

Question 34

What can a split-brain person do that other people cannot do?

Answer 34

A split-brain person can draw different things with the two hands at the same time, or move the hands at different speeds at the same time.

Question 35

Can a split-brain person name an object after feeling it with the right hand? With the left hand? Explain.

Answer 35

A split-brain person can describe something after feeling it with the right hand but not with the left. The right hand sends its information to the left hemisphere, which is dominant for language in most people. The left hand sends its information to the right hemisphere, which cannot speak.

Question 36

Which hemisphere is dominant for the following in most people: speech, emotional inflection of speech, interpreting other people’s emotional expressions, spatial relationships?

Answer 36

The left hemisphere is dominant for speech. The right hemisphere is dominant for the other items listed

Question 37

What are three likely explanations for why bonobos made more language progress than common chimpanzees?

Answer 37

.Bonobos may be more predisposed to language than common chimpanzees. The bonobos started training at an earlier age. They learned by imitation instead of formal training techniques.

Question 38

What evidence argues against the hypothesis that language evolution depended simply on the overall evolution of brain and intelligence?

Answer 38

Some people have normal brain size but very poor language. Also, some people are mentally retarded but nevertheless develop nearly normal language

Question 39

Describe tasks that people with Williams syndrome do poorly and those that they do well.

Answer 39

Poor: self-care skills, attention, planning, numbers, visual-motor skills, and spatial perception. Relatively good: language, interpretation of facial expressions, some aspects of music.

Question 40

What is the strongest evidence in favor of a sensitive period for language learning?

Answer 40

Deaf children who are not exposed to sign language until later in life (and who did not learn spoken language either while they were young) do not become proficient at it.

Question 41

What kind of word are Broca’s patients least likely to use?

Answer 41

They have the greatest trouble with “closed-class” words that are meaningful only in the context of a sentence, such as prepositions, conjunctions, and helping verbs.

Question 42

What kind of word do Broca’s patients have the most trouble understanding?

Answer 42

They have the most trouble understanding the same kind of words they have trouble producing—the closed-class words.

Question 43

Describe the speech production of people with Wernicke’s aphasia.

Answer 43

People with Wernicke’s aphasia speak fluently and grammatically but omit most nouns and verbs and therefore make little sense.

Question 44

Describe the speech comprehension of people with Wernicke’s aphasia.

Answer 44

People with Wernicke’s aphasia understand little speech.

Question 45

In what way do musical compositions vary depending on the language spoken by the composer?

Answer 45

Musical compositions tend to follow the same rhythms that are common in the language spoken by the composer.

Question 46

Why is dyslexia identified more frequently in children speaking English than in those speaking many other languages?

Answer 46

English has a large number of words with irregular, nonphonetic spellings.

Question 47

Why do nearly all scientists and philosophers reject the idea of dualism?

Answer 47

Dualism contradicts the law of the conservation of matter and energy. According to that law, the only way to influence matter and energy, including that of your body, is to act on it with other matter and energy.

Question 48

What is meant by the “hard problem”?

Answer 48

The hard problem is why minds exist at all in a physical world. Why is there such a thing as consciousness?

Question 49

In the experiment by Dehaene et al., how were the conscious and unconscious stimuli similar? How were they different?

Answer 49

The conscious and unconscious stimuli were physically the same (a word flashed on the screen for 29 ms). The difference was that a stimulus did not become conscious if it was preceded and followed by an interfering pattern.

Question 50

In this experiment, how did the brain’s responses differ to the conscious and unconscious stimuli?

Answer 50

If a stimulus became conscious, it activated the same brain areas as an unconscious stimulus but more strongly, and then the activity spread to additional areas. Also, brain responses became synchronized when a pattern was conscious.

Question 51

How could someone use fMRI to determine which of two patterns in binocular rivalry is conscious at a given moment?

Answer 51

Make one stimulus pulsate at a given rhythm and look for brain areas showing that rhythm of activity. The rhythm takes over widespread areas of the brain when that pattern is conscious.

Question 52

If someone is aware of the stimulus on the right in a case of binocular rivalry, what evidence indicates that the brain is also processing the stimulus on the left?

Answer 52

If a stimulus gradually appears on the left side, attention shifts to the left faster if that stimulus is a meaningful word than if it is a word from an unfamiliar language.

Question 53

In what way does the phi phenomenon imply that a new stimulus sometimes changes consciousness of what went before it?

Answer 53

Someone who sees a dot on the left and then a dot on the right perceives the dot as moving from left to right. The perceived movement would have occurred before the dot on the right, but the person had no reason to infer that movement until after the dot appeared on the right

Question 54

As people lost consciousness under anesthesia and later regained it, what changed most strikingly in the brain?

Answer 54

Connectivity between the cerebral cortex and subcortical areas including the thalamus, hypothalamus, and basal ganglia.

Question 55

What brain response was related to people’s ability to resist distraction from an irrelevant red square among the green squares and circle?

Answer 55

Resistance to distraction related to the amount of activity in part of the prefrontal cortex before the presentation of stimuli.

Question 56

What is the evidence that spatial neglect is a problem in attention, not just sensation?

Answer 56

When a patient with neglect sees a large letter composed of small letters, he or she can identify the large letter but then neglects part of it when asked to cross off all the small letters. Also, someone who neglects the left hand pays attention to it when it is crossed over the right hand.

Question 57

.What are several procedures that increase attention to the left side in a person with spatial neglect?

Answer 57

Simply telling the person to attend to something on the left helps temporarily. Having the person look to the left while feeling something on the left side increases attention to the felt object. Crossing the left hand over the right increases attention to the left hand. Moving a hand far to the left makes it easier for the person to point to something in the left visual field because the hand will move toward the right to point at the object.

Question 58

Why is it misleading to call oxytocin the “love hormone”?

Answer 58

Oxytocin increases positive responses toward someone you already love or trust, but not toward everyone.

Question 59

If a rat has an opportunity to help another rat in distress, under what circumstances will it or will it not help?

Answer 59

It helps the strain of rat with which it has grown up, regardless of whether it is genetically related to them.