Perceptual Processes Exam Preparation Guide
Course Introduction
Perceptual Processes explores the mechanisms by which humans interpret and organize sensory information from the environment. This course covers the physiological basis of sensation, the transformation of sensory input into meaningful experiences, and the cognitive and neural pathways involved in perception. Topics include visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and taste perception, attention, perceptual development, illusions, and individual differences in perceptual processing. Students will examine both classic theories and recent research findings to better understand how perception influences behavior, decision-making, and interaction with the world.
Recommended Textbook
Sensation and Perception 9th Edition by E. Bruce Goldstein
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15 Chapters
750 Verified Questions
750 Flashcards
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Chapter 1: Introduction to Perception
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49 Verified Questions
49 Flashcards
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Sample Questions
Q1) Which of the following is a reason for studying perception?
A) To become more aware of your own perceptual experiences.
B) To provide information that may help with a future career.
C) To apply perception to everyday problems, such as highway sign visibility.
D) All of these.
Answer: D
Q2) The "S" in the Weber fraction stands for:
A) sensation
B) synapse
C) standard stimulus
D) somatic
Answer: A
Q3) The theory that accounts for response criterion in a detection experiment is A) signal detection theory.
B) evolutionary theory.
C) balance theory.
D) gateway theory.
Answer: A
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Chapter 2: The Beginnings of Perception
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Sample Questions
Q1) Acuity is better in the ____ than in the _____.
A) periphery; fovea
B) optic disk; fovea
C) optic disk; cornea
D) fovea; periphery
Answer: D
Q2) The "rod-cone break" in the dark adaptation curve occurs after about ___ in the dark.
A) 30 seconds
B) 2 minutes
C) 7 minutes
D) 30 minutes
Answer: C
Q3) Which of the following is a reason for the poor acuity of newborns?
A) The rods are not developed at birth.
B) Newborns have too much visual pigment in the cones.
C) A newborn's rods have very narrow inner segments.
D) The visual cortex of the newborn is only partially developed.
Answer: D
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Page 4
Chapter 3: Neural Processing and Perception
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Sample Questions
Q1) The Nobel Prize winners who conducted the pioneering research on the physiology of striate cortex neurons were
A) White and Benary.
B) Hubel and Wiesel.
C) Mathers and Marshall.
D) Libby and Rizzutto.
Answer: B
Q2) Selective rearing refers to
A) raising an organism in an environment that only contains certain types of stimuli.
B) genetically manipulating the organism pre-natally.
C) genetically manipulating the organism in the first month after birth.
D) presenting an array of stimuli to the organism in the first month after birth.
Answer: A
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Chapter 4: Cortical Organization
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Sample Questions
Q1) The _________ effect occurs because humans have more cortical neurons that respond to horizontal and vertical orientations than slanted orientations.
A) oblique
B) transverse
C) parallel
D) box
Q2) A researcher finds that damage to Area A of the brain results in the loss of Function A but not Function B. In another individual, damage to Area B results in the loss of Function B but not Function A. These results are best described as a/an
A) associative link.
B) double dissociation.
C) single dissociation.
D) differential assessment.
Q3) Ablation is a procedure in which
A) a radioactive isotope is injected into the bloodstream and traced through the brain.
B) electrodes on the scalp are used to measure changes in brain activity.
C) a particular area of the brain is removed or destroyed.
D) an electromagnetic pulse is used to temporarily disrupt brain activity.
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Chapter 5: Perceiving Objects and Scenes
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Sample Questions
Q1) When Palmer (1975) showed observers a kitchen scene and then a target picture, which picture was identified correctly 80% of the time?
A) A loaf of bread, because it matches the context of the scene
B) A mailbox, because it seems so out-of-context, that it "pops-out"
C) A drum, because participants were music majors.
D) A bedroom, because it is from the same category.
Q2) Corey looks at a flock of seagulls flying in one direction, when suddenly five of the seagulls start flying in another direction. He now perceives two groups of birds, because of the Gestalt principle of
A) common fate.
B) uniform connectedness.
C) synchrony.
D) Pragnanz.
Q3) The demonstration of apparent movement provides support for the Gestalt approach because
A) the phenomenon cannot be explained by sensations alone.
B) the phenomenon relies exclusively on the perceiver's past experience.
C) the images used do not follow the principle of common region.
D) the phenomenon relied on figure/ground segregation.
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Page 7
Chapter 6: Visual Attention
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Sample Questions
Q1) (a) Discuss how Treisman's feature integration theory addresses the binding problem.
