Cognitive Psychology- Ch. 8 Practice Questions

Despite scientific evidence to the contrary, Harry believes that drinking dandelion tea would improve his long-term memory because he saw several news stories and articles about it online. What is Harry experiencing?

Illusory truth effect

The misinformation effect occurs when a person's memory for an event is modified by misleading information presented

after the event.

Your text's discussion of false memories leads to the conclusion that false memories

arise from the same constructive processes that produce true memories.

The repeated reproduction technique used in memory studies involves

the same participants remembering some information at longer and longer intervals after learning the information.

Which of the following terms does NOT reflect the concept of flashbulb memories?

Accurate

Your text describes an experiment by Talarico and Rubin (2003) that measured people's memories of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Which of the following was the primary result of that research?

After 32 weeks, participants had a high level of confidence in their memories of the terrorist events, but lower belief in their memories of "everyday" events.

Which statement below is NOT true, based on the results of memory research?

Although eyewitness testimony is often faulty, people who have just viewed a videotape of a crime are quite accurate at picking the "perpetrator" from a lineup.

Which of the following has been shown to play a role in the strength of memories that are associated with emotion?

Cortisol

Which of the following is the most accurate statement regarding post-event information and the misinformation effect?

Even when participants are told that the post-event information is incorrect, the misinformation effect can still occur.

Extrapolating from the cultural life script hypothesis, which of the following events would be easiest to recall?

Graduating from college at age 22

Flashbulb memory is best represented by which of the following statements?

It is memory for the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an emotional event that remains especially vivid but not necessarily accurate over time.

__________ occurs when reading a sentence leads a person to expect something that is not explicitly stated or necessarily implied by the sentence.

Pragmatic inference

Latoya is remembering a fun day at the beach that she had with her dad when she was a little girl. Which region of brain will have the LEAST connection to the more personal aspects of Latoya's memory?

Prefrontal cortex

Which of the following is key to the illusory truth effect?

Repetition

Wei has allergy symptoms. He has gone to his regular doctor and an allergy specialist, but he wasn't given a prescription by either doctor. Instead, he was advised to buy an over-the-counter medicine. While he was in the specialist's waiting area, he read a magazine where he saw three ads for an allergy medicine called SneezeLess. A week later, in a drug store, Wei says to his brother, "My doctor says SneezeLess works great. I'll buy that one." Wei and his doctor never discussed SneezeLess. Wei has fallen victim to which of the following errors?

Source monitoring

Ellen is 52 years old. Which of the following experiences has most likely faded from her memory?

Winning the first grade spelling bee

A script is a type of schema that also includes knowledge of

a sequence of actions.

Schrauf and Rubin's "two groups of immigrants" study found that the reminiscence bump coincided with periods of rapid change, occurring at a normal age for people emigrating early in life but shifting to 15 years later for those who emigrated later. These results support the

cognitive hypothesis.

According to the ______ approach to memory, what people report as memories is based on what actually happened plus additional factors such as other knowledge, experiences, and expectations.

constructive

The "telephone game" is often played by children. One child creates a story and whispers it to a second child, who does the same to a third child, and so on. When the last child recites the story to the group, his or her reproduction of the story is generally shorter than the original and contains many omissions and inaccuracies. This game shows how memory is a __________ process.

constructive

In the "word list" false memory experiment (DRM) where several students incorrectly remembered hearing the word sleep, false memory occurs because of

constructive memory processes.

Bartlett's experiment in which English participants were asked to recall the "War of the Ghosts" story that was taken from the French Indian culture illustrated the

constructive nature of memory.

Arkes and Freedman's "baseball game" experiment asked participants to indicate whether the following sentence was present in a passage they had previously read about events in a game: "The batter was safe at first." Their findings showed inaccurate memories involved

creations from inferences based on baseball knowledge.

Unconscious plagiarism of the work of others is known as

cryptoamnesia.

