Sensation, Perception, Cognition and Language

Question 1

What is nativism ?

Answer 1

The belief in the INNATE ability of language

Question 2

which theory argues that adults influence speech development in children by reinforcing babbling?

Answer 2

Theory of LEARNING

Question 3

What is ethnocentrism ?

Answer 3

Ethnocentrism: occurs when an individual believes his or her way of life is better than that of another cultural or ethnic group.

Question 4

What is self-fulfilling prophecy?

Answer 4

self-fulfilling prophecy :occurs when the expectations of an individual cause one to eventually confirm those perceptions.

Question 5

What is cultural relativism ?

Answer 5

Cultural relativism: the idea that customs and values differ from one culture to another

Question 6

What is transduction and where does it occur ?

Answer 6

Transduction: , the process through which sensory signals from the environment are transformed into neural signals.
Transduction occurs in the CILIA (hair cells)

Question 7

What is the cilia ?

Answer 7

Cilia : hair cells or delicate organs that vibrate in response to the sound waves that enter into the ear

Question 8

What is the mere exposure effect ?

Answer 8

The mere-exposure principle (aka FAMILIARITY Effect) , is a psychological phenomenon that suggests that the degree to which someone likes a novel (new) object or stimuli increases with additional exposures;

Question 9

What is the absolute threshold ?

Answer 9

Absolute threshold: is the minimum level of intensity of a sensory signal correctly perceived to be present 50% of the time.

Question 10

What is fundamental attribution error ? Give an example

Answer 10

The fundamental attribution error is made when an observer discounts the impact of external or situational sources on a person’s behavior, in favor of attributing behavior to internal causes
ex: when she concludes that the student did not respond because he has a rude personality;

Question 11

what occurs with gestalt principles ?

Answer 11

Gestalt psychology: based on the idea that humans try and create meaning and their brain tends to impose patterns and closure on visual input in a TOP-DOWN manner

Question 12

How does autism affect one’s development ?

Answer 12

People with autism experience an ATYPICAL adolescent development (NOT necessarily a disorder of decline)

Question 13

What is one major hallmark of autism spectrum disorder ?

Answer 13

One of the hallmarks of autistic spectrum disorder is that the person appears remote and indifferent to those around them, often failing to make eye contact

Question 14

Explain the process that allows humans to smell detect orders ?

Answer 14

The main process by which humans smell is via chemoreceptor cells located on the roof of the nasal cavity, known as the olfactory epithelium, which detect odors.
Cilia respond to the chemicals dissolved in the mucus on the surface of the epithelium and are then detected by receptors on the olfactory sensory neurons

Question 15

What happens to a split brain patient ? How is there vision and speech affected ?

Answer 15

A split brain patient will be able to see an object in their visual field because the information from the temporal retina of the eye will be processed in either right or left hemisphere.
However, without a corpus callosum, this information cannot be transferred across to the left hemisphere where Broca’s area is localized,

Question 16

How does the brain process visual input from watching a movie ?

Answer 16

Through PARALLEL PROCESSING. all of the elements (form, depth, color, movement) are processed simultaneously.

Question 17

What are Nocireceptors?

Answer 17

. Nociceptors are PAIN receptors

Question 18

What are mechanoreceptors ?

Answer 18

Mechanoreceptors are sensory receptors that respond to PRESSURe Ex: such as a cane bouncing over bumps or grooves in a sidewalk.

Question 19

What are chemoreceptors used for?

Answer 19

Chemoreceptors detect chemicals in either gaseous or aqueous form; these receptors are vital to the human senses of taste and smell

Question 20

where is the Wernicke’s area located in right handed invidiuals ?

Answer 20

Wernicke’s area is located in LEFT-TEMPORAL Lobe in right-handed individuals

Question 21

Which theory would pose that humans have a Language aquistion devise (LAD) that explains our ability to readily acquire language at at an early age?

Answer 21

**NATIVIST Theory **

nativist perspective, proposed that humans are born hard-wired to learn language, and suggested this ability was due to the presence of a “language acquisition device” (LAD), an innate feature unique to the human mind that allows people to gain mastery of language from limited exposure during the sensitive developmental years in early childhood

Question 22

what is weber’s Law?

Answer 22

Weber’s Law: states that two stimuli must differ by a constant proportion (not a constant amount) in order for us to perceive the difference,

Question 23

What is the Gestalt Law Of proximity ?

Answer 23

The Gestalt Law of Proximity: states that we tend to group nearby things together
ex: instead of perceiving 18 small black squares, we tend to perceive two larger squares composed of nine smaller squares each in the figure above

Question 24

What is the Gestalt law of connectedness ?

Answer 24

The Gestalt Law of Connectedness: states that we will tend to perceive things as connected, uniform, and linked

Question 25

What is the Gestalt law of Closure?

