Picture of the Week: #23

Exams are finally over, which is why I can provide you, dear reader, with this photo. Not hugely interesting to you perhaps, but these three carnations are very significant to me. If you're unfamiliar with Oxford's very odd exam traditions, the first thing that you should know is that they involve wearing formal academic dress, also known as sub fusc. This does have the unfortunate side effect of making all the students look rather like very well-dressed penguins, but it at least means that you're so busy smiling for the tourists as you head for your exam that you aren't worrying about the upcoming terrifying ordeal.

The more immediately relevant tradition involves wearing the carnations you see here - white at first, pink for exams up until and including the penultimate, and a red one to finish. This means that you there is a handy colour code so that you know which random strangers to congratulate. (It does happen...) These rather tired-looking flowers are, then, my reminder that I have now completed my degree, and that I'm shortly going to be the recipient of a rather nice BA certificate, which is extremely bizarre.

If you're interested in what final-year psychology papers look like, I've listed the questions from my three after the cut. Those that I answered are asterisked. Feel free to point this list out to anyone who is under the impression that psychology is not a science...

Multisensory Perception: From the Cockpit to the Dinner Table

1. *What have studies of the psychological refractory period (PRP) revealed about the nature of the central bottleneck underlying limitations in dual-task performance?
2. To what extent have studies of 'the conflict situation' helped us to understand how the information from different sensory modalities is integrated?
3. What contributions to the understanding of multisensory perception/integration have emerged from recent studies of multisensory aspects of flavour perception?
4. *What evidence is there to support the notion that supra-additive and sub-additive interactions modulate multisensory perception?
5. Which aspects of synaesthesia are satisfactorily accounted for by cognitive neuroscience models? Which are not?
6. *Why is it so difficult to have a conversation on a mobile phone while driving? Evaluate the evidence that listening to the radio or conversing with a passenger has a similar deleterious effect on driving performance.

Conscious Awareness: Neuropsychology and Psychophysics

1. What are Block's 'two neural correlates of awareness'? How do they relate to neuropsychological, psychophysical and physiological evidence?
2. Discuss the difficulties in devising a measure of awareness that captures its subjective nature.
3. How is vision degraded in blindsight? What are the implications for drawing inferences about the neural basis of visual awareness?
4. *How would you account for the lack of awareness in visual neglect?
5. *Discuss the role of sensory memory in visual detection and discrimination. Describe and evaluate an alternative account.
6. *Evaluate current neural models of perceptual decisions. To what extent do they shed light on possible mechanisms underlying perceptual awareness?

Hearing

1. *What are 'critical bands' in audition? How are they measured?
2. The most detectable sound centred on a given frequency has a narrow bandwidth but the loudest has a broad bandwidth. Why?
3. *In the content [shurely "context"? Ed.] of hearing research, what is the 'residue' and how is it measured?
4. How are the absolute threshold of hearing, frequency resolution, and amplitude resolution related to the frequency and amplitude of the pure tones?
5. What has been the role of Fourier analysis in the study of hearing?
6. *How do we localize sources of pure tones? What specifically is the role of head movements in sound localization?