Exam 5: Sensation and Perception

What is the nature and adaptive value of perceptual constancies?

As Jesse closes her eyes, Joe puts two tiny boxes in Jesse's hands. In her right hand, the box is empty, but the box in her left hand contains two small Hershey's kisses. Jesse has no problem picking the box in her left hand as the heavier of the two. However, Joe next takes two equal 2-pound bags of candy and adds the two small kisses to one of the bags. Then Joe puts a bag of candy in each of her hands and Jesse is unable to pick which one has the extra kisses. This inability to perceive the weight in the second situation can be explained by

Describe the results of shadowing experiments in relation to attentional capabilities.

A movie theatre decides to build a new marquee sign to attract attention. The hundreds of light bulbs on the sign are timed to go on and off in sequence, thus giving a perception of

The recognition of an incoming stimulus is facilitated by the presence of __________, which is a mental representation or image that we compare the stimulus to.

Describe the Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory of colour vision. What kinds of evidence support this theory, and what two phenomena challenge it?

How certain a person needs to feel before saying that a particular stimulus is present is referred to as the:

When various pieces of visual information related to a stimulus object are processed simultaneously it is referred to as parallel processing.

You are blindfolded and asked to taste a cup of coffee to determine if it contains cream. Eight times out of 10 you correctly identified the presence of cream, but twice you said that cream was present when there was none there. According to signal detection theory, your correct responses are called ___________ and your incorrect responses are called __________.

There are significantly more rods than cones located in the fovea.

When vision is restored to adults who have been blind for their entire lives, they typically ___________________. Examples such as this best demonstrate the ___________.

A little boy is putting together a jigsaw puzzle. Only after putting all the pieces in place is he able to see that the puzzle is a picture of a dog. This example best illustrates which concept?

The tiny bones in the middle ear serve to transfer incoming sound waves from the cochlea to the basilar membrane.

Which of the following shows the correct route taken by a light stimulus traveling to the brain?

Peter, my pet dog, pricks his ears immediately and looks in the direction where I drop a ball. His ability to locate the source of sound is also called _______________.

Muir and Mitchell's visual pattern discrimination tests on kittens raised in an environment devoid of certain visual stimuli demonstrated that

One interesting feature of the retina is that _______________.

The fact that the face of a friend looks the same whether you are viewing it up front or from the side is best accounted for by

Julie and Jason were on a blind date. Jason was very excited and expected the evening to go well. Julie agreed to go on the date only to help out her friend who was responsible for entertaining her cousin while he was in town. Julie expected that she would have a terrible time. Sure enough, the next day, Julie was telling her friend how boring the evening was; her friend was shocked to hear this as her cousin, Jason, had just spent the morning telling her how wonderful Julie was and how much they had in common. How could the friend rationalize that Julie and Jason had been on the same date last night?

Niguel is required to give a speech as part of his psychology class. Esme, who is also in the class, opens a note from her boyfriend during Niguel's speech and grows angry at something her boyfriend wrote. Though he hasn't been paying attention to how many people are smiling at him, Niguel immediately notices Esme's angry face. Why do psychologists think we are so much quicker to recognize an angry face than a happy one?