Study Guide I (2005)

The study questions below constitute a subset of the information which is required for the first exam. Three or four of these questions will appear as "short answer" questions on the exam (you can use up to one full page for each answer). Many of the questions have multiple parts -- make sure you read and answer all parts of each question. Be advised that advanced preparation will facilitate your performance on the exam. Feel free to work with others on your answers (including using the class message board).
  1. A yellow butterfly swoops past the left side of your head and lands on a green plant in front of you. Describe in detail how this information is processed by the visual system.

  2. Discuss the importance of Gestalt organizational principles in perception. Why are these ideas important?

  3. The perception of depth is important for navigation in the world. Describe the sources of information which aid in depth perception.

  4. What are constancies and illusions. Why are they important and what do they tell us about perception?

  5. Briefly describe the two theories of color vision. How do they account for the perception of color?

  6. Briefly describe Selfridge's pandemonium model of pattern recognition. How does the model account for the difference in visual search performance Neisser observed when subjects search for a curved target a) in a field of curved distractors or b) in a field of angular distractors?

  7. Explain the difference between data-driven (or bottom-up) processing and conceptually driven (or top-down) processing. Describe the role each plays in processing a) novel information and b) familiar information.

  8. Contrast the symptoms of apperceptive agnosia and associative agnosia. What seems to be the major problem in each, and how might you test whether a person has one or the other?

  9. Describe the difference between selective and divided attention. Provide a description of how these two forms of attention are studied and provide a real-world example of each.

  10. An experimenter performs a dual-task attention experiment in which the processing priority is varied between the two tasks. The results show a linear tradeoff between performance on task A and performance on task B. What would this look like if we plotted performance using a Performance Operator Characteristic (POC) curve and what would this tell us about attention? Illustrate what would happen as subjects become more skilled in concurrently performing Task A and Task B.


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