Chapter 4

Question 1

A notion which David Hume’s skeptical philosophy challenged, and which Immanuel Kant tried to rescue in his philosophical reformulation, was

Answer 1

causality.

Question 2

The argument that our sense of causality is not absolute but only probabilistic, based on the assumption that event sequences observed in the past are highly likely to be repeat-ed in the future, was proposed by

Answer 2

Immanuel Kant.

Question 3

According to Kant, the __________ world consists of “things in themselves” which exist independently of human experience and reason.

Answer 3

noumenal

Question 4

According to Kant, the objective external world can never be known directly. Instead, we only know the external world as it impacts the human mind. This inner and subjective world is also known as

Answer 4

the phenomenal world.

Question 5

According to Kant, time and space are

Answer 5

intuitions.

Question 6

When you press gently on the side of your eyeball and experience the visual sensation of colored light, you illustrate

Answer 6

the law of specific nerve energies.

Question 7

Helmholtz decided to study medicine because

Answer 7

as a non-wealthy student he was eligible for a free medical training program in ex-change for service as an army surgeon.

Question 8

__________ was a university friend of Helmholtz’s who later collaborated with him in determining the electrochemical nature of the nervous impulse.

Answer 8

Emil de Bois-Reymond

Question 9

The idea that all living things are imbued with an ultimately unanalyzable “life force” is the major tenet of what doctrine?

Answer 9

vitalism

Question 10

A belief in the doctrine of vitalism implied that

Answer 10

physiological processes could not be fully understood through scientific analysis.

Question 11

A major consequence of the adoption of the doctrine of physiological mechanism by Helmholtz and his fellow students was that they

Answer 11

were encouraged to try to solve problems that previously seemed unsolvable, such as analyzing and measuring the nervous impulse.

Question 12

To Helmholtz, the law of conservation of energy implied all of the following EXCEPT

Answer 12

causality is probabilistic, not absolute.

Question 13

Helmholtz’s early experiments with frogs’ and humans’ legs indicated that the speed of the nervous impulse was

Answer 13

slow enough to suggest reaction times of two seconds or more in very large ani-mals.

Question 14

Helmholtz’s attempt to measure the speed of the nervous impulse in human subjects

Answer 14

helped introduce the “reaction time” method into psychology.

Question 15

Helmholtz divided his discussions of vision and audition into sections devoted to which three of the following general categories?

Answer 15

physical, physiological, and psychological

Question 16

According to Helmholtz’s distinction, the discontinuous patches of colored light you experience when viewing a landscape are your __________, while the “trees,” “grass,” and “sky,” etc., you become aware of are __________.

Answer 16

sensations; perceptions

Question 17

Within the structure of the eye, the lens brings near objects into focus by bulging in the middle and brings distant objects into focus by assuming a relatively flat shape. This process is known as

Answer 17

accommodation.

Question 18

A photograph providing an image identical to what is recorded by the eye would feature

Answer 18

all but the center of the scene as blurred.

Question 19

How did Helmholtz define perception?

Answer 19

the psychological process by which sensory information is actively organized and interpreted by the brain

Question 20

According to Helmholtz’s analysis of the eye, the sharpness of focus within the visual field is

Answer 20

impressively acute only in a very small region near the center.

Question 21

The orange light of the spectrum and the orange produced by mixing red and yellow spectral light

Answer 21

are indistinguishable from each other by the human color senses.

Question 22

Which two names are used to refer to Helmholtz’s theory of color vision?

Answer 22

trichromatic theory and Young-Helmholtz theory

Question 23

Pairs of colored lights which produce a sensation of white light when mixed together are called

Answer 23

complementary colors.

Question 24

Three colors—a certain red, green, and a blue-violet—can be mixed in various combinations to produce any other color on the spectrum. These colors are known as

Answer 24

primary colors.

Question 25

Relative to Kant in his theory of visual perception, Helmholtz was more

Answer 25

empiricist.

