PSYA01 PRACTICE FINAL

1. Which approach to understanding human nature was developed in direct response to the
rise of psychoanalysis?

a) Positive Psychology
b) Social Psychology
c) Humanistic Psychology
d) Cognitive Psychology

2. Imagine you live in one of those new condo developments in downtown Toronto. To your
dismay, another condo is going up across the street and construction starts at 7:00 AM.
There's a lot of drilling and digging going on. For the first few days you find the
construction loud and unbearable. One week later, however, you realize that it isn't so bad
at all and that you are not being awakened at 7:00 AM anymore. What is this process an
example of?

a) Sensory Adaptation
b) Sensory Acuity
c) Sensory Manipulation
d) Sensory Deprivation

3. A main function of mimicry is to help us to figure out _________.

a) What makes people motivated

b) What others see
c) What others are feeling
d) What others are thinking

4. You encounter a patient who appears to have the following symptoms: uncontrollable
appetite and thirst, dysregulated body temperature, and is overly promiscuous, to the point
that you quickly head in the opposite direction to avoid any unwanted contact. You think
back to PSYA01 and remember that a lesion in one area of the brain could cause these
symptoms. Which area of the brain is a lesion most likely?

a) Hypothalamus
b) Amygdala
c) Cerebral Cortex
d) Thalamus
5. The textbook describes three challenges that make people difficult to study. Which of the
challenge is caused by the fact that people act differently when they are being observed?

a) Validity
b) Complexity
c) Variability
d) Reactivity

6. Which hypothesis suggests that emotional expressions can cause the emotional
experiences they signify?

a) Facial Feedback
b) Two Factor Theory
c) Universality
d) Imitation

7. Which part of the brain is important in controlling behaviour, disentangling the right
from the wrong and the emotional context of the problem?

a) Amygdala
b) Motor Cortex
c) Prefrontal Cortex
d) Frontal Lobes

8. Opiates, or narcotics, are a class of drugs that mimic the body’s natural ___________,
neurotransmitters that are associated with the relief of pain.

a) Dopaminergic Systems
b) Serotonergic Synapses
c) Amphetamines
d) Endorphins

9. There are two types of photoreceptors cells in the retina. What are they? What are their
function? Which cells are more sensitive to stimulation?

a) Rods detect contrast in low-light conditions; cones detect colour and fine detail; rods are more
sensitive
b) Rods detect contrast in low-light conditions and colour; cones detect fine detail; cones are
more sensitive
c) Rods detect fine detail; cones detect colour and contrast in low-light conditions; cones are
more sensitive
d) Rods detect colour and fine detail; cones detect contrast in low-light conditions; rods are more
sensitive
10. ______ refers to the tendency for people to cling to their assumptions; on the other side,
_______ refers to the belief that accurate knowledge can be acquired through observation.

a) Fundamentalism; Structuralism
b) Structuralism; Fundamentalism
c) Dogmatism; Empiricism
d) Empiricism; Dogmatism

11. Even though monozygotic twins share 100% of their genes, it is not uncommon for the
two twins to have different levels of intelligence, incidence of disease and mental illness, and
other life outcomes. Why does heritability in monozygotic twins never seem to be perfect?

a) Heritability is fate; it can tell us exactly how much trait we are going to get or pass on
b) Heritability is a population concept and tells us nothing about the individual
c) Heritability is not dependent on the environment, such that it does not influence genetics
d) Heritability is a basic concept and we can always explain the specific genes involved

12. Your friend has a hard time understanding why peripheral vision is less clear than
something directly in front of you, close up. The reason, you explain is because:

a) Rods take over the job of cones in the periphery, leading to the most detail with objects in
front of you
b) Cones are more sparsely distributed when you move away from the fovea
c) There are more cones than rods but they also need more stimulation
d) The peripheral areas of the retina do not contain enough cells to process fine details

13. In lecture, Professor Joordens talked about the effects taking the drug cocaine on the
synapse. What did he say happens?

a) Blocks reuptake of dopamine

b) Blocks vesicular release of dopamine
c) Blocks vesicular release of serotonin
d) Blocks reuptake of serotonin

14. Which part of the brain is involved in the experience of emotions (fear, anxiety) and is
critical for emotional conditioning?

