Chapter 3 Quiz: Perception and Consciousness

Section A: Comprehension

1. The distinction between sensation and perception is:

a) Sensation is conscious; perception is unconscious b) Sensation is the raw detection of physical stimuli; perception is the interpretation and organization of that sensory data c) Sensation involves all senses; perception involves only vision d) Sensation is biological; perception is entirely learned

2. "Bottom-up processing" refers to:

a) Processing that starts with prior expectations and uses them to guide interpretation b) Processing that starts with raw sensory data and builds toward higher-level representation c) Unconscious processing that occurs below the level of awareness d) Processing that begins with emotional evaluation before cognition

3. Inattentional blindness demonstrates:

a) That we see everything in our visual field simultaneously b) That familiar objects become invisible over time c) That we can fail to perceive a fully visible, salient stimulus when our attention is directed elsewhere d) That unconscious perception is always more accurate than conscious perception

4. The halo effect refers to:

a) A visual illusion caused by bright light surrounding an object b) The tendency for a positive or negative overall impression to color perceptions of specific, unrelated traits c) The perception that familiar people appear to glow with warmth d) A type of religious experience associated with perceptual distortion

5. What did Chalmers call the "hard problem" of consciousness?

a) The difficulty of explaining how the brain processes sensory information b) The challenge of predicting which stimuli will reach conscious awareness c) The question of why physical neural processing is accompanied by subjective experience at all d) The difficulty of measuring consciousness objectively in laboratory settings

6. Perceptual readiness (Bruner) refers to:

a) The speed at which the visual system processes incoming stimuli b) The degree to which a concept or category is primed for use in perception, influencing what we readily notice c) The physiological preparedness of sense organs for environmental input d) A technique for training attention to become more efficient

7. The McGurk effect demonstrates:

a) That visual information always overrides auditory information in perception b) That the brain combines information from multiple sensory channels, creating a perception not identical to either input c) That subliminal auditory stimuli can reliably influence behavior d) That language processing and visual processing are entirely independent systems

Section B: Application

8. In the opening scene, Amara sees the film's mother as frightened and inarticulate; Kemi sees her as manipulative. Using the chapter's framework, explain how two people watching the same frame can perceive genuinely different things. What factors might have determined each interpretation?

[Open response]

9. You are in a meeting when your manager makes a comment that sounds critical to you. A colleague who was also present later tells you they thought the manager was just making a neutral observation. Using the chapter's perceptual concepts, analyze how this discrepancy could have occurred without either of you being wrong.

[Open response]

10. Describe a real situation in your own life where top-down processing (expectation) led you to perceive something inaccurately. How did you discover the inaccuracy? What conditions would have been necessary to perceive it more accurately in the first place?

[Personal reflection — no sample answer]

Section C: Critical Thinking

11. The chapter states: "Two people in the same room do not inhabit exactly the same reality." Someone challenges you: "This is relativism — it implies there is no objective truth about what happened." How would you respond? What is the distinction between perceptual constructivism and relativism?

[Open response]

12. The chapter discusses the halo effect, thin-slice judgments, and attribution errors as perceptual biases in social perception. Are these biases uniformly harmful, or do they serve adaptive purposes? Under what conditions are they most likely to mislead us?

[Open response]

13. The "hard problem" of consciousness has not been solved. Some philosophers and scientists argue it is not a real problem — just a conceptual confusion. Others argue it points to fundamental limits on what a physical science of mind can explain. What is your intuition about the hard problem, and why? What would it mean — for psychology, for ethics, for how we treat each other — if consciousness cannot be explained by neuroscience?

[Open response — no single correct answer]

Section D: Integration

14. Connect the concept of perceptual construction in this chapter to the concept of introspection's limits in Chapter 1. How do these two ideas reinforce each other? What is the combined implication for how much we can trust our experience of ourselves and the world?

[Open response]

Answer Key Overview

Full answers for Sections A and B samples are in appendices/answers-to-selected.md.

Section A answers: 1-b, 2-b, 3-c, 4-b, 5-c, 6-b, 7-b