Question 26

When subjects in Helmholtz’s experiment learned to adjust their responses to the distorted images produced by prismatic glasses, they illustrated

Answer 26

perceptual adaptation.

Question 27

In Helmholtz’s theory, an important hypothetical process underlying such perceptual phenomena as depth perception was called

Answer 27

unconscious inference.

Question 28

Eleanor Gibson’s studies of the responses of visually inexperienced animals and human infants to the “visual cliff” seem to

Answer 28

disconfirm aspects of Helmholtz’s empiricist perceptual theory.

Question 29

An apparatus that features a platform with a transparent glass floor, part of which is set over an area with no visible surface directly below, is referred to as a

Answer 29

visual cliff.

Question 30

The study of relationships between the objectively measured intensities of various stimuli and the subjective impressions of those intensities is referred to as

Answer 30

psychophysics.

Question 31

Gustav Fechner used the pen-name “Dr. Mises” for which of his writings?

Answer 31

his often satirical medical and philosophical speculations

Question 32

The inspiring idea that led most directly to Fechner’s development of psychophysics was

Answer 32

Weber’s demonstration of the jnd.

Question 33

Gustav Fechner was especially pleased to discover his psychophysical law because

Answer 33

it indicated an underlying harmony between the “two faces” (physical and psycho-logical) of nature.

Question 34

In his mid-career, Fechner was tormented by an apparently unresolvable conflict between

Answer 34

a purely mechanistic “night view” versus a “day view” that saw the universe as having some soul-like properties.

Question 35

Fechner’s law expresses in mathematical terms the

Answer 35

observed mathematical relationship between physical and subjective stimulus intensities

Question 36

The smallest intensity of a stimulus that can be reliably detected, used by Fechner as the “zero point” in his scale of subjective intensities, is called the

Answer 36

absolute threshold.

Question 37

For stimuli such as electric shocks, where the jnd’s become smaller with higher intensities, the psychophysical relationship is best expressed by

Answer 37

Stevens’ (power) law.

Question 38

Ernst Weber is important for introducing which of these concepts?

Answer 38

the just noticeable difference

Question 39

The first topic to be seriously investigated by Wertheimer and his fellow Gestalt psychologists was

Answer 39

apparent movement and the phi phenomenon.

Question 40

Why was Fechner important in the development of a scientific, experimental psychology?

Answer 40

He was among the first to demonstrate how a psychological phenomenon could be measured and quantified, and shown to relate lawfully to other variables.

Question 41

Gestalt psychology focuses on the

Answer 41

ways the mind organizes experiences and perceptions into organized wholes that are more than the sum of their parts.

Question 42

The “squareness” of a square and the basic tune of a melody are both examples of

Answer 42

Gestalt qualities.

Question 43

Who of the following was NOT a founder of the movement known as Gestalt psychology?

Answer 43

Ernst Weber

Question 44

All of the following are true of the phi phenomenon EXCEPT it

Answer 44

was discovered by Kant.

Question 45

As you read this page, the words you are aware of constitute the__________, and the page on which they are printed is the__________.

Answer 45

figure; ground

Question 46

According to the Gestalt psychologists, our perceptual processes tend to do all of the following EXCEPT

Answer 46

provide conscious sensations that are exact reproductions of objects in the external world.

Question 47

The three founders of Gestalt psychology moved to the United States in the 1920s and 1930s because they

Answer 47

anticipated the coming rise of Nazi Germany and its atrocities.

Question 48

An important concept from physics with which Köhler tried to integrate Gestalt psychology was

Answer 48

the force field.

Question 49

Köhler’s principle that “psychological facts and the underlying events in the brain resemble each other in all their structural characteristics” is known as the

Answer 49

Hypothesis of Psychophysical Isomorphism.

Question 50

Gestalt-trained psychologist __________ argued that every individual lives within a unique psychological field or __________, which is the totality of the individual’s psychological situation at any given moment.

Answer 50

Kurt Lewin; life space