a) Hypothalamus
b) Hippocampus
c) Cerebellum
d) Amygdala
15. Studies of self-consciousness in humans and non-human primates used what object to
get at the behaviours associated with self-consciousness?

a) Mirrors
b) Hallucinatory Narcotics
c) Food Items
d) Journals and Journal Entries

16. A motivation is which one is aware of is termed as _________ whereas motivation in

which one is unaware of termed as _________

a) Intrinsic; Extrinsic
b) Conscious; Unconscious
c) Unconscious; Conscious
d) Extrinsic; Intrinsic

17. Game shows like Jeopardy and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? have contestants
consult their _________ memory when answering different trivia questions.

a) Procedural Memory
b) Episodic Memory
c) Semantic Memory
d) Muscle Memory

18. Subjective feelings, like sorrow, happiness, rage, that are consciously generated within
the individual are what philosophers refer to as __________.

a) Epi-phenomena
b) Product Consciousness
c) Mentalism
d) Qualia

19. Who is considered the father of scientific method?

a) Euclid
b) Ibn al-Haytham
c) Albert Einstein
d) William James
20. Your forgetful TA has made another mistake. This time he is informing you of several
types of cues in which the eyes perceive depth and size. But one of them is wrong. His list
includes: linear perspective, monocular depth, binocular disparity, and familiar size
memory. Which of these is incorrect?

a) Linear Perspective
b) Monocular Depth
c) Familiar Size Memory
d) Binocular Disparity

21. What is one of the problems with the drive reduction hypothesis?

a) Variables such as tuner are easy to measure

b) The hypothesis takes into account of variables that go beyond biological needs
c) The cycle stops once the need/drive is satisfied
d) Some drives such as hunger are hard to scientifically define

22. The individual cells in your nervous system that allow communication from one part of
the brain to the other are called _________.

a) Myelin Sheaths
b) Glial Cells
c) Ganglions
d) Neurons

23. Historians generally credit the official emergence of psychology to _______.

a) Hermann von Helmholtz

b) William James
c) Wilhelm Wundt
d) Edward Titchener

24. Perception of any given stimulus differs depending on the individual assessing that
stimulus. Upon realizing this in the 1860s, Gustav Fechner designed a series of experiments
where he varied the intensity of the brightness of the light and flashed it on and off. He
then asked observers if they saw the flash or not. This type of experiment is exemplary of
what subfield of psychology?

a) Cognitive Psychology
b) Vision Science
c) Optics
d) Psychophysics
25. In a typical experiment of examining __________, observers (usually students) would be
presented with a stimulus (usually a colour or a sound) and then be asked to report their
subjective observations, for example, the brightness of a colour or the loudness of a tone.

a) Consciousness
b) Introspection
c) Meditation
d) Unconsciousness

26. Which of the following description of central tendency is MOST likely to be skewed by
outliers (or data points that are far outside the range of other collected data points)?

a) Median
b) Variance
c) Mode
d) Mead

27. The acquisition of new knowledge, skills, or responses from experience that results in a
permanent change in the state of the learner is known as ______.

a) Learning
b) Implicit Learning
c) Explicit Learning
d) Conditioning

28. The resting state potential is primarily influenced by the flow of which ion across the
neuronal membrane?

a) K+ (potassium ions)
b) Na+ (sodium ions)
c) Cl- (chloride ions)
d) A- (negatively charged anions)

29. The instructions, “try to pose for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear,”
belongs to a study in which researchers were examining ____________.

a) Attention
b) Polar Bears
c) Thought Suppression
d) Memory
30. You try out your friend's experiment and are instructed to study visual displays in
which many of the same black digit are presented with interspersing coloured letters, a red
X and a blue A. After the display, you are asked to report the black digit and to describe the
coloured letters. You mistakenly say that you saw a red A and a blue X. What kind of error
have you just made?

a) Illusory Conjuction
b) Hallucination
c) Colour-Opponent Error
d) Illusion Switch

31. The state of consciousness characterized by suggestibility and the feeling that one's
actions are occurring involuntary is generally known as what?