Much research has been dedicated to improving the reliability of eyewitness testimony. One finding reveals that when constructing a lineup,

increasing similarity between "fillers" and a suspect leads to an increased level of missed identification of some guilty suspects.

The experiment in which participants first read sentences about a baseball game and were then asked to identify sentences they had seen before, illustrated that memory

involves making inferences.

"S," who had a photographic memory that was described as virtually limitless, was able to achieve many feats of memory. According to the discussion in your text, S's memory system operated

less efficiently than normal.

Experiments that argue against a special flashbulb memory mechanism find that as time increases since the occurrence of the flashbulb event, participants

make more errors in their recollections.

The observation that older adults often become nostalgic for the "good old days" reflects the self-image hypothesis, which states that

memory for life events is enhanced during the time we assume our life identities.

Your friend has been sick for several days, so you go over to her home to make her some chicken soup. Searching for a spoon, you first reach in a top drawer beside the dishwasher. Then, you turn to the big cupboard beside the stove to search for a pan. In your search, you have relied on a kitchen

schema

In the experiment in which participants sat in an office and then were asked to remember what they saw in the office, participants "remembered" some things, like books, that weren't actually there. This experiment illustrates the effect of __________ on memory.

schemas

Jackie went to the grocery store to pick up yogurt, bread, and apples. First, she picked up a hand basket for carrying her groceries, and then she searched the store. After finding what she needed, she stood in a check-out line. Then, the cashier put her items in a plastic bag, and soon after, Jackie left the store. As readers of this event, we understand that Jackie paid for the groceries, even though it wasn't mentioned, because we are relying on a grocery store _____.

script

The "wedding reception" false memory experiment shows that false memories can be explained as a product of familiarity and

source misattribution.

The experiment for which people were asked to make fame judgments for both famous and non-famous names (and for which Sebastian Weissdorf was one of the names to be remembered) illustrated the effect of __________ on memory.

source misattributions

Autobiographical memory research shows that a person's brain is more extensively activated when viewing photos

the person took himself or herself.

Research on eyewitness testimony reveals that

when viewing a lineup, an eyewitness's confidence in his or her choice of the suspect can be increased by an authority's confirmation of his or her choice, even when the choice is wrong.

Jacoby's experiment, in which participants made judgments about whether they had previously seen the names of famous and non-famous people, found that inaccurate memories based on source misattributions occurred after a delay of

24 hours

For most adults over age 40, the reminiscence bump describes enhanced memory for

adolescence and young adulthood.

In Lindsay's "misinformation effect" experiment, participants saw a sequence of slides showing a maintenance man stealing money and a computer. This slide presentation included narration by a female speaker who described what was happening in the slides as they were shown. Results showed that the misinformation effect was greatest when presentation of misleading post-event information was

auditory from a female speaker.

The conclusion to be drawn from the man named Shereshevskii whose abnormal brain functioning gave him virtually limitless word-for-word memory is that having memory like a video recorder

can seriously disrupt functioning in one's personal life

Lindsay's misinformation effect experiment, in which participants were given a memory test about a sequence of slides showing a maintenance man stealing money and a computer, showed that participants are influenced by misleading post-event information

even if they are told to ignore the post-event information.

A lesson to be learned from the research on flashbulb memories is that

extreme vividness of a memory does not mean it is accurate.

Your text's discussion of eyewitness testimony illustrates that this type of memory is frequently influenced by all of the following EXCEPT

failing to elaboratively rehearse these kinds of events due to fear.

The idea that we remember life events better because we encounter the information over and over in what we read, see on TV, and talk about with other people is called the

narrative rehearsal hypothesis.

Stanny and Johnson's "weapons focus" experiment, investigating memory for crime scenes, found that

the presence of a weapon hinders memory for other parts of the event.

Asking people to recall the most influential events that happened during their college careers shows that __________ in people's lives appear to be particularly memorable.

transition points