Unit quiz: Inside the body and outside the moment: regulation, timing, and a contested metaphor

Check understanding, separately from reading

5 questions · 80% to pass · no timer. This quiz checks the lessons in this unit. These authored questions assess recognition and application of the taught distinctions, not professional qualification. You may review the lessons and retry. Repeat attempts reuse the question bank; a remembered answer is not proof of transfer to a new situation.

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Question 1

A robotic arm is built with a purely feedback controller whose sensory loop takes about 33 milliseconds and whose targets move unpredictably, and it achieves smooth slow movements but fails at fast reaches. Which change follows from the lesson's control-theory reasoning?Add a feedforward element that issues the initial command from a prediction of the movement's consequences, so corrections are applied to a predicted rather than a fully realised state.Reduce the loop time to zero, since any remaining delay is the sole cause of the failure.

Question 2

A study reports that participants who count more heartbeats accurately also score higher on a self-report measure of body awareness, and concludes that interoception drives body awareness. Which feature of the method most limits that conclusion?The sample was too small, because correlations based on small samples are always uninterpretable regardless of the measure used.The task can be completed using a belief about one's heart rate rather than an internal signal, so the association may reflect self-knowledge or reporting style rather than sensitivity.

Question 3

A food-policy model assumes that a fixed daily energy surplus of 500 kilocalories produces steady weight gain for several years, and is surprised that observed weight plateaus. Using the regulation frameworks in the lesson, diagnose the model's error.It treats a settled system as an open one: as mass changes, the energy cost of maintenance and movement and the resulting intake both change, so the surplus is not constant and a resting value that shifts with conditions is expected.The surplus has been miscalculated and should be about 3500 kilocalories per day, since that is the constant that converts energy to mass.

Question 4

A researcher proposes to study jet lag by confining participants to a room with a 25-hour day, reasoning that this will simply delay sleep by an hour each night. Using the free-running period and entrainment-range concepts, assess the proposal.The proposal cannot work at all, because circadian rhythms are fixed internal periods that cannot be adjusted in any environment.The imposed day is longer than the internal period of about 24.2 hours, so the daily correction is within the range a normally entrainable clock can absorb, but as the imposed period grows further the correction can exceed the range and the rhythm will free-run rather than continue to entrain.

Question 5

A press release states that a new study reveals how the brain computes the value of a reward, and the study itself reports that a set of neurons responds more strongly to unexpected than to expected rewards. Which sentence best characterises what the evidence supports?The evidence supports an information-processing description at the level of a response that tracks a discrepancy between expectation and outcome, and the word computes adds a claim about operations and implementation that a response difference has not established.The evidence supports the computational claim completely, because a response that tracks a discrepancy is by definition the implementation of a computation.

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