Psychophysics Final Exam
Course Introduction
Psychophysics is the scientific study of the relationship between physical stimuli and the sensations and perceptions they produce in the human mind. This course explores foundational methods for measuring sensory experiences, such as threshold detection, scaling, and signal detection theory. Students will learn how to design experiments to quantify perceptual processes and interpret behavioral data in the context of sensory psychology. Topics include visual, auditory, and tactile psychophysics, as well as applications to neuroscience, technology, and clinical assessment. Emphasis is placed on both classic studies and modern advancements in understanding how we perceive the world around us.
Recommended Textbook
Sensation and Perception 10th Edition by E. Bruce Goldstein
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Chapter 1: Introduction to Perception
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Q1) Describe the method of limits and how it is used.
Answer: In the method of limits, the experimenter presents stimuli in either ascending order (intensity is increased) or descending order (intensity is decreased). For example, suppose an experimenter is studying the perception of tones. On the first series of trials, the experimenter begins by presenting a tone with an intensity we will call 103, and the observer indicates by a "yes" response that he hears the tone. This response is indicated by a Y at an intensity of 103 in the far left column of the table. The experimenter then presents another tone, at a lower intensity, and the observer responds to this tone. This procedure continues, with the observer making a judgment at each intensity until he responds "no," he did not hear the tone. This change from "yes" to "no," indicated by the dashed line, is the crossover point, and the threshold for this series is taken as the mean between 99 and 98, or 98.5. The next series of trials begins below the observer's threshold, so that he says "no" on the first trial (intensity 95), and continues until he says "yes" (when the intensity reaches 100). Notice that the crossover point when starting below the threshold is slightly different. Because the crossover points may vary slightly, this procedure is repeated a number of times, starting above the threshold half the time and starting below the threshold half the time. The threshold is then determined by calculating the average of all of the crossover points.
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Chapter 2: The Beginning of the Perceptual Process
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Q1) As stimulus intensity is increased, recording from a single neuron shows that _____.
A) the amplitude of the action potential increases
B) the amplitude of the action potential decreases
C) the amplitude of the action potential may increase or decrease, depending on the stimulus
D) the rate of firing of the nerve fiber increases
Answer: D
Q2) A retinal condition that destroys the cones in the fovea is _____.
A) macular degeneration
B) retinitis pigmentosa
C) presbyopia
D) retinal hypopolarization
Answer: A
Q3) To isolate the rod portion of the dark adaptation curve, researchers _____.
A) use rod monochromats as the participants
B) present the stimulus foveally
C) present the stimulus in the periphery
D) use cone monochromats as participants
Answer: A
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Page 4
Chapter 3: Neural Processing
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Q1) Chad is reading when he sees an insect land on the corner of his book. He then makes an eye movement to look at the insect. The structure of the visual system that is most likely responsible for making this eye movement is the _____.
A) superior colliculus
B) extrastriate cortex
C) optic chiasm
D) parietal cortex
Answer: A
Q2) Unlike simple cells, complex cells respond best to _____.
A) stationary spots of light
B) small spots of light
C) moving stimuli
D) stationary lines of any orientation
Answer: C
Q3) _________: Limulus :: ________: human retina.
A) Horizontal cells; amacrine cells
B) Amacrine cells; horizontal cells
C) Lateral plexus; horizontal and amacrine cells
D) Lateral plexus; rods
Answer: C
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Chapter 4: Cortical Organization
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Q1) An IT neuron in the monkey will fire briskly when presented a picture of a _____.
A) monkey's face
B) Tree
C) banana
D) human torso
Q2) The ventral pathway has also been labeled the "_____" pathway.
A) where
B) how
C) What
D) Why
Q3) Which statement is true regarding the organization of columns in the cortex
A) A location column can contain many orientation columns.
B) An orientation column can contain many location columns.
C) Location and orientation columns are located in different parts of the cortex.
D) Action columns are present in both location and orientation columns.
Q4) Describe research on brain damaged people that support the idea that the dorsal stream is the "how" pathway.
Q5) Describe how an object such as a tree is represented in the striate cortex.
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Chapter 5: Perceiving Objects and Scenes
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Q1) Structuralists would be most likely to endorse which of the following statements
A) Sensations and perceptions are the same "unit" of thought.
B) The whole of something is greater than its parts.?
C) The starting point for perceptions is the sensations that make them up.?
D) Past experience plays little or no role in perception formation.?