a) Hypnosis
b) Intoxication
c) Love
d) Mesmerization

32. According to psychologist Joseph LeDoux mapping of the two distinct pathways an
information takes through brain, the fast pathway goes from _____ directly to the amydala
and the slow pathway goes from the thalamus to the _____ then to the amygdala.

a) Cortex, Thalamus
b) Thalamus, Cortex
c) Cortex, Hippocampus
d) Hippocampus, Cortex

33. The system of memory that requires focused attention, mental effort, and repetition of
the items of interest is referred to as _______ memory

a) Short-Term
b) Working
c) Long-Term
d) Executive

34. Through the little Albert experiment, what was one of the goals that Watson and
Rayner's strived to show?

a) Classical conditioning only applies to animals

b) Even emotions can be produced by classical conditioning
c) Complex reactions cannot be achieved through Pavlovian techniques
d) Emotions can only be produced by operant conditioning
35. Professor Joordens described a shark experiment in which two conditions were used:
one which involved passively observing the sharks in a tank with a conducting rod off and
one which involved electrifying the rod and observing the sharks. Which of the following
correctly classifies the two conditions?

a) Both are experimental conditions

b) Both are control conditionings
c) Conducting rod off = control conditions; Conducting rod on = Experimental condition
d) Conduction rod on = control conditions; Conducting rod off = Experimental condition

36. Visual information appears to travel from the occipital lobe in two different
information "streams". One of the streams is the ventral pathway, which leads information
to the temporal lobes, and sends information about an object's shape and identity. What is
the correct name for the second visual stream, where does it send information, and the type
of information that path yields?

a) Dorsal stream; parietal lobe; stability and temperament

b) Anterior stream; parietal lobe; guiding movements
c) Dorsal stream; parietal lobe; guiding movements
d) Posterior stream; occipital lobe; eye tracking

37. It should be apparent from lecture, that the largest part of the primary motor cortex
and the primary sensory cortex are devoted to sensory input and motor control of which
part of the body?

a) Genitals
b) Lips
c) Hands
d) Tongue

38. What are two ways that neurotransmitters are cleared from the synaptic gap?

a) Autoreceptors activation enzymatic destruction

b) Enzymatic destruction; reuptake into the post-synaptic neutron
c) Enzymatic destruction; reuptake into the pre-synaptic neutron
d) Reuptake into the pre-synaptic neuron; auto receptor activation
39. Wundt favoured a view that saw the "mind" as being made up of basic elements.
Therefore, he saw the mind as being able to be broken down into basic elements. What
would this view be called more formally?

a) Materialism
b) Functionalism
c) Elementalism
d) Structuralism

40. The insulating layer of fatty material covering the axon is called the _____________.
This layer is composed of __________, the support cells of the nervous system.

a) Cholesterol; fat
b) Cell body; oligodendrocytes
c) Myelin sheath; glial cells
d) Insulation; myelin

41. In the Chapter 3 vignette, we met two patients: David who saw things that were not
really there and Betty who could not recognize her husband whom she had been married to
for a long time. Eventually, we learn what that David and Betty were experiencing
(respectively)…?

a) Delusions; compulsions
b) Hallucinations; memory loss
c) Obsessions; compulsions
d) Hallucinations; prospagnosia

42. In a study by Stern et al. (1977), it was shown that hypnosis was ________ effective in
reducing induced-pain as compared to acupuncture, morphine, aspirin, and placebo.

a) Less
b) More
c) Equally as
d) Not at all

43. Where are the neurotransmitters stored in the neuron (be specific)?

a) Vesicles
b) Cell body
c) Receptors
d) Terminal Buttons
44. According to the principle of ___________, if a father gives candy to his daughter when
she picks up her toys, the frequency of the daughter picking up the toys will increase over
time.

a) Reward
b) Reinforcement
c) Punishment
d) Classical Conditioning

45. Which of the following groups of people have deficits in implicit learning?

a) People with dyslexia

b) People with schizophrenia
c) People in their old age
d) Amnesic patients

46. Professor Joordens talked a lot about Jane Goodall and her research with chimps and
gorillas. What type of studies did she undertake?

a) Longitudinal study
b) Case study
c) Naturalistic observations
d) Correlational study

