Cognitive Psychology: Exam 2

In Kahneman's model of attention, allocation of mental resources is affected by preferences for certain kinds of tasks over others. These preferences are known as:

enduring dispositions

As classically conceived, long term memory is held to have all of the following properties except:

it primarily uses acoustic coding.

Which of the following is true regarding controlled processing?

it requires attention

Stroop interference lessens when:

participants are given more practice at naming colors.

The main distinction between "short-term memory" and "working memory" hinges on:

the emphasis on static structure vs. active processing.

Which fo the following processing context would lead to the greatest probability of recalling the target word "DISH"?

"Does the word fit into this sentence: He passed her a ___ full of steaming, homemade pasta and rich tomato sauce."

You have just listened to a list of 20 words. When asked to recall these words in any order, you are least likely to recall the...

10th word

Bahrick assessed memory for landmarks and buildings in the town in which participants went to college; 46 years after graduation alumni still remembered about _____ of the information that current graduation seniors have.

40%

The capacity of short-term memory was thought by George Miller to be:

7 (plus or minus 2) chunks of information

More recent research has suggested a move from a ____ to a _____ metaphor to explain the basic nature of attention.

Bottleneck; Spotlight

In Treisman's experiments on feature integration, the number of distractors did not matter when participants were asked to spot:

a T among O's

One basic physiological mechanism for learning is the _____ rule, which states that if a synapse between two neurons is repeatedly activated at about the same time the postsynaptic neuron tires, the chemistry of the synapse changes.

Hebb

Which of the following is not true about distracted driving?

Most drivers who text only do so while at a stop sign or stop light.

In a study of inattentional blindness, Daniel Simons and colleagues presented an unexpected event, such as a woman with an umbrella crossing the room from left to right, to a group of participants who were trying to monitor the number of passes that a particular basketball team made in a film. When questioned later about, "anything unexpected" that happened in the film.

Overall, 46% of the participants failed to notice the woman at all.

Which of the following is an example of a controlled process, for most people?

Sending a telegraph message

Which of the following is true regarding retrograde amnesia?

The time span for which memory is lost varies enormously.

Which of the following seems to be true of both echoes and icons?

They are modality specific, holding only one type of sensory information.

Results from dichotic listening studies indicate that, while a person is shadowing one message, he/she notices which of the following features of the unattended message?

Whether it is speech or simply noise

The "cocktail party effect" refers to the fact that shadowing performance is disrupted when ____ is embedded in the unattended message.

a listener's name

Broadbent, in proposing his filter theory of attention, argued that an attentional filter lets some information through and blocks out the rest. This filter is based upon:

a physical characteristic of the message, such as its location.

Roediger's work on the testing effect tells us that taking tests:

actually improves memory for material.

Spelke, Hirst and Neisser attempt to teach participants to simultaneously take dictation and read with comprehension. Their results suggested that:

after 6 weeks of practice people could simultaneously take dictation accurately and read with normal comprehension.

Long-term memory would allow you to recall _____.

all of these

Brain surgery patient "H.M." suffered after surgery from:

an inability to form new memories of new events.

Because of how they are stored in long-term memory, you would ____ confuse words like "cat" and "hat".

be unlikely to

Children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD):

cannot sustain vigilance on repetitive or dull tasks.

Research suggests that talking on a cell phone while driving:

causes significantly more errors and slows reaction time significantly more than listening to the radio.

Ebbinghaus's Forgetting curve demonstrates that:

forgetting is rapid at first and then levels off.

Because of the way they are coded in long-term memory, you are most likely to confuse pieces of information that are ______ similar.

conceptually

A retrieval cue will be most effective when it is highly distinctive or unusual, according to the principle of:

cue overload.

When information is first translated into a form that other cognitive processes can use, we say that ____ has occurred.

encoding

the central executive in working memory is hypothesized to have the function of:

directing the flow of information.

Parts of the frontal, parietal and subcortical lobes are involved in:

disengaging attention from where it was previously focused.

Neuropsychological studies have indicated that patients with damage to the right parietal lobe:

do not pay attention to objects on the left side of visual space.

