Final Exam Flashcards
What division of the nervous system is responsible for gathering information about the body and transmitting decisions to the body?
peripheral nervous system (PNS)
What is an area of the temporal lobe, usually in the left hemisphere, involved in language comprehension?
Wernicke’s area
What is the experimental factor that the experimenter varies independently of other possible confounding variables?
Independent Variable
What accounts for the fact that people, if asked if the word “doll” fits in the sentence “The girl put the __________ on the table”, will later remember it better than if they were asked if it’s in capital letters?
Levels of processing
What is the organization of the visual field into objects that stand out from their surroundings?
Figure Ground
What includes size constancy: perceiving the size of objects as constant even while our distance from them varies?
Perceptual Constancy
What type of learning explains how a pigeon can come to press a lever more or less in response to food or shocks it receives directly as a consequence?
Operant Conditioning
What type of drugs dilate the pupils, increase heart and breathing rates, raise blood sugar levels, and cause a drop in appetite?
Stimulants
What division of the autonomic nervous system decreases heartbeat, lowers blood sugar, and stimulates digestion?
Parasympathetic Nervous system
What has been theorized to serve the function of helping us restore and rebuild our fading memories of the day’s experiences?
Sleep
What type of depth cues include light and shadow: how shading produces a sense of depth consistent with our assumption that light comes from above?
Monocular cues
What is a layer of fatty tissue that encases some axons?
Myelin Sheath
What perspective of psychology drew attention to ways that current environmental influences can nurture or limit our growth potential?
Humanistic
What is the minimum intensity that excitatory signals need to be greater in amount than inhibitory signals in order to trigger an action potential?
Threshold
What lobe of the cerebral cortex is located just behind the forehead?
Frontal lobe
What is the chamber between the eardrum and cochlea containing three tiny bones (hammer, anvil, and stirrup) that concentrate the vibrations of the eardrum on the cochlea’s oval window?
Middle ear
According to evolutionary psychologists, what has shaped our human traits over the course of human evolution?
Natural Selection
What would be tested for if a hearing specialist exposed each of your ears to varying sound levels and, for each tone, the test defined where half the time you could detect the sound and half the time you could not?
Absolute threshold
What cerebral hemisphere receives information from the left visual field?
Right cerebral hemisphere
What is the memory of facts and experiences that one can consciously know and “declare”?
Explicit memory
What neuron extension may be very long, projecting several feet through the body?
Axon
What cerebral hemisphere receives information from the right visual field?
Left cerebral hemisphere
What would be occurring if a dog conditioned to salivate when rubbed would also drool a bit when scratched?
Generalization
What is a tendency to search for information that supports our preconceptions and to ignore or distort contradictory evidence?
Confirmation bias
In its spoken version, what would need three building blocks: phonemes, morphemes, and grammar?
Language
What is the theory of pitch perception that links the pitch we hear with the place where the cochlea’s membrane is stimulated?
Place theory
What type of thought was found to help students achieve a better academic performance by each day visualizing effective studying techniques?
imaginal thought
What was occurring when a co-pilot, expecting to hear the usual “Gear up” command, raised the planes wheels when the pilot told him to “Cheer up”?
perceptual set
What type of sensory receptor sends messages to the cerebellum at the back of your brain?
Vestibular receptor
What is an observation technique in which one person is studied in depth in hope of revealing universal principles?
case study
What was occurring when the dogs stopped salivating to the tone because Pavlov no longer gave them food?
Extinction
What do you have 20,000 to 25,000 of, which may be either active (expressed) or inactive?
Genes
After damage to what brain area would a person struggle to speak words while still being able to sing familiar songs and comprehend speech?
Broca’s area
What brain structure is a finger-shaped network of neurons that extends from the spinal cord right up through the thalamus?
reticular formation
What might help solve scientific mysteries, such as why only one member of an identical twin pair may develop a genetically influenced mental disorder, and how experience leaves its fingerprints in our brains?