47. Which stream dominated psychology from the 1930s to the 1950s?

a) Cognitive psychology
b) Structuralism
c) Fundamentalism
d) Behaviourism

48. Antidepressants (i.e., selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, SSRIs) act by blocking
____________, which renders these drugs as ____________, because they facilitate the
function of the serotonin and increase binding on the post-synaptic membrane.

a) Autoreceptors; agonists
b) Enzymes that breakdown serotonin; agonist
c) Post-synaptic serotonin receptors; antagonist
d) Pre-synaptic reuptake; agonists
49. You decide you are going to participate in a one-hour research study on TAPS. After
consenting to the experiment and completing all aspects of the experiment, the
experimenter should provide a full explanation of the study called ____________.

a) Empathy
b) Embargo
c) Explanation
d) Debriefing

50. Despite the difficulty of an exam you’re writing the next day, you go to bed early after
your evening study session to ensure that you get a full night’s rest. What memory process
are you taking advantage of by not pulling an all-nighter?

a) Memory resting
b) Memory sleeplessness
c) Memory consolidation
d) Memory buffer

51. A patient suffers a traumatic head injury and cannot remember his family members
and past life events. They are experiencing what memory impairment?

a) Retrograde amnesia
b) Anterograde amnesia
c) Social amnesia
d) Social ties blindness

52. The complex interconnections between thoughts and physical behaviours, which
Descartes first thought was associated with the pineal gland in the brain is called the
__________ problem.

a) Psych/phy
b) Philosopher’s
c) Mind/body
d) Pineal/brain
53. You decide to run an absolute threshold experiment for your thesis. You randomly
present sounds at different decibels and have people respond "yes" or "no" to whether
they've heard a sound. You arrange the proportion of responses into "yes-hit", "yes-false
alarm", "no-correct rejection", and "no-miss". What are you relying on when quantifying
your responses in this manner?

a) Weber’s law
b) Signal detection theory
c) Absolute threshold hypothesis
d) Just noticeable difference

54. According to James-Lange theory of emotion, emotional experience is the _______ of

our physiological reactions to objects and events in the world.

a) Consequence
b) Motivation
c) Cause
d) Arousal

55. Who was the first historical figure to argue for the notion of dualism between the
physical body and the intangible mind in human beings?

a) Paul Broca
b) Plato
c) Aristotle
d) Rene Descartes

56. Let's say you were brought into a room and in each of your hands, an experimenter
places two weights that you cannot look at. The experimenter asks if you detect a difference
and you say no. He replaces one of the weights with a different weight and you still do not
detect a difference in the weights between hands. Finally, the experimenter places a
different weight in one of your hands and you detect a difference. One weight is definitely
heavier now. The experiment you just completed involves detecting the ______________.

a) Just noticeable difference

b) Weber’s law of differences
c) Minimum difference
d) Absolute threshold
57. An evaluation of the emotion-relevant aspects of a stimulus is called a(n) _________.

a) Drives
b) Instinct
c) Appraisal
d) Reappraisal

58. Our ability to encode a grid of letters that rapidly flash on a screen before our eyes only
to have that memory trace rapidly disappear is referred to as:

a) Disappearance Memory
b) Iconic Memory
c) Echoic Memory
d) Flashbulb Memory

59. Sleep, food, shelter, warmth are examples of ______ reinforcers and compliments,
awards,verbal support, money are examples of ______ reinforcers

a) Secondary; Primary
b) Positive; Negative
c) Negative; Positive
d) Primary; Secondary

60. The idea that people seek pleasurable experiences and avoid negative painful
experiences is the _______

a) Hedonic principle
b) Two factor principle
c) Motivation principle
d) Universality hypothesis

61. What does cognitive neuroscience attempt to explore the relationship of?

a) Cognitive deficits and brain diseases

b) Cognitive processes and brain activity
c) Memory and brain lesions
d) Neurotransmitters and brain areas
62. Although many people report not being able to dream on a regular basis, ___% of
people when wakened during REM sleep are able to report dreams experiences.

a) 80
b) 0
c) 50
d) 30

63. As a busy student and part-time employee, fearful of forgetting important dates, you
schedule all your appointments, classes, tests, and shifts on your Gmail, which is synced to
your Iphone and desktop computer at home. These aids, which prevent your all too often
absentmindedness may be seen as assisting your ___________ memory system.

