Deck 4: The Sensing and Perceiving Mind: From Kant through the Gestalt Psychologists

Question 1

According to Kant,the ______________world consists of "things-in themselves" which exist independently of human experience and reason.

A) material
B) phenomenal
C) noumenal
D) objective

Answer 1

C

Question 2

A notion which David Hume's skeptical philosophy challenged,and which Immanuel Kant tried to rescue in his philosophical reformulation,was:

A) specific nerve energies.
B) analytic geometry.
C) the soul.
D) causality.

Answer 2

D

Question 3

To Helmholtz,the law of Conservation of Energy implied that:

A) all forms of energy are interchangeable varieties from a single reservoir, which cannot be increased or decreased.
B) vitalist theory was contrary to other natural laws.
C) there could be no perpetual motion machine.
D) all of the above

Answer 3

D

Question 4

Relative to Kant in his theory of visual perception,Helmholtz was more:

A) Nativist.
B) Rationalist.
C) Idealist.
D) Empiricist.

Question 5

Helmholtz's attempt to measure the speed of the nervous impulse in human subjects:

A) gave consistent results almost identical with those for the frog's nerve.
B) helped introduce the "reaction time" method into psychology.
C) indicated that the speed was too fast to be measurable in humans.
D) both a and b above

Question 6

Helmholtz's experiment with the frog's nerve indicated that the speed of the nervous impulse was:

A) infinite.
B) about the same as that of an electrical current in a wire.
C) slow enough to suggest reaction times of two seconds or more in very large animals.
D) finite, but too fast to be measured with existing equipment.

Question 7

Which of the following is not a name applied to Helmholtz's theory of color vision?

A) the component theory
B) the opponent theory
C) the trichromatic theory
D) the Young-Helmholtz theory

Question 8

According to Helmholtz's analysis of the eye,the sharpness of focus within the visual field is:

A) impressively acute only in a very small region near the center.
B) about the same quality as that produced by a good camera lens.
C) impressive evidence of the optical perfection of the eye.
D) uniform throughout the entire field.

Question 9

Fechner's law is concerned with:

A) the observed mathematical relationship between physical and subjective stimulus intensities.
B) the largest intensity of a stimulus that can be perceived.
C) the amount of energy that can be transformed from one state to another.
D) the minimum amount of difference between two weights necessary to tell them apart.

Question 10

Eleanor Gibson's studies of the responses of visually inexperienced animals and human infants to the "visual cliff" seem to:

A) support Helmholtz's nativist perceptual theory.
B) refute Helmholtz's trichromatic theory.
C) disconfirm aspects of Helmholtz's empiricist perceptual theory.
D) support Helmholtz's theory of unconscious inference.

Question 11

Helmholtz divided his discussions of vision and audition into sections devoted to which three of the following general categories?

A) chemical, physiological, and perceptual
B) physical, physiological, and psychological
C) vitalistic, mechanistic, and subjective
D) phenomenal, noumenal, and material

Question 12

Pairs of colored lights which produce a sensation of white light when mixed together are called:

A) contrasting colors.
B) primary colors.
C) complementary colors.
D) harmonizing colors.

Question 13

According to Helmholtz's distinction,the discontinuous patches of colored light you experience when viewing a landscape are your ____________________,while the "trees," "grass," and "sky," etc.,you are aware of are_________________.

A) unconscious inferences; conscious inferences
B) perceptions; sensations
C) sensations; perceptions
D) primary colors; perceptions

Question 14

How did Helmholtz define perception?

A) the physiological process that conveys signals to the brain which results in conscious awareness
B) the process through which the senses detect visual, auditory, and other sensory stimuli and transmit them to the brain
C) the psychological process by which sensory information is actively organized and interpreted by the brain..
D) the minimum amount of difference between two senses that is necessary to tell them apart

Question 15

In Helmholtz's theory,an important hypothetical process underlying such perceptual phenomena as depth perception was called:

A) unconscious inference.
B) unconscious rationalization.
C) inductive reasoning.
D) practical intuition.

Question 16

A major consequence of the adoption of mechanistic doctrine by Helmholtz and his fellow students was that:

A) they were encouraged to try to solve problems that previously seemed unsolvable, such as analyzing and measuring the nervous impulse.
B) they finally performed the ultimate experiment, disproving vitalism completely.
C) they lost support from their superiors, such as Müller, and were cast into an oppositional role.
D) all of the above

Question 17

The idea that all living things are imbued with an ultimately unanalyzable "life force" is the major tenet of what doctrine?

A) Mechanism
B) Vitalism
C) Conservation of Energy
D) Transcendental Idealism

Question 18

The orange light of the spectrum,and the orange produced by mixing red and yellow spectral light:

A) can be distinguished from one another by brightness cues.
B) are made up of identical kinds of light waves.
C) can be distinguished because spectral orange is less muddy looking.
D) are indistinguishable from each other to the human color senses.

Question 19

When subjects in Helmholtz's experiment learned to adjust their responses to the distorted images produced by prismatic glasses,they illustrated:

A) visual accommodation.
B) trial and error learning.
C) perceptual adaptation.
D) perceptual nativism.

Question 20

When you press gently on the side of your eyeball and experience the visual sensation of light,you illustrate:

A) the law of specific nerve energies.
B) Weber's Law.
C) the Young-Helmholtz Law.
D) the law of sensory pressure.

Question 21

As you read this page,the words you are aware of constitute the ___________________,and the page on which they are printed is the ______________________.

A) figure; ground
B) ground; figure
C) concept; percept
D) percept; concept

Question 22

Kohler's principle that "psychological facts and the underlying events in the brain resemble each other in all their structural characteristics" is known as the:

A) Hypothesis of Psychophysical Isomorphism.
B) Law of Gestalt Identity.
C) Law of Specific Nerve Energies.
D) Hypothesis of Underlying Similarities.

Question 23

The smallest intensity of a stimulus that can be reliably detected,used by Fechner as the "zero point" in his scale of subjective intensities,is called the:

A) logarithm.
B) absolute threshold.
C) phi phenomenon.
D) constant k.

Question 24

The phi phenomenon:

A) was discovered by Kant.
B) illustrates apparent movement.
C) was studied early by Fechner.
D) both b and c above

Question 25

Ernst Weber is important for introducing which of these concepts?

A) the just noticeable difference
B) the absolute threshold
C) apparent movement
D) negative afterimages

Question 26

For stimuli such as electric shocks,where the jnd's become smaller with higher intensities,the psychophysical relationship is best expressed by:

A) Weber's law.
B) Fechner's law.
C) Steven's (power) law.
D) either b or c, which are mathematically equivalent.

Question 27

Why was Fechner important in the development of a scientific,experimental psychology?

A) He was among the first to demonstrate how reaction time experiments could be of significance to psychology.
B) He was among the first to demonstrate how memory could be studied quantitatively.
C) He was among the first to demonstrate how the Gestalt theories of figure and ground could be quantified.
D) He was among the first to demonstrate how a psychological phenomenon could be measured and quantified, and shown to relate lawfully with other variables.

Question 28

The "squareness" of a square and the musical melody are both examples of:

A) elements of consciousness.
B) elementary sensations.
C) Gestalt qualities.
D) figure-ground reversals.

Question 29

An important concept from physics with which Kohler tried to integrate Gestalt psychology was:

A) Newtonian attraction and repulsion.
B) the force field.
C) the phi phenomenon.
D) he uncertainty principle

Question 30

According to the Gestalt psychologists,our perceptual processes tend to:

A) organize the visual field into wholes.
B) organize complicated aggregates of stimuli into similar groups.
C) divide the perceptual field into figure and ground.
D) all of the above