(b) What are illusory conjunctions, and why are they support for feature integration theory?
Q2) Levin and Simons showed a video of two women having a conversation. As the view switches between the women, other things in the scene change. Which change was noticed by the majority of the participants?
A) A scarf being present in one frame, but gone when the camera returns to her.
B) One woman whose hand position has changed from her chin to the table.
C) The plates on the table changing from red to white in different frames.
D) None of the changes were noticed by the majority of the participants
Q3) Vaco is playing basketball, and does a "no-look" pass to a teammate. This demonstrates the idea that attention
A) is solely the result of eye movements.
B) can occur without directly looking at the object.
C) may not occur even if we are looking straight at an object.
D) is due to the functioning of the rods.
Q4) Discuss the differences in attention between people who have autism and those who do not, from behavioral and physiological perspectives.
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Chapter 7: Taking Action
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Sample Questions
Q1) Mirror neurons
A) help an individual understand another person's actions and react appropriately.
B) help an individual imitate observed behaviors.
C) have been discovered in the premotor cortex.
D) all of these
Q2) Describe a "blind-walking" experiment, and discuss how the results are related to optic flow.
Q3) (a) What are affordances?
(b) Provide an example of an object and what action it affords.
(c) Describe whether or not an object could have more than one affordance associated with it.
Q4) According to Land and Lee, drivers look ______________ when driving on straight road.
A) directly at the focus of expansion
B) straight ahead, but not directly at the focus of expansion
C) at locomotor flow line
D) at the psychometric curb
Q5) Describe evidence from monkey studies that suggests that mirror neurons do more than respond to patterns of motion.
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Chapter 8: Perceiving Motion
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Sample Questions
Q1) The aperture problem is solved by the pooling of responses of a number of V1 neurons. Physiological evidence suggests that this pooling occurs in the ____, a nucleus in the _____stream.
A) MT cortex; dorsal
B) MT cortex; ventral
C) PF cortex; "what"
D) PF cortex; "how"
Q2) An afterimage when viewed in the dark appears to move when you move your eyes. The Corollary Discharge Theory predicts this because
A) there is an IDS, but not a CDS.
B) there is no IDS, but there is a CDS.
C) there is no IDS and no CDS.
D) none of the these; the corollary discharge theory cannot explain this event.
Q3) Newsome, Britten, and Movshon found that as the coherence between the dots' direction of movement increased
A) the MT neuron fired more rapidly.
B) the monkey judged the direction of movement less accurately.
C) the MT neuron fired less rapidly.
D) the MT neuron fired at rates less than the level of spontaneous activity.
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Page 10
Chapter 9: Perceiving Color
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Sample Questions
Q1) The major theories of color vision were first proposed A) in the 1800s, based on behavioral evidence only.
B) in the 1930s, based on some psychophysical data and lesioning studies.
C) in the 1960s after Hubel and Wiesel's pioneering research.
D) in the 1990s when technologically advanced brain imaging studies could be conducted.
Q2) (a) What is the difference between an illumination edge and a reflectance edge? (b) Discuss what the "penumbra" demonstration and the "folded card" demonstration reveal about perception of these types of edges.
Q3) Contrast the three types of dichromatism, in regard to rates, neutral points, color experience, and proposed physiological cause.
Q4) Evaluate Newton's claim that the light "rays are not coloured."
Q5) Newton's quote of "The Rays are not colored" means that A) we can determine the accuracy of color perception by measuring the wavelength of the light.
B) colors are created by our perceptual system.
C) the experience of color is not arbitrary.
D) a 450 nm pattern will look the identical shade of blue to all human trichromats.
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Chapter 10: Perceiving Depth and Size
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Sample Questions
Q1) Fox et al. (1980) found that the ability to use binocular disparity develops between
A) 1 to 2 months.
B) 2 to 3 months.
C) 3 ½ to 6 months.
D) 10 to 11 months.
Q2) The size-distance scaling equation is S = K(R x D). The "S" in the equation stands for
A) stimulus intensity.
B) an object's perceived size.
C) an object's physical size.
D) an object's physical shape.
Q3) Suppose you watch a "3-D" movie (using red/blue "3-D glasses") with your friends. After the movie, a friend asks "Why do we see such depth in this movie?" Summarize how you would answer this question.
Q4) An insect is most likely to use ______ to perceive depth.
A) atmospheric perspective.
