Unit 3: Sensation and Perception Part 3

What is the purpose of the iris?

• To focus light on the retina

• To process color

• To allow light into the eye

• To enable night vision

• To detect specific shapes

__________ are neurons that fire in response to specific edges, lines, angles, and movements.

• Rods

• Cones

• Ganglion cells

• Feature detectors

• Bipolar cells

Signal detection theory is most closely associated with which perception process?

• Vision

• Sensory adaptation

• Absolute thresholds

• Smell

• Context effects

Which of the following represents perceptual constancy?

• We recognize the taste of McDonald’s food each time we eat it.

• In photos of people, the people almost always are perceived as figure and everything else as ground.

• We know that the color of a printed page has not changed as it moves from sunlight into shadow.

• From the time they are very young, most people can recognize the smell of a dentist’s office.

• The cold water in a lake doesn’t seem so cold after you have been swimming in it for a few minutes.

You friend tells you that a cloud looks like your math teacher; you look up and agree. Which principle explains why this is so?

• Selective attention

• ESP

• Perceptual set

• Shape constancy

• Bottom-up processing

The process by which rods and cones change electromagnetic energy into neural messages is called

• adaptation.

• accommodation.

• parallel processing.

• transduction.

• perceptual setting.

Which of the following is most likely to influence our memory of a painful event?

• The overall length of the event

• The intensity of pain at the end of the event

• The reason for the pain

• The amount of rest you’ve had in the 24 hours preceding the event

• The specific part of the body that experiences the pain

Frequency theory relates to which element of the hearing process?

• The rate at which the basilar membrane vibrates

• The number of fibers in the auditory nerve

• The point at which the basilar membrane exhibits the most vibration

• The decibel level of a sound

• The number of hair cells in each cochlea

Which of the following best represents an absolute threshold?

• A guitar player knows that his D string has just gone out of tune.

• A photographer can tell that the natural light available for a photograph has just faded slightly.

• Your friend amazes you by correctly identifying unlabeled glasses of Coke and Pepsi.

• A cook can just barely taste the small amount of salt she has added to her soup.

• Your mom throws out the milk because she says the taste is “off.”

Which of the following describes a perception process that the Gestalt psychologists would have been interested in?

• Depth perception and how it allows us to survive in the world

• How we notice the various flavor elements in a dish

• How an organized whole is formed out of its component pieces

• What the smallest units of perception are

• The similarities between shape constancy and size constancy