Epigenetics
What is a research method in which an investigator manipulates one or more factors to observe the effect on some behavior or mental process?
Experimental research
What is the transition from wakefulness into sleep, characterized by a slowing of breathing rate and of brain waves?
NREM-1 Sleep
What is the science of behavior and mental processes?
Psychology
What perspective of psychology engaged in introspective examination of the stream of consciousness and of emotion?
Functionalism
What is a brief sleep stage that occurs shortly after getting into bed, in which you may experience fantastic images resembling hallucinations, known as hypnagogic sensations?
NREM-1 sleep
What brain structure is located in the limbic system and processes conscious memories?
Hippocampus
What cerebral hemisphere helps modulate our speech to make meaning clear, in terms of intonation?
Right Cerebral Hemisphere
What is a compulsive drug craving and use, despite adverse consequences?
Addiction
What type of variable does random assignment control for?
Cofounding variable
What is a memory aid, especially a technique that uses vivid imagery and organizational devices?
Mnemonic
What part of the eye has its curvature and thickness changed to bring nearby or distant objects into focus on the retina?
Lens
What occurred when people, focused on giving directions to a construction worker, failed to notice when he was replaced by another worker during a staged interruption?
Change blindness
What is a neuron’s bushy, branching extension that receives messages and conducts impulses toward the cell body?
Dendrite
What includes shape constancy: perceiving the shape of familiar objects as constant even while we view them from different angles?
Perceptual Constancy
What do human infants have a remarkable capacity and built-in predisposition for, but the particular version of it that they learn will reflect their unique interactions with others?
Language
Which perspective of psychology emphasizes the analysis of mind in terms of its basic elements?
Structuralism
In 1965, Fred Smith wrote a Management class paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. His professor gave him a C because �the concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a C, [it] must be feasible.” Smith ignored his professor�s statement and founded Federal Express (FedEx), a company that is now worth $3.2 billion. Smith�s professor wanted Smith to stick to business solutions that were proven, not come up with something �outside the box.� In other words, Smith�s professor was relying on a(n) __________________.
Mental Set
What theory of color was based on the fact that blue, green, and red can generate the entire visible spectrum through additive mixture?
Young-Helmholtz Trichromatic Theory
Lelani wants to know what percentage of all Canadian college students receive financial aid in their freshman year. She attends Camosun college, where most students bus to campus every day. However, she stands in the car parking lot one weekday and hands out surveys to just the people there. Her data will not be generalizable to all Canadian college students because she failed to use what procedure?
Random Sample
Some birds of prey have such exceptional visual acuity that they can see small animals from thousands of feet in the air. Visual acuity is greatest when an image projects directly onto a small area of the _______, known as the fovea, that contains no rods but many cones. Some birds of prey have more than one of these areas.
Retina
What process for visual stimuli in the retina would be analogous to how your radio picks up radio frequency waves and converts them into sounds out the speakers?
Transduction
On the evening before her psychology quiz, after a long study session for the quiz and before she went to bed for the night, Ianna decided to watch a TV show in order to take a break from thinking about psychology. The next day during the quiz, Ianna was able to recall most of what she studied the night before. According to the stage model of memory, what type of memory did she rely upon during the quiz?
Long-term memory
Language is primarily a function of what cerebral hemisphere?
Left cerebral hemisphere
Scientists have found that the gas, nitric oxide, is sometimes released by neurons when they fire and can transmit information to other nearby neurons. What does nitric oxide thus meet some of the criteria for being?
neurotransmitter
On a hot summer day, five children decide to fill up Brock�s kiddie pool. Yesterday, Brock�s father ran over the hose with the lawnmower, so the hose is not working. The children decide to create a bucket line from the faucet to the pool. The first child passes the full bucket to the second child, the second to the third, and so on until the last child empties the bucket into the pool and tosses the bucket back to the first child. If each child in the bucket line is analogous to a single neuron, we can say that the water, which is passed from child to child until it reaches the pool, is like the __________________.
