PSYC439 Cognitive Psychology Midterm Study Guide

Have you ever tried to think of the words and hum the melody of one song while the radio is playing a different song? People have often noted that this is very difficult to do. This difficulty can be understood as

articulatory suppression

The first experiments in cognitive psychology were based on the idea that mental responses can be

inferred from the participant's behavior

K.C., who was injured in a motorcycle accident, remembers facts like the difference between a strike and a spare in bowling, but he is unaware of experiencing things like hearing about the circumstances of his brother's death, which occurred two years before the accident. His memory behavior suggests

intact semantic memory but defective episodic memory.

Which part of the brain is important for touch?

parietal lobe

According to the recognition by components theory, if we can see an object's geons, we are able to identify the object. This is known as the

principle of componential recovery

Suppose you (a student) are asked by a teacher to learn a poem you will recite in front of your class. Soon after, both you and a classmate, J.P., are asked by another teacher to learn the lyrics to an unfamiliar song. When you and J.P. are later asked to remember the song lyrics, you have a much more difficult time recalling them than J.P. does. This impairment of your performance is most likely attributable to

proactive interference.

The fusiform face area (FFA) in the brain is often damaged in patients with

prosopagnosia

You are at a parade where there are a number of marching bands. You perceive the bands that are all in the same uniforms as being grouped together. The red uniforms are one band, the green uniforms another, and so forth. You have this perceptual experience because of the gestalt law of

similarity

When conducting an experiment on how stimuli are represented by the firing of neurons, you notice that neurons respond differently to different faces. For example, Arthur's face causes three neurons to fire, with neuron 1 responding the most and neuron 3 responding the least. Roger's face causes the same three neurons to fire, with neuron 1 responding the least and neuron 3 responding the most. Your results support

sparse coding

The ability to divide attention depends on all of the following EXCEPT

task cueing

One function of ______ is controlling the suppression of irrelevant information.

the central executive

During the Stroop task, you would expect to find the longest reaction times when

the color of the word and the name of the word differed

Your text discusses how episodic and semantic memories are interconnected. This discussion revealed that when we experience events,

the knowledge that makes up semantic memories is initially attained through a personal experience based in episodic memory

Research on the use of cell phones while driving indicates that

the main effect of cell phone use on driving safety can be attributed to the fact that attention is used up by the cognitive task of talking on the phone.

The Word-Length Effect reveals that

the phonological loop of the working memory model has a limited capacity.

Someone introduces themselves to you at a party, and then you go across the room to get drinks for the two of you, and you don't think about the person's name. Based on what you know about the duration of short-term memory, what is the maximum amount of time your trip to the bar could take, so that when you get back to the person, you'd still remember their name?

15-20 seconds

Which of the following statements best describes how neurons communicate with one another?

A chemical process takes place at the synapse

Which example below best demonstrates state-dependent learning?

Although Emily doesn't very often think about her first love, Steve, she can't help getting caught up in happy memories when "their song" (the first song they danced to) plays on the radio.

From what you know about the Phonological Similarity Effect, which of the following sequences would be the most difficult to keep track of in short-term memory?

B, P, Z, D, E, T, C

Which of the following learning techniques is least likely to lead to deep processing of the information?

Bree has just bought a new car and is trying to learn her new license plate sequence. Every morning, for three weeks, she repeats the sequence out loud when she wakes up.

In an experiment conducted by Simons and Chabris (1999), participants were instructed to watch people passing a basketball around and were told to keep track of some activity within the game. What was the distinctive feature of the scene and what proportion of people failed to notice it?

During the passing game, a person in a gorilla suit walked into and out of the scene; nearly half failed to notice it

According to the TED Talk from Joshua Foer ("Feats of Memory Anyone Can Do"), what impact has technology played on memory?

Technology has given us little need to remember and has lessened the importance of cultivating our memory

Roediger and Karpicke (2006) found that recall of a prose passage was significantly better among participants that took repeated recall tests over the passage compared to participants that re-read the passage. This result describes the

Testing Effect

According to Treisman's Attenuation Model of selective attention, which of the following messages would you expect to have the highest activation threshold for most people?

The word "platypus".

Your text describes the occurrence of a cognitive revolution during which dramatic changes took place in the way psychology was studied. This so-called revolution occurred parallel to (and, in part, because of) the introduction of

computers

Memory for a word will tend to be better if the word is used in a complex sentence (like "the bicycle was blue, with high handlebars and a racing seat") rather than a simple sentence (like "he rode the bicycle"). This probably occurs because the complex sentence

creates more connections.

In Slameka and Graf's (1978) study, some participants read word pairs, while other participants had to fill in the blank letters of the second word in a pair with a word related to the first word. The latter group performed better on a later memory task, illustrating the

generation effect.

The recency effect occurs when participants are asked to recall a list of words. One way to get rid of the recency effect is to

have participants count backwards for 30 seconds after hearing the last word of the list.

Brain imaging techniques can determine all of the following except

the structure of individual neurons

Maria took a drink from a container marked "milk". Surprised, she quickly spit out the liquid because it turned out the container was filled with orange juice instead. Maria likes orange juice, so why did she have such a negative reaction to it? Her response was most affected by

top-down processing