Psych 250 Exam 1 Study guide ch. 1-6

Imagine that a friend has just read a magazine article that discusses flashbulb memories, and your friend argues that people retain a very clear memory of certain emotional events. What would you respond?

"No, the article overstates the case; these memories can be inaccurate and can fade with time."

Suppose that several psychologists want to explore interpersonal interactions during adulthood. Which of the following topics would be most consistent with the cognitive approach?

"When meeting someone for the first time, what attribute does a person perceive most quickly, gender or ethnicity?"

Which of the following is the best example of a geon?

A 3-dimensional cylinder

Which of the following students provides the most accurate summary about the emotions associated with events that occurred in the past?

Anna: "The emotional tone of unpleasant events fades more than the emotional tone of pleasant events."

Which of the following statements most accurately captures the point of view called the "false memory perspective" with respect to childhood sexual abuse?

As adults, people construct an incorrect memory about abuse, and they believe that the abuse actually did occur.

In the working-memory model, which of the following cognitive activities would the central executive be most likely to perform?

Deciding which items on a list should be remembered and which should be forgotten.

Which of the following students has the best understanding about how to apply the distributed-practice effect?

Derrick: "It's best to take breaks between your study sessions, so that your learning trials are spread across time."

You have no difficulty distinguishing between the letters O and W, but it takes longer to distinguish between the letters O and Q. Which theory of object recognition does this support?

Feature-analysis theory

Which of the following movements emphasized the human tendency to actively organize what we see?

Gestalt Psychology

Which of the following statements is an example of episodic memory?

I remember reading the book Sense and Sensibility in twelfth grade.

What is the current status of the bottleneck theory of attention?

It is not flexible enough to explain human attention.

Which of the following students provides the best summary about the current status of the information-processing approach?

Magda: "The information-processing approach has declined in popularity during recent years, because those models are not complex enough to explain many cognitive activities."

Which of the following students provides the best summary of the research about using a cell phone and paying attention while driving?

María Luisa: "Talking on a hands-free cell phone can distract your attention."

Which term or phrase is closest in meaning to the term "cognition"?

Mental activity

Which of the following students' statements best characterizes Baddeley's view of working memory?

Sam: "Working memory has four separate components, each with its own specialized kind of cognitive activity."

Which of the following students provides the best, most complete definition of the term "perception"?

Sarah: "Perception uses our previous knowledge to collect and interpret sensory stimuli."

Which of the following students' statements best summarizes the research on face perception?

Sarita: "We process faces in terms of their general structure; for other objects, we are more likely to process isolated features."

Which of the following students provides the best understanding of the concept called elaboration?

Soltan: "Elaboration means that you think about how an item is related to other concepts."

Which of the following students has the best understanding of the concept "release from proactive interference"?

Tara: "As you learn a series of stimuli from the same category, memory will become less accurate; if you switch to a new category, memory will improve."

You will have difficulty reading your textbook if you are simultaneously singing the words to your favorite song. How would Baddeley explain this phenomenon?

The words from the textbook and the words from the song will interfere with each other in the phonological loop.

If you had one important message about memory improvement that you could convey to a friend, what should it be?

Try to think about your memory strategies, plan how to study, and monitor whether you understand material.

Psychologists have conducted studies in which the participants must detect a stimulus in a display of many other objects. According to this research, people usually detect

a feature that is present more quickly than a feature that is absent.

In the chaotic aftermath of a robbery, you see a tall thin man in a red shirt and a shorter man in a black jacket running from the scene of the crime. According to research on illusory conjunctions, it would not be surprising for you to later remember seeing

a tall, thin man in a black jacket

Imagine that you are looking at a geometric drawing. At first, one shape in this drawing seems to be in front of other shapes. The next moment, this same shape seems to be located behind a second shape. This phenomenon is called:

an ambiguous figure-ground relationship.

Cognitive science is

an interdisciplinary field that explores questions about the mind.

Baddeley's current model of working memory includes a feature called the episodic buffer. According to Baddeley's description, the episodic buffer

briefly holds material from the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and long-term memory.

An operational definition is most likely to

describe precisely how the researchers will measure a particular concept.

Suppose that you are sitting in a cafeteria, trying to focus on a comment from a student on your left, while a student on your right is talking to a friend. This situation resembles the laboratory setup known as

dichotic listening.

According to Anne Treisman's feature-integration theory,

distributed attention uses parallel search through the visual field.