Answer 25

The Gestalt Law of Closure: states that we tend to fill in the gaps to create a complete, whole object

Question 26

What is the Gestalt law of continuity ?

Answer 26

The Gestalt Law of Continuity: states that we tend to see smooth, continuous patterns rather than discontinuous ones

Question 27

What is learned during Piagets’ concrete operations stage?

Answer 27

during the concrete operations stage (from roughly ages 7-11), children learn to grasp the principle of CONSERVATION which suggests that despite changes in size or shape, a child understands that quantity remains the same.

Question 28

What is confirmation bias ?

Answer 28

confirmation bias: a type of cognitive error that involves favoring information that confirms previously existing beliefs.
ex: This occurs when she pays attention to the information that upholds and supports her ideas about stem cell research.

Question 29

What is representativeness heuristic ?

Answer 29

representativeness heuristic, one type of mental shortcut that is used when making quick decisions and judgments.
example, the physician may estimate the likelihood that this teenager is an unwed mother and drug addict by comparing her appearance and behavior to an existing prototype of what an unwed teenage mother on drugs looks and acts like

Question 30

What is availability heuristic ?

Answer 30

availability heuristic is a mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to mind.
ex: When RK is thinking about going to the hospital for his weekly dialysis, a number of examples of MRSA outbreaks in hospitals around the country immediately spring into his mind; as a result, he judges the likelihood of contracting MRSA as far more frequent and possible than it actually

Question 31

What are experience expectant skills ?

Answer 31

Experience expectant skills : skills that have been part of the human repertoire for a long time, so the brain is essentially hard-wired to produce them.
ex: such as language and visual perception or comprehension of a verbal language

Question 32

What are experience dependent skills ?

Answer 32

experience dependent skills: skills that are NEWER to the human experience or limited to a particular culture, such as driving a car or carrying water jugs on one’s head.
ex: playing a culturally unique game would be considered experience dependent.

Question 33

What is reciprocal causation ?

Answer 33

Reciprocal causation: cause–effect relationships are bi-directional, as a cause could later become an effect and vice versa.
(Albert bandora)

Question 34

What occurs during synaptic pruning ?

Answer 34

synaptic pruning: which refers to the gradual elimination of neuronal synapses, or brain cell connections, that are not relevant to the infant’s developing brain. (occurs at a young age)

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hence, when presented with novel, nuanced sounds, the infant may have difficulty quickly learning to discriminate between those sounds

Question 35

What is the role of Nociceptors ?

Answer 35

Nociceptors: allows humans to perceive sensation of PAIN

Question 36

What occurs in Autism Spectrum Disorder ?

Answer 36

Autism Spectrum Disorder: is a disorder characterized by sensory dysfunction. People with ASD often display sensory regulating behaviors such as flapping and may be prone to feeling over-stimulated

Question 37

What is long-term potentiation ?

Answer 37

Long-term potentiation: occurs when neuron morphology changes to increase the probability of a future action potential being fired.
In other words, neurons that “fire together, wire together”.

Question 38

What are the components of working memory ?

Answer 38

• phonological loop
  -visuospatial sketchpad
  -source monitoring

Question 39

What does episodic buffer pertain to ?

Answer 39

episodic buffer: is most closely related to long-term memory and the recollection of events in a person’s life

Question 40

What is spreading activation ?

Answer 40

spreading activation: is the storage of information in the brain such that related concepts or ideas stimulate similar or related concepts, ideas, or memories.
This is believed to function at the neural level with networks of synaptic activation that map the conceptual spreading activation network

Question 41

Differentiate between Bipolar ON and OFF center cells

Answer 41

Different types of bipolar cells can trigger action potentials in ganglion cells under different conditions; **ON-center cells stimulate action potentials in the PRESENCE e of light , while OFF-center cells stimulate action potentials in the absence of light

Question 42

What happens when you reject the null hypothesis ? When does this occur?

Answer 42

rejects the null hypothesis: states that there is no meaningful difference between the experimental conditions (ex:, multitasking vs. non-multitasking)

reject null hypothesis when researchers report findings significant at the p < 0.05 and p < 0.01 levels.

Question 43

What is between the subjects design ?

Answer 43

A between-subjects design: the participants are assigned to groups that experience DIFFERENT conditions
ex, one group receives a drug and the other a placebo.

Question 44

What is the Hawthorne Effect ?

Answer 44

The Hawthorne effect: occurs when subjects alter their behavior simply because they know they are being observed.

Question 45

What is top-down processing?

Answer 45

top-down organization : starts with a larger overall concept and works down to the details.

Question 46

Where does language ability stem from ?

Answer 46

Language ability is localized to LEFT hemisphere of brain

Question 47

Where does Wernicke’s area reside ?

Answer 47

Wernicke’s area, located in the temporal lobe
(responsible or comprehension )