a) Prospective
b) Encoding
c) Retrieval
d) Retrospective

64. What is one of the reasons why we are poor lie detectors?

a) We are good at judging sincere and insincere emotions

b) We son’t seem to know which pieces of information to attend to and which to ignore
c) We are adept with display rules
d) We can distinguish a person’s motivations

65. Choosing participants in a way that ensures that every member of the population we
are interested in has an equal chance of being selected in the sample is called ___________.

a) Soliciting
b) Non-random sampling
c) Stratified sampling
d) Random sampling

66. Activity in the brain is wave-like and can be recorded by a specialized tool. This tool
would usually be used to measure small areas of the brain, not the whole brain. What is it?

a) Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)

b) Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
c) Electroencephalograph (EEG)
d) Positive emission topography (PET)
67. A patient presented in Chapter 4 with visual-form agnosia, in which her ability to
recognize objects by sight was dramatically impaired. However, she was fully capable of
guiding her actions by sight towards objects (e.g. manipulating a key to open a lock). What
was the reasoning behind this odd case?

a) The patient suffered damage to the ventral stream pathway

b) The patient suffered damage to brain areas related to her short-term memory
c) The patient suffered irreversible damage to the dorsal stream pathway
d) The patient suffered damage to the thalamus and was unable to relay visual information to
the occipital lobe

68. Which hypothesis is based on the principle that we are born with certain needs/drive
(warmth, food, water, shelter), which when reduces motivates us to satisfy it and when
satisfied we return to a state of homeostasis?

a) Two factor
b) Approach motivation
c) Drive reduction
d) Hedonic principle

69. What do we use to denote the strength of a correlation?

a) Student’s t
b) Mann-Whitney’s U
c) Fisher’s Z
d) Pearson’s r

70. Imagine you are doing an experiment on emotion sensitivity, the idea that emotional
information is perceived more saliently than other information. Emotion sensitivity can be
measured in a variety of ways but in your experiment you decide on defining it as the
"ability to recognize emotional expressions at lower intensities". In doing so, what kind of
definition did you just create?

a) Tangible definition
b) Indirect definition
c) Experimentally derived definition
d) Operational definition
71. In classical conditioning, when an conditioned stimulus (ex. sound of a tuning fork) is
paired with unconditioned stimulus (ex. food) will produce ____________.

a) No response
b) An unconditioned response
c) A neutral response
d) A conditioned response

72. fMRI brain scan studies looking at the role of emotion in dreaming and during sleep
show that the ________ brain area is activated regularly:

a) The ventral premotor cortex

b) The temporal gyro
c) The visual association
d) The amygdala

73. The flaw of memory which entails the forgetting that occurs with the mere passage of
time is referred to as ______________.

a) Erosion
b) Passage forgetfulness
c) Political forgetfulness
d) Transience

74. Fixed ratio has a _______ resistance to extinction whereas variable ratio has ______
resistance to extinction

a) Higher; lower
b) Higher; lower
c) Lower; lower
d) Lower; higher

75. Unusual perceptual experiences, where the perception of one sense can be evoked by
another sense, is a phenomenon called ____________.

a) Sensory overload
b) Sense combined
c) Synesthesia
d) Hallucinations
76. Famous memory patient, “HM,” who had his hippocampus and surrounding structures
of the medial temporal lobe surgically removed suffered from what neurological
impairment?

a) Split brain diffusion

b) Retrograde amnesia
c) Broca’s aphasia
d) Anterograde amnesia

77. A student is taught how to perform a certain math skill but does not demonstrate the
knowledge until homework is assigned. This is an example of which type of learning?

a) Reinforcement
b) Discrimination
c) Latent learning
d) Shaping

78. Observational learning seen in Albert Bandura's studies has implications for _____
learning and cultural transmission of __________.

a) Social; behaviour, norms, and values

b) Conscious; norms
c) Explicit; values
d) Implicit; behaviour

79. With regards to auditory stimuli, the primary auditory cortex (A1) can detect changes
in ___________ while Wernicke's area is primarily involved in the ___________.

a) Frequency; comprehension of language

b) Resonance; appreciation of music
c) Amplitude; comprehension of voice
d) Complexity; comprehension of sounds