Action potential
Trina�s dog loves to go for walks, and she always puts a leash on him when they go out. At first, the dog only wagged his tail when they got outside; eventually, he began to wag his tail when she picked up the leash. Irinia recently locked herself out of her place, so she has begun picking up her keys and putting them in her pocket before she gets the leash down. Now the dog begins to wag his tail when she picks up her keys. What kind of classical conditioning has happened?
Highorder conditioning
Dr. Bienvenido is testing a new antidepressant. He carefully screens his subjects and assigns them either to the control group or the experimental group. When it is time for subjects to take the antidepressants, he gives one group the new medication and one group sugar pills that look exactly the same as the real medication. He is excited about all the good he believes this new medication will do for people. When he gives his control group the sugar pills, he shows little emotion, but when he hands out the antidepressants, he grins at his participants. To control for expectancy effects, what procedure should Dr. Bienvenido have used instead?
Double blind procedure
Jeff has been working on a particular problem for several weeks but he isn�t making any progress on it. He decides to put the problem aside for a few weeks and return to it later. What problem-solving strategy is Jeff using by taking this period of time to let his subconscious work on the problem?
Intuition
What do a mother and a father both each contribute 23 of to each of their offspring?
Chromosomes
Sasha drives whenever she must travel, because she�s terrified a plane will crash. Statistics show that there are 40,000 deaths per year in automobile accidents and only about 200 deaths in air transport, but news programs tend to sensationalize plane crashes and minimize car wrecks. As a result, people like Sasha can easily call to mind examples of plane crashes. They are relying on the _____________.
Availability Heuristic
In the Crow and the Trains problem, you are asked to determine the total distance a crow would fly (at a speed of 60 km/hr) while flying back and forth between two converging trains, which are travelling at the same speed (25 km/hr) across two cities that are 50 km apart, until the trains meet. When conceptualizing it as a distance problem, you will find this problem to be very difficult to solve; but when _________ the problem in terms of time, you will find it relatively easy to arrive at the solution.
Framing
According to what theory should skiers be better able at perceiving different types of snow if they have learned different names for them, such as “champagne powder”, “chopped powder”, “corn”, and “crud”.
Linguistic Determinism
When Lindsay spins in circles, what type of sensory receptor is stimulated by the fluid in her ear�s semicircular canals moving, and sends messages about movement to her brain?
Vestibular receptor
Todd yells at his brother and takes his toy away. Todd�s mom sees his behavior and gives Todd a scolding. After this, Todd stops treating his brother so harshly. What specific type of operant conditioning is Todd’s behavior to his brother an example of?
Positive punishment
When Peter is hit in the back of the head, damage to what lobe is most likely to affect his vision?
Occipital Lobe
Assembly-line workers who receive $20 for every five toys that they assemble are working on what type of partial reinforcement schedule?
Fixed-Ratio Schedule
Chess experts, versus novices, can remember the location of more pieces when presented with realistic games due to ______________ of the locations into meaningful patterns.
Chunking
During an in-class quiz, your ability to remember information better if you had previously studied in that classroom (versus in the library) would be an example of ______________ .
Context-dependant memory
Whether raised together or apart, what type of twins are most similar in personality scores?
identical twin
Sandy has a friend named Judy. She meets a woman at a party named Julie. To her embarrassment, every time she sees Julie, she calls her Judy. What is Sandy experiencing?
proactive interference
What ethical principle says that people, before they agree to participate in research, should be informed about the study�s procedures, potential benefits, and potential risks to participants?
Informed consent
What contain the chemical receptors concentrated along the edges and back surface of the tongue?
Taste bud
What specific type of operant conditioning is giving a misbehaving child a time-out from playing with other kids in order to reduce her misbehaving?
Negative punishment
