Cognitive Psychology Exam 4

Which of the following is consistent with research on sex differences in IQ?

men tend to have higher visiospatial ability than femals

Raven's progressive matrices is an example of what kind of task?

non-verbal reasoning

Research on the neural correlates of decision making suggest which of the following brain areas plays a major role

nucleus accumbens

A contestant on deal or no deal has a bank offer of $120,000. Their bank offer before that was $300,000, so they feel like they've just "lost" money. According to subjective utility, they are in a state of losses. What are they now more likely to do?

open another case in hopes of getting a better offer

Animals with a large prefrontal cortex seem to have an advantage when it comes to problem solving. This advantage is strongly associated with the ability to

organize the problem space into subgoals

Aging is associated with a degradation of the quality of white matter tracts in the brain. The physiological change is associated with a reduction in neural efficiency. Which of the following aspects of cognition suffer most from this change?

overall processing speed

Which of the following is a common cause of cognitive decline late in life?

oxidative stress on brain tissue

According to Fuzzy-Trace theory, why is the Wason card selection task performed better when it is modified to stimulate a police officer attempting to determine if someone is drinking alcohol under the legal age?

people perform better because the original version requires maintaining and reasoning with more arbitrary verbatim information

Analogical transfer of operators is often impeded because

people tend to focus on the surface features of a problem

Backup avoidance occurs because

people want to reduce the difference between current state and goal state

Bayes Theorem is used to calculate ____________, based on ______ and _________

posterior probability base rate conditional probabilities

Gestalt psychologists characterized some problems as insight problems. Solving such a problem seems to be dependent on

restructuring the problem in one's mind

An animal's ability to overcome backup avoidance, perform well on the Stroop Task and overcome backup avoidance all

seem to require the ability to create and manage a complex goal structure

The availability heuristic suggests that some probability judgements are strongly affected by what major theory related to the way concepts prime the activity occurring in the brain?

spreading activation theory

All of the following describe abilities associated with general fluid intelligence g(F) except:

subject specific knowledge

What is the "Flynn Effect"?

the consistent trend of increasing IQ observed over the last century in industrialized society

Means-End analysis (Newell and Simon, 1972) suggests solving a complex problem efficiently is enabled by

the creation of subgoals

Modality specific cognitive styles such as verbal or spatial are assessed by...

the ease at which one transforms meaning to and from that type of stimulus

Incubation effect occurs because

forgetting the problem structure or operator one was originally using often breaks fixation

Past the age of 30, most measures indicate that fluid intelligence __________ over time while crystalized intelligence ____________ until a person dies

increasingly declines remains relatively stable

Generating a theory is performing _________ while testing a hypothesis that follows from the theory using an experiment is performing __________

inductive reasoning deductive reasoning

True or False: Joe is at the horse track trying to decide whether or not to place a $10 bet on a long shot horse at 20 to 1 odds. Joe is more likely to place the bet if he hasn't yet gained any money than if he has already lost $100.

False

Which of the following statements best describes the interaction between socioeconomic status (SES) and heritability when predicting IQ score?

High SES groups show high heritability for IQ while low SES show low variability for IQ

Goel et al. (2000) showed increased brain activation of the ventral prefrontal cortex (an area used for recalling meaningful relations) and partietal-temporal cortex when reasoning with meaningful syllogisms vs. abstract syllogisms. How is this reflected by accuracy of validity judgements?

Meaningful syllogisms tend to be more accurately validated when they are true than when they are false or abstract because the former is corroborated by semantic processing

If you ask someone which is a more likely outcome when flipping a coin HTHTTH or HHHHHH many people will say the latter, despite a statistical equation validating the first example appears more similar to other coin flipping outcomes. This is an example of what heuristic we talked about?

Representative heuristic

Which of the following is NOT an example of inductive reasoning?

Your professor's policy is if you miss an exam you get an F. You missed an exam so you conclude you'll get an F.

True of False: Accumulated evidence suggests that racial group differences in IQ are primarily dependent on environmental factors

True

True or False: People tend to be better at assessing the validity of syllogisms that affirm the antecedent than all other types of conditional syllogisms.

True

What is the association between working memory and the tendency for human reasoning to reflect a probabilistic interpretation of categorical syllogisms?

Working memory has limited processing capacity that results in a limited ability to construct "mental models" of a syllogism. As a result we tend to only create 1 or 2 models to test validity of the syllogism

Conservatism occurs when people do not give enough weight to the evidence in a situation. This tends to occur when people are given an upfront, explicit behavior and evidence is added to the situation gradually. What heuristic describes this phenomenon?

anchoring and adjustment heuristic

Which of the following is not a common use for IQ tests?

assessment of one's overall semantic knowledge base

Aging is associated with a loss of grey matter in the prefrontal cortex. The physiological change is associated with a reduction in neural adaptability. Which cognitive process suffers the most from this change?

attention shifting

If someone said that the chance of a person being a logger out of a group of 20 loggers and 80 fisherman was 70% after they were told that the person lived by the ocean, this person would be experiencing

base-rate neglect

During sleep, interstitial space increases by about 60% to allow for

cerebrospinal fluid to wash out metabolic waste

In the problem we discussed in lecture and shown above. fixation can impede problem solving because

conceptualizing line X as part of a triangle will inhibit finding the solution

Neural synchronization, as discussed by Prat and Just (2008) is defined as what?

connection strength between prefrontal and posterior regions of the brain

Which of the following does NOT help delay of cognitive decline?

eating a surplus of calories

The human brain seems to utilize two main decision making mechanisms. One is geared towards _________ and one that is geared towards ________

evaluating probabilities subjective value of the reward

The subjective utility curve seems to strongly predict people's decision making. What creates a framing effect in this context?

where you perceive yourself, in relations to gains and losses at the time of making a decision

Which of the following best describes the advantage given by a high working memory capacity when problem solving?

working memory allows one to maintain representations of many subgoals along with the final goal state, thereby allowing one to effectively identify a path through a complex problem space