B) movement parallax
C) size information
D) all of these
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Page 12
Chapter 11: Hearing
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Sample Questions
Q1) A complex tone can be created by starting with a pure tone, called the ____________, and adding frequencies that are multiples of this first frequency.
A) fundamental frequency
B) harmonic frequency
C) spatial frequency
D) audible frequency
Q2) The speed of sound through air is
A) 50 meters per second.
B) 340 meters per second.
C) 1500 meters per second.
D) 3000 meters per second.
Q3) When the tip links in the cilia stretch, ion channels open and A) sodium flows into the cell.
B) potassium flows into the cell.
C) sodium flows out of the cell.
D) potassium flows out of the cell.
Q4) What are the major components of a cochlear implant?
Q5) Describe how the actions of the cochlea results in transduction.
Q6) Discuss the structures and functions of the middle ear.
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Chapter 12: Auditory Localization and Organization
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Sample Questions
Q1) Garner and Garner showed that smoothing out the nooks of the pinnae
A) results in more accurate localization on all corrdinates.
B) makes it more difficult to locate sounds along the elevation coordinate.
C) results in more accurate localization along the elevation coordinate.
D) does not affect spectral cues for localization.
Q2) The "S" in the S/N ratio in a classroom is the:
A) sound from adjacent rooms.
B) sound of the ventilation system.
C) level of the teacher's voice.
D) scene analysis.
Q3) Seven-month-old infants listened to a regular repeating ambiguous rhythm while they were bounced up and down at two bounces per beat or at three bounces per beat. Later, they were tested to see how they had perceived the rhythm. The results suggest that
A) the infants perceived the rhythm as presented - ambiguous.
B) the infants always perceived the rhythm as occurring in twos.
C) the infants' perception was influenced by how they were bounced.
D) the vestibular system is not involved in auditory perception and movement.
Q4) Define visual capture and give examples of this concept.
Q5) What is "melody schema"? Discuss the support for this concept.
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Chapter 13: Speech Perception
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Sample Questions
Q1) Link et al. (2003) studied the perceived meaning of listeners' to the phrase "Let's do lunch sometime," based on the speaker's inflection and emotional state. These are examples of
A) indexical characteristics.
B) segmentation effects.
C) lip reading effects.
D) speech shadowing techniques.
Q2) Describe how voice onset times (VOTs) have been used to study categorical perception.
Q3) Japanese children at the age of _______ can tell the difference between the /r/ sound and the /l/ sound just as well as American children.
A) 6 months old
B) 1 year old
C) 2 years old
D) 5 years old
Q4) Discuss the methods and results of two studies of the phonemic restoration effect.
Q5) What is the McGurk effect? What evidence exists for the physiological basis for this effect?
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Chapter 14: The Cutaneous Senses
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Sample Questions
Q1) Which of the following stimuli have been used to test tactile acuity?
A) Gratings
B) Letters
C) Two-point stimuli
D) Letters, gratings, and two-point stimuli have all been used.
Q2) Discuss how cortical magnification and plasticity are related to the cortical mapping of area S1.
Q3) Describe the basic principles of the gate-control model of pain.
Q4) Experience-dependent plasticity has been found to occur for
A) the somatosensory system only.
B) the auditory system only.
C) only the auditory and somatosensory systems
D) the somatosensory, auditory, and visual systems.
Q5) The phrase "multimodal nature of pain" refers to
A) pain that occurs from too much heat or too much cold.
B) pain that occurs from sounds that are too loud and skin stimulation that is too intense.
C) sensory and emotional components of pain.
D) real and imagined sources of pain.
Q6) Name and discuss the differences between the four types of mechanoreceptors.
Page 16
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Chapter 15: The Chemical Senses
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Sample Questions
Q1) Octanoic acid and octanol differ in molecular structure by one oxygen molecule. When smelling these substances,
A) participants report that the two substances both smell "sweet."
B) participants report that the two substances both smell "musky."
C) the recognition profiles for the two substances are very different.
D) octanoic acid, but not octanol, was classified as a "pheromone" for sexual attraction.
Q2) Areas on the tongue covered primarily with filiform papillae are similar to ______ in vision.
A) convergence
B) the blind spot
C) cortical magnification
D) accretion and deletion
Q3) Flavor is the impression a person gets from
A) taste only.
B) the combination of olfaction and kinesthesis.
C) the combination of olfaction and taste.
D) the combination of olfaction, taste, and vision.
Q4) Compare three different methods for studying the physiology of olfaction.
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