Ch. 6

Question 1

The term associative agnosia is reserved for patients who

Answer 1

cannot recognize objects despite having normal perceptual representations

Question 2

A patient like G.S. who had visual object agnosia would have difficulty in identifying an object unless

Answer 2

he was permitted to touch the object before making a response.

Question 3

When her telephone rings, a patient who has been diagnosed with visual object agnosia immediately picks up the receiver and answers it correctly. Why doesn’t this person show any signs of an object recognition deficit in this scenario?

Answer 3

The patient can use the sound of the ringing telephone to cue its recognition.

Question 4

When a picture of a hammer is placed in front of Patient H, she is unable to identify it. How can you determine if her difficulty is in recognizing the object or in simply remembering its name?

Answer 4

Ask her to demonstrate its use rather than identifying it.

Question 5

Anatomical outputs from the occipital lobe follow two major axon bundles that terminate in the
________ and ________.

Answer 5

inferior temporal lobe ; posterior parietal lobe

Question 6

With regard to the two main output pathways from the occipital lobe, ________ is to ________ as dorsal is to ventral.

Answer 6

“Where”; “What”

Question 7

The “what” versus “where” distinction is supported by single-cell recording studies showing that neurons in the ________ lobes have receptive fields that are almost always located in the fovea, where high-acuity vision takes place.

Answer 7

Inferior Temporal

Question 8

During a single-cell recording study, you locate a neuron in one of the two main output pathways from the occipital cortex that has a large receptive field in the central part of the visual field. The cell probably lies inside the ________ pathway and is specialized for ________.

Answer 8

Temporal; Object Recognition

Question 9

Eliminating a gnostic unit would

Answer 9

Completely disrupt recognition of a complex object.

Question 10

Which of the following is NOT a problem with the idea that single neurons encode the mental representations for all possible complex visual stimuli?

Answer 10

There is no neurophysiological evidence that visual cells respond to specific types of stimuli.

Question 11

According to ensemble theories of object recognition, it is possible to confuse similar-looking objects because

Answer 11

objects that appear similar activate overlapping networks of cells.

Question 12

Pohl (1973) conducted a study of the “what” and “where” pathways in brain-lesioned monkeys using two different tasks: a landmark discrimination task, which required a visuospatial judgment, and an object discrimination task, which required object recognition. He found that monkeys with temporal lobe lesions became severely impaired in learning the ________ task but not the ________ task. Monkeys with posterior parietal lesions showed the ________ pattern of performance.

Answer 12

object discrimination ; landmark discrimination ; opposite

Question 13

The patient D.F., studied by Goodale and Milner (1982), had severe problems with object
recognition. When presented with a circular block into which a slot had been cut,

Answer 13

D.F. was able to insert a card into the slot when asked to do so, even though she was unable
to follow the instruction to orient the card so that it would fit.

Question 14

A role of the dorsal visual system in computing the argues for a dichotomy between

Answer 14

“what” and “how”.

Question 15

Optic ataxia is an inability to

Answer 15

use visual information to guide movements

Question 16

. Optic ataxia is to associative visual agnosia as ________ lesions are to ________ lesions.

Answer 16

dorsal pathway ; ventral pathway

Question 17

________ is the ability to recognize an object under many different viewing conditions and in many different contexts.

Answer 17

Object constancy

Question 18

An undercover agent notices a green car parked outside her apartment building when she leaves for work at 8:00 a.m. Later she notices the same car in a store parking lot and becomes suspicious that she is being followed. The agent’s ability to recognize the car under these two different circumstances is an example of

Answer 18

object constancy.

Question 19

Which of the following is NOT a major reason why the visual information reflected by an object will
vary over different viewings?

Answer 19

Objects are associated with view-dependent major axes.

Question 20

The statement “recognition of a visual pattern at a later time occurs only if you can match the stimulus to its exact stored representation” is most consistent with which theory of pattern perception?

Answer 20

view-dependent

Question 21

One limitation of view-dependent theories of object recognition is that

Answer 21

separate templates must be generated and stored for each different view of a given object.