Q2) Alyson looks at a picture of arrows and sees white arrows pointing to the right against a black background. She looks at the picture longer, and then sees black arrows pointing to the left against a white background. Her perception of this stimulus is an example of _____.
A) perceptual segregation
B) binocular rivalry?
C) view invariance?
D) orientation invariance?
Q3) Jimmy looks at a moderately blurred picture of Princess Diana's face. Jimmy will most likely _____.
A) not be able to identify the face
B) identify the face as male rather than female
C) be able to correctly identify the face
D) need a computer to scan the image to correctly identify it
Q4) Describe the how Bayesian inference can be used to understand perception.
Page 7
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Chapter 6: Visual Attention
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Q1) The incidence of change blindness _____ when a cue is added to the scene that indicates which part of the scene has changed.
A) increases
B) decreases
C) remains unchanged
D) can increase or decrease, depending on cue duration
Q2) _____ described attention as "the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought."
A) Hemlholtz
B) Posner
C) James
D) Rensink
Q3) The finding that attention can spread within an object, thereby, enhancing detection at other places within the object is referred to as _____.
A) spreading activation
B) object location invariance
C) same-object advantage
D) spatial drift
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Page 8
Chapter 7: Taking Action
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Q1) Joe enters a room, sees a novel object, and promptly walks over and sits on it. The object was about the size of a small table and had a flat, smooth surface at approximately knee height. If asked to explain Joe's behavior, Gibson would likely say that Joe _____.
A) was acting based on affordances
B) had sustained damage to his hippocampus
C) had learned the function of the object from optic flow
D) was suffering from optic ataxia
Q2) 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.
Q3) You are driving a car. Which statement is an accurate reflection of flow in this situation?
A) Optic flow is slower near the car.
B) Optic flow does not occur for information in the periphery.
C) Optic flow is faster farther away from the car.
D) Optic flow does not occur for the focus of expansion.
Q4) Name and discuss two characteristics of optic flow.
Q5) Discuss how mirror neurons could convey information about others' intentions.
Page 9
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Chapter 8: Perceiving Motion
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Q1) The real world contains instances of continuous motion that somehow are divided up into meaningful units. The point in time when one unit ends and another begins is referred to as the _____.
A) breaking point
B) segment marker
C) event boundary
D) transition period
Q2) What is the aperture problem
How does the visual system "solve" this problem?
Q3) Percy is injected with a drug that paralyzes his eye muscles. When he is instructed to try to move his eye when looking a stationary scene, his brain is able to send a signal to his eye muscles but he is unable to move his eyes. As a result, he perceives _____.
A) no movement, because his eye muscles can't move
B) no movement, because the scene is stationary
C) movement, because there is a CDS and an IDS
D) movement, because there is a CDS, but not an IDS
Q4) Review the evidence for the physiological basis of perceiving biological motion.
Q5) Describe Francesca Simion's work with biological motion in newborn infants.
Q6) Describe Freyd's (1983) study of implied motion.
Page 10
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Chapter 9: Perceiving Color
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Q1) According to researcher Dorthea Jameson, "A blue bird would not be mistaken for a goldfinch if it were brought indoors." This supports the concept of _____.
A) anomalous trichromacy
B) neutral point univariance?
C) color constancy
D) area centralis
Q2) Mark enters a supermarket that is lit by red lights. After fifteen minutes he enters the produce section and finds some red apples to purchase. Mark is able to see these apples as red because he has undergone _____.
A) chromatic adaptation
B) re-adaption
C) Isomerization
D) corticalization
Q3) Explain (with examples) the difference between additive color mixture and subtractive color mixture.
Q4) Contrast the three types of dichromatism with regard to rates of occurrence, neutral points, color experience, and proposed physiological cause.
Q5) Evaluate Newton's claim that the light "rays are not colored."
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Chapter 10: Perceiving Depth and Size
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Q1) Epstein (1965) presented observers photographs of a quarter, dime, and half-dollar that were all equal in physical size. His results showed that _____.
A) familiar size is most effective when other information about depth is absent
B) familiar size is most effective when the observer has both eyes open
C) the quarter was judged to be closer than the dime, when viewed monocularly
D) accommodation is a stronger cue than any pictorial depth cue
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) What depth cue could be classified as a binocular cue and an oculomotor cue
A) accommodation
B) accretion
C) stereopsis
D) convergence
Q4) Name, define, and give an example (in words and/or drawings) of six pictorial depth cues.