The suffix effect relates to which type of memory?

echoic

The recency effect is thought to result from participants' use of:

either sensory or short-term memory

your memory of your first college lecture would be an example of:

episodic memory.

Memories that are consciously recollected are called ____ memories.

explicit

The more facts that you learn about a particular topic, the longer it takes you to retrieve any particular fact. This is referred to as the ______ effect.

fan

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD):

has been suggested to involve an inability to inhibit an ongoing response such as talking or playing a game.

The surgery performed on patient "H.M." involved removal of most of the:

hippocampus

Repetition priming is often used in the laboratory to demonstrated _____ memory.

implicit

The phenomenon of attentional capture:

is driven by the properties of the stimulus, but can be overridden by top-down processes under certain circumstances.

The icon is said to be characterized by all of the following except:

it lasts about 20 seconds

Information such as the name of the person who sat in front of you in the fifth grade is stored in:

long-term memory.

Research on divided attention suggests that:

of you think that you are doing two things simultaneously, you are probably really rapidly switching attention back and forth between the two.

Bahrick's study of retention fo spanish vocabulary words showed that large portions of information remained in long-term memory for:

over 50 years

Learning a rhyme that begins "One is a bun, two is a shoe" is part of the mnemonic technique called the:

pegword method.

The word "cat" is _______ by the phrase, "the dog chased the _____?" That is, the word cat is especially ready to be recognized or attended to.

primed

Your memory for how to ride a bicycle is an example of _______ memory.

procedural

You are studying for a midterm exam in your french class. After several hours of review, you take a break reading through your spanish vocabulary items. The next day on the French exam, you are dismayed to discover that the appropriate french words keep eluding you, whereas the spanish words "pop into your head." You are experiencing the effects of:

retroactive interference

According to ____ theory, we never actually acquire unattended material at all.

schema

Your memory for the fact that Ebbinghaus studied forgetting is an example of:

semantic memory

Inattentional information is stored briefly in:

sensory memory.

Information is held in _____ for 20 to 30 seconds.

short-term memory

"Cramming" for exams tends to be ineffective because of the:

spacing effect

Daydreams are a type of:

stimulus-independent thought (SIT).

In addition to its original description in Atkinson and Shiffrin's modal model of memory, long-term memory can be characterized as having _____.

subcomponents

PET scan studies:

support Baddeley's notion that verbal and spatial working memory are different systems.

Retrieval involves:

the calling to mind of previously stored information.

Damage to the frontal lobe of the brain often disrupts processing by:

the central executive.

the production of stimulus-independent thoughts (SITs), such as daydreams, depend upon:

the central executive.

Which of the following is not a component of Baddeley's working memory model?

the icon

Which of the following factors does not influence the allocation of mental resources in Kahneman's capacity model?

the lateness of selection

The term "anterograde amnesia" refers to:

the loss of the ability to form new memories.

Bower claimed that a person would recall more information if he/she were in the same mood at recall time as at encoding time. This phenomenon is referred to as:

the mood-dependent memory.

Repeating a phone number to yourself to hold it in memory while you dial it would use which component of working memory?

the phonological loop

Encoding variability is a potential explanation for:

the spacing effect.

In the Stroop effect, participants have difficulty correctly nameing the color of ink that a word is written when:

the word names a color which is not the ink color.

Most studies of sensory memory have focused on memory for information from which sensory modalities?

vision and hearing

You had just heard some bad news and were very sad when you listened to a lecture on levels of processing. Now it is time to take a test on that lecture material. According to the mood-dependent memory effect you should:

watch a sad movie just before the exam.

In the second stage of feature integration theory:

we combine features into unified objects.

The concept of fluid intelligence is highly related to:

working memory capacity.

A person approaches you on the street and asks for directions. While you are talking, two people carry a door between you and the person to whom you are speaking. While the door is passing, the person you are talking to is replaced by a different person. If you are like the people in studies by Simons & Levin:

you have about a 50% chance of noticing the switch.

According to the retrieval cue explanation of interference, you are more likely to forget where you parked your car in a lot where:

you have parked frequently, but in many different spaces.