Sensation & Perception Practice MCQ

Bob is concerned because his children have been eating too much of an expensive breakfast cereal, so he brings home a less expensive version that looks and tastes exactly the same to him. His children immediately notice that the new cereal is less sweet. Which of the following concepts best explains the conflicting perceptions of Bob and his children?

• Perceptual adaptation

• Sensory adaptation

• Difference threshold

• Signal-detection theory

• Absolute threshold

If Carmelita stares at a red spot for one minute and then shifts her gaze to a white piece of paper, she is likely to experience an afterimage that is

• green

• red

• blue

• violet

• black

The tendency of most people to identify a three-sided figure as a triangle, even when one of its sides is incomplete, is the result of a perceptual process known as

• closure

• proximity

• similarity

• feature analysis

• shape constancy

The Gestalt principle that refers to an individual’s tendency to perceive an incomplete figure as whole is called

• figure-ground

• motion parallax

• closure

• proximity

• shape constancy

In this figure, what letter corresponds to the light-sensitive surface of the eye that contains photoreceptors?

• A

• B

• C

• D

• E

In this figure, what letter corresponds to the nerve that carries neural impulses from the eye to the brain?

• A

• B

• C

• D

• E

John walks into art class and is overwhelmed by the smell of paint. However, the longer he stays in the room, the less noticeable the smell becomes. Which of the following appears to be operating in this instance?

• Sensory adaptation

• Subliminal perception

• Absolute threshold

• Signal detection

• Perceptual set

Negative afterimages are explained by

• the trichromatic theory.

• color detection by rods.

• the opponent-process theory.

• a lack of adaptation.

• dichromatic color perception.

Which of the following refers to the transformation of stimulus energy into neural impulses?

• Perception

• Bottom-up processing

• Top-down processing

• Transduction

• Psychophysics

A reason that one typically does not notice a blind spot in the visual field is that

• the blind spot is very small, and no visual stimuli are likely to be so small that the blind spot completely obscures them

• most visual stimuli affect only one visual hemisphere, and one hemisphere can cover for the other

• visual stimuli usually affect the occipital cortex in both hemispheres

• the blind spot habituates to a stimulus when the head is held still

• the brain fills in missing information so there is no awareness that the visual field is incomplete