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Chapter 11: Hearing I: Basic Processes and Pitch Perception
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Q1) Discuss the structures and functions of the middle ear.
Q2) Békésy discovered the traveling wave motion of the basilar membrane by _____.
A) stimulating the ear of human cadavers
B) using brain imaging techniques in humans
C) using single-cell recordings from live monkeys
D) computer simulations
Q3) A guinea pig tonotopic map shows that a receptor close to the apex will respond to a tone of _____ Hz.
A) 60
B) 800
C) 7,000
D) 30,000
Q4) When listening to music, which method will help ensure you hear all of the frequencies represented in the piece
A) Hold volume constant throughout the piece.
B) Turn the volume down (e.g., 20 dB) so the music is quiet.
C) Turn the volume up (e.g., 80 dB) so the music is loud.
D) Play white noise in the background to allow better discrimination.
Q5) Define loudness, pitch, and timbre and relate each to the physical sound stimulus.
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Chapter 12: Hearing II: Location and Organization
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Q1) Recanzone (2000) examined localization in A1 and the auditory belt area in monkeys. Results indicated that _____.
A) the posterior belt area is not involved in localization
B) A1 provides the most specific localization information?
C) localization coded the same throughout the auditory cortex
D) the posterior belt area provides more specific localization then A1
Q2) Define visual capture and give examples of this concept.
Q3) The separation of different sound sources into perceptually different streams is called _____ by musicians.
A) timbre segregation
B) pitch discrimination
C) locational timbre
D) implied polyphony
Q4) Vision is to figure-ground segregation as audition is to _____.
A) the ecological approach
B) intimacy
C) auditory scene analysis
D) Fourier analysis
Q5) What factors are important to consider when designing concert halls?
Q6) Describe the Jeffress model of auditory localization.
Page 14
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Chapter 13: Speech Perception
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Q1) What is noise vocoded speech and what has been learned using it?
Q2) The McGurk effect is most similar to which of the following performers
A) ventriloquists
B) hockey players
C) ballet dancers
D) gymnasts
Q3) Discuss the methods and results of two studies of the phonemic restoration effect.
Q4) Discuss Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia.
Q5) The discovery of _____ is used as support for the motor theory of speech perception.
A) Broca's area
B) Wernicke's area
C) audiovisual mirror neurons
D) simple cells in area V1
Q6) Computer speech recognition is _____.
A) better than human speech recognition under any condition
B) better than human speech recognition in accuracy
C) equal in all respects to human speech recognition
D) poorer than human speech recognition
Page 15
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Chapter 14: The Cutaneous Senses
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Q1) Moving your finger across a textured surface can produce vibrations that are interpreted as texture. These vibrations are defined as _____.
A) parietal cues
B) temporal cues
C) spatial cues
D) olfactory cues
Q2) The somatosensory system comprises _____.
A) the cutaneous sensory system only
B) cutaneous sensations and proprioception only
C) cutaneous sensations and kinesthesis only
D) cutaneous sensations, proprioception, and kinesthesis
Q3) Neuropathic pain is to _____ as inflammatory pain is to _____.
A) tumor cells; phantom limb syndrome
B) tumor cells; carpal tunnel syndrome
C) carpal tunnel syndrome; azimuth burn
D) carpal tunnel syndrome; tumor cells
Q4) Name and discuss the differences between the four types of mechanoreceptors.
Q5) Discuss how cortical magnification and plasticity are related to the cortical mapping of area S1.
Page 16
Q6) Describe the basic principles of the gate-control model of pain.
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Chapter 15: The Chemical Senses
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Q1) The _____ papillae are mushroom-shaped and found on the tip and sides of the tongue.
A) filiform
B) fungiform
C) foliate
D) circumvillate
Q2) Describe the capacity of human infants to experience taste and smell.
Q3) Macrosmatic animals _____.
A) have relatively few olfactory receptors
B) have limited ability to discriminate among odors
C) are unable to exploit pheromones
D) use their sense of smell for survival
Q4) Describe the Proust effect and provide a physiological explanation for its occurrence.
Q5) The axons of the olfactory sensory neurons project to the _____ in the brain.
A) glomeruli in the olfactory bulb
B) occipital lobe
C) lateral geniculate nucleus
D) superior olivary nucleus
Q6) Compare three different methods for studying the physiology of olfaction.
Page 17
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