Psychology Exam 3 Study

According to the concept of prototypes, how do we decide whether an item belongs to a particular category?

We compare the item to the most typical members of the category.

availability heuristic

estimating the likelihood of events based on their availability in memory; if instances come readily to mind (perhaps because of their vividness), we presume such events are common

In contrast to an achievement test, an aptitude test is intended to measure what?

fluid intelligence

If asked to tell your social security number (without looking it up), you are being asked to perform which type of memory test?

free recall

What is anterograde amnesia?

inability to form new memories

The tendency to assume that if an item is similar to members of a particular category, it is probably a member of that category itself, is known as the

representativeness heuristic

First you memorized the street map of Detroit. If you now memorize the street map of Philadelphia, you might forget the Detroit map because of

retroactive interference

In decision making, searching until you find something that is good enough is called

satisficing

You cannot remember the geography you learned in junior high school. Someone tests whether you can relearn it faster than you learned it the first time. Which type of memory test is this?

savings

A saccade is

A rapid movement of the eye between fixation points

The Wechsler and the Stanford-Binet tests were both devised to have a mean score around __________ and a standard deviation around __________.

100....15

In what way is identifying a suspect from a lineup similar to taking a multiple choice test?

Both are a form of a recognition memory test.

What does psychological research say about using a cell phone while you are driving?

Even listening to your passenger's half of a conversation is distracting.

Which of the following theories holds that intelligence includes unrelated (or poorly correlated) abilities such as language, music, logic, body movement, and social sensitivity?

Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences

What was Hermann Ebbinghaus's contribution to the study of memory?

He was the first to do experiments to measure memory

If differences among people in their IQ scores are based largely on differences in heredity, what should we expect to find?

IQ scores should correlate higher for dizygotic twins than for monozygotic twins.

Comparing several methods of testing memory leads to which of these conclusions?

People might or might not remember something, depending on how we test them.

What does it mean to say that a test has been standardized?

Psychologists have established rules for administering the test and interpreting its scores.

Which of the following was an attempt to devise an IQ test that makes minimal use of language and is more fair to people with various cultural and language backgrounds?

Raven's Progressive Matrices

What is meant by the "Flynn effect"?

Raw scores on IQ tests have been increasing from decade to decade.

Certain IQ tests, such as the WISC-IV, include separate tests for specialized abilities. Scores on all those separate tests are positively correlated with one another. These positive correlations are considered evidence in favor of

Spearman's "g" factor.

The early IQ tests developed in France and modified for English speakers became the first important IQ test in the English language. This new version was the

Stanford-Binet

The researcher associated with developing the triarchic theory is

Sternberg

When you are asked how something would look from a different angle, you say you "imagined rotating the object in my head." What evidence did Shepard & Metzler present to show that what you did really is like watching an object rotate?

The delay to answering is proportional to the angular distance of rotation.

The WISC and WAIS are both IQ tests. What is the difference between them?

They are given to people of different ages.

Brain-damaged patient A speaks fluently but is hard to understand, and she has trouble understanding other people's speech. Patient B understands most speech, but he speaks slowly and inarticulately, and he leaves out nearly all prepositions, conjunctions, and word endings. Patient A has _____ and patient B has _____.

Wernicke's aphasia... Broca's aphasia

an attentive process

You are looking for a well-camouflaged animal in a forest. Finding it will require

Ordinarily, you have short eye fixations when reading something easy and long fixations when reading something difficult. If your fixations start to become about the same for easy and difficult material, what is probably happening?

Your attention is wandering.

What is a prototype?

a typical example of a category

Because you remember all the times it rained right after you washed your car, you think it always rains when you wash your car. What heuristic is responsible for this judgment?

availability heuristic

Your history professor gives you a list of the initials of all the U.S. presidents and vice presidents and asks you to fill in the names. What kind of memory test is this?

cued recall

The availability heuristic is based on the assumption that

if we can easily remember examples of something, it must be a common event.

If you are trying to think of uses for a brick and you can't think of anything other than building a wall, what error have you made?

functional fixedness

In decision making, considering every possibility to find the best decision is called

maximizing

After the neurological patient H.M. suffered damage to his hippocampus, he experienced a severe loss in his __________, but continued to be almost normal in his __________.

memory for new facts...ability to learn new skills

One unusual feature of implicit memory is that

people can display implict memory without realizing that they are using memory.

The WAIS-III and WISC-IV have one advantage over the Raven's Progressive Matrices test, which is that the WAIS-III and WISC-IV

provide scores on a number of separate abilities

After you witness a robbery, you have trouble describing the thief. The police show you several photographs and ask whether any of them was the thief. They are checking your memory by which method?

recognition

Mnemonic devices are most useful in helping people to do what?

remember a list of unrelated words

pre-attentive process

stands out immediately

What are heuristics?

strategies for simplifying a problem or for guiding an investigation

To improve your probability of performing a learned skill well, or your probability of remembering something in a variety of circumstances, you should

study or practice under a variety of conditions.

The willingness to do something we wouldn't otherwise choose to do because of money or effort already spent is termed the

sunk-cost effect

What is the Stroop effect?

the difficulty of saying the color of the ink instead of reading the word

John needed to remember the last 10 presidents of the United States. He generated an image of each of the presidents located somewhere in his house. John used

the method of loci

Why have psychologists periodically revised and reworded the IQ tests over the years?

to prevent the mean score from rising above 100

In which situation would a heuristic be most useful?

you have too many hypotheses to test