Question 22

According to ________ theories of object recognition, when one sees an object such as a bicycle, recognition depends on the ability to detect properties that do not depend on specific viewing conditions.

Answer 22

view-invariant

Question 23

In fMRI studies, when a stimulus is repeated, the BOLD response can be ________ for the second
presentation compared to the first. This is known as the ________.

Answer 23

lower ; repetition suppression effect

Question 24

With regard to perception, the term feature refers to

Answer 24

a fundamental component of a visual pattern, such as edge orientation or color.

Question 25

Which of the following visual object properties best illustrates the concept of a visually invariant property?

Answer 25

the major and minor axes of an object

Question 26

After suffering from a focal brain injury, a patient has difficulty in recognizing visually presented objects, despite normal acuity and color perception. Notably, she has severe difficulty in judging whether two pictures, each showing a different view, represent the same object. What is the most probable diagnosis?

Answer 26

apperceptive agnosia

Question 27

Warrington (1985) proposed an anatomical model of the cognitive operations necessary to explain object recognition. The first stage in this model involves the detection and categorization of visually invariant information, which occurs in the ________ hemisphere; the second stage involves the semantic categorization of visual input, which occurs in ________ hemisphere(s).

Answer 27

right ; the left

Question 28

Generally, in anatomical studies of object recognition deficits, ________ posterior lesions are
associated with ________ agnosia.

Answer 28

left hemisphere ; associative

Question 29

According to Warrington’s model, patients with left posterior lesions should be particularly impaired in

Answer 29

linking functionally associated visual inputs.

Question 30

A patient who has difficulty matching pictures of the same object taken from different vantage
points may be showing which dysfunction?

Answer 30

apperceptive agnosia

Question 31

Which of the following statements does NOT explain why some patients are visually agnosic for living (animate) things versus nonliving (inanimate) things?

Answer 31

There are more familiar animate objects in the environment than inanimate objects.

Question 32

Humphreys and Riddoch (1994) described a patient with a syndrome they called integrative
agnosia, which was characterized by difficulty in

Answer 32

combining parts of objects into coherent whole percepts.

Question 33

A person with apperceptive visual agnosia has difficulty in recognizing drawings of familiar objects, such as an apple. If she were asked to imagine an apple rather than to inspect a picture of an apple, you would expect to find that

Answer 33

she has great difficulty in generating visual images as well as visual perception because the two skills share common brain regions.

Question 34

________ is to ________ as face recognition is to object recognition.

Answer 34

Prosopagnosia ; agnosia

Question 35

Why do people fail to notice when the mouth and eyes of an inverted face remain upright?

Answer 35

The overall configuration remains the same.

Question 36

Patients with prosopagnosia typically have difficulty recognizing

Answer 36

the faces of both their friends and famous people.

Question 37

A major source of evidence against the idea that faces are processed in a special brain region in humans is that the candidate region

Answer 37

is recruited when people have to make discriminations among highly familiar stimuli.

Question 38

When a person who has learned to read proficiently subsequently develops reading problems as a
result of brain injury, this deficit is called

Answer 38

acquired alexia.

Question 39

Prosopagnosia is to alexia as ________ is to ________.

Answer 39

face recognition ; reading

Question 40

Which of the following is a brain region that would likely be implicated in processing spatial relations in an outdoor scene?

Answer 40

the parahippocampal place area (PPA)

Question 41

A researcher wishes to investigate the visual processing of bodies in the human brain using TMS.
Where should he or she stimulate?

Answer 41

On the border of the occipital and temporal lobes

Question 42

Which of the following factors does NOT restrict our ability to decode information from the brain?

Answer 42

the spatial resolution of our equipment

Question 43

To create an effective encoding model of the brain’s visual activity, what properties should be used to model V1 voxel activity?

Answer 43

receptive field properties

Question 44

Which characteristic of brain activity is promising for the potential to decode dreams in the future?

Answer 44

Activity patterns during perception resemble those generated when people imagine the same object.

Question 45

When patients in vegetative states show typical brain activity after being asked to imagine something, how do we know this is not automatic priming?

Answer 45

The patient responded with volition.