Baars and Gage: Cognition, Brain, and Consciousness

Test Bank

Chapter 8: Attention and Consciousness

1.	You are woken up at 6:00 am by your roommate’s alarm clock.  As you start to reach for the snooze button, you remember your roommate asking you not to press any buttons but to instead ignore it.  You decide to go along your roommate’s request, smiling to yourself as you recognize this example of
a.	involuntary attention
b.	*executive attention
c.	automatic attention
d.	leading attention

2.	You are at the grocery store picking up several items for your mother, but can’t find the right spaghetti sauce.  After looking unsuccessfully, you call her on your cell phone.  She reminds you that it has a bright blue label with a yellow stripe on it, and after a moment more of searching you find it.  You have completed a 
a.	*top-down process
b.	bottom-up process
c.	bi-directional process
d.	round-about process

3.	What is the relationship between attention and consciousness?
a.	Consciousness is not a useful scientific term. 
b.	*Attentional control often determines what will or will not become conscious.
c.	Attention and consciousness are synonyms and can be used interchangeably
d.	There is only a minimal and indirect connection between attention and consciousness that is not well understood.

4.	“Feature binding” can be described as
a.	*combining multiple stimulus features in the world into a single conscious object 
b.	the appearance of stimuli that can catch your eye 
c.	committing a particular set of stimulus features to memory
d.	the tendency to cluster similar objects together according to their features

5.	Your friend wants a suggestion for an experiment measuring selective attention.  You recommend
a.	having participants find the blue shape amid different red shapes and timing how long it takes to name the shape
b.	*having participants listen to a recording that plays his voice out of one side of a headphone set  and your voice out of the other, and to repeat what they hear 
c.	having participants view a series of numbers presented briefly on the screen, and rehearse them mentally in order to write them down
d.	having participants try and recall their second birthday and describe the emotions they felt

6.	In “conjunction search” 			 required to locate the target stimulus
a.	*more voluntary effort is
b.	less voluntary effort is
c.	automatic effort is
d.	voluntary effort is not

7.	A chimp exhibits greater firing in visual cortex IT area when looking at a banana after a banana-related cue is presented, compared to the firing that occurs while looking at an apple after an apple-related cue is presented.   Based on this finding, it is likely that
a.	*the banana is the preferred stimulus
b.	the apple is the preferred stimulus
c.	the cue dictates the preferred stimulus
d.	there is not a clear preferred stimulus

8.	Selective attention to a visual stimulus is believed to be guided by 
a.	the frontal and temporal lobes
b.	the occipital and parietal lobes
c.	the temporal and occipital lobes
d.	*the parietal and frontal lobes

9.	Feature binding of seen objects appears to take place in 
a.	*the visual cortex
b.	the somatosensory region
c.	the motor cortex
d.	the prefrontal cortex

10.	When people are asked to track the movement of a basketball being tossed between students on one team but not another they often cannot see a person in a gorilla suit walked through the scene, and even waving at the audience.  This is a dramatic example of
a.	inattentional sight
b.	attentional sight
c.	*inattentional blindness
d.	attentional blindness

11.	What happens when a stimulus appears at an unexpected location in a flanker task? 
a.	subjects must continue to attend to the cued side and not to the stimulus
b.	executive attention is involved
c.	areas that maintain attention on the cued side are different from those that guide visual attention to expected stimulus 
d.	*all of the above are true

12.	The degree of synchronous activity between different brain areas may signal
a.	cooperative interactions between neuronal populations
b.	competitive interactions between neuronal populations
c.	*cooperative and competitive interactions between neuronal populations
d.	excitatory and inhibitory interactions between neuronal populations

13.	If a visual stimulus activates cortical regions beyond the visual cortex alone, it is probably  
a.	attentionally blind 
b.	*conscious 
c.	unattended
d.	unconscious 

14.	The Stroop Color Naming Task requires 
a.	attentional blindness
b.	visual masking 
c.	*executive attention
d.	attentional blink

15.	Voluntary visual attention is thought to involve the 			 which results in increased processing efficiency in 			.
a.	prefrontal cortex, subcortical regions
b.	prefrontal cortex, thalamic regions
c.	prefrontal cortex, sensorimotor cortex
d.	*prefrontal cortex, the visual cortex

16.	Posner and colleagues proposed three separable aspects of “attention:”  
a.	detecting, discriminating, and deciding
b.	orienting, discriminating, and controlling 
c.	*alerting, orienting, and controlling
d.	bottom-up, top-down, and integrative 

17.	A common metaphor for attention is:
a.	attentional blink
b.	*spotlight
c.	pop-out
d.	top-down

18.	Visual consciousness has been studied experimentally by using phenomena like  
a.	“binocular rivalry” in the macaque monkey, to study consciously and unconsciously activated brain cells 
b.	“visual backward masking,” to see how a conscious stimulus is processed in the brain  compared to a masked unconscious stimulus 
c.	“inattentional blindness” in humans, using behavioral reports to find out whether subjects are conscious of a gorilla walking through a basketball game
d.	*all of the above

19.	Voluntary attention is needed to stay focused on a task in the presence of distractors. The sense of staying focused is called
a.	*mental effort
b.	pop-out
c.	alerting, controlling, and focusing
d.	implicit thinking  

20.	Visual attention in the human brain may have evolved from 
a.	subcortical feature binding 
b.	*eye movement control 
c.	area MT motion detection  
d.	inferior parietal oculomotor