Lori types her notes on her laptop during her professor's lectures, but she also checks her email and monitors Facebook at the same time. Although Lori insists that she's a good multitasker, Steve informs her that she would remember the material better if she closed her email and browser during class. Steve's good advice is based on knowledge of

divided attention.

The letters Q and O differ only in the presence or absence of a single feature. Based on research on visual search, you would find it

easier to detect a Q in an array of Os than to detect an O in an array of Qs.

Suppose that your professor tells you that you must locate a journal article about cognitive psychology that presents empirical evidence. You should look for an article that

emphasizes evidence collected in experiments.

Suppose that you look at a new term in a foreign language, and this item is then stored in your memory. Cognitive psychologists call this process

encoding

Sean is studying for his philosophy final exam. He knows that the test will be all essays, and he knows that the professor often asks students to compare two philosophical approaches. As part of his studying, he writes several practice essays in which he compares some philosophical approaches. Sean's study method makes use of the cognitive principle called

encoding specificity.

Bottom-up processing

focuses on the contribution of the stimulus to object recognition.

Suppose that you look at a television screen for less than a second and then close your eyes. The image that is briefly preserved after the stimulus has disappeared is held in

iconic memory.

Suppose that a close friend is telling you about a very emotional experience she has just had. You are paying such close attention to her that you fail to notice that some strangers have just entered the room. This incident is an example of

inattentional blindness.

George Miller's (1956) classic article, on the magical number seven, introduced the concept of a chunk. According to Miller's terminology, a chunk

is the basic unit in short-term memory.

During the 1950s, many psychologists were becoming discouraged with behaviorism, and cognitive psychology began to emerge. A major reason they were disappointed with behaviorism is that

it considered only psychological processes that are clearly observable.

According to the Atkinson-Shiffrin model,

memory can be represented as a series of stages in which information is passed between separate storage areas.

The term autobiographical memory generally refers to

memory for issues and events from your own life.

Harrison knows that he will typically perform better in an exam if he reads the textbook chapters in the early afternoon and if he reviews the material by trying to explain it in his own words. Harrison is demonstrating

metacognition.

The identification of a complex arrangement of visual stimuli is known as

object recognition

According to research on the testing effect,

one explanation is that test-taking creates desirable difficulties.

The hierarchy technique is an example of a mnemonic device that primarily emphasizes

organization.

The Stroop effect is related to selective attention because

people are required to pay selective attention to the color of the stimulus, rather than the name of the stimulus.

Compared to control-group participants, people with anterograde amnesia are likely to

perform similarly on implicit memory tasks, but poorer on explicit memory tasks.

Suppose that you need to remember to pick up a book at the library after your examination today. This kind of memory task is an example of

prospective memory.

According to your textbook, retrospective memory

refers to some information that you learned in the past.

Consider this sentence: "I know that the winters in Wisconsin are colder than the winters in New Jersey." This sentence is an example of

semantic memory.

Suppose that a friend at your college says that she can multitask very effectively, even when two tasks are challenging. Based on the information in Chapter 3, you would conclude that

she may believe that she can multitask effectively, but the research does not support this belief.

Suppose that Jessica has a phobic disorder, a fear of snakes. A clinical psychologist gives her the appropriate version of an emotional Stroop task. Jessica would be likely to:

show an attentional bias, so that she pays less attention to the color of the ink, when the word is related to snakes.

A research team is studying which parts of the brain are active when a participant looks at a photograph of a person, and tries to judge how intelligent that person is. This kind of study is an example of

social cognitive neuroscience.

Baddeley's model of working memory proposes a feature called the "phonological loop." This feature allows you to

store the sound of someone's name.

Suppose that you are calculating your recent expenses, and you are adding up five 2-digit numbers in your head. As you begin to calculate the final sum, you feel that you've reached the limits of your memory. This strain can be traced to

the difficulty of keeping all this material in your working memory.

If a study has high ecological validity, then the most likely conclusion is that

the results could be applied in real-world situations.

Suppose that you study for your next examination in this course by reviewing each topic and asking how the information might be relevant to the career you want to pursue. Your study technique makes use of

the self-reference principle.

Suppose that you have been watching a figure skating competition. You close your eyes and you try to remember how the last skater performed her final jump, then glided to the center of the rink and finished with a spin. The component of your working memory that is now most active is

the visuospatial sketchpad.

The discussion of the template model of object recognition pointed out that

this model would have difficulty explaining how we can recognize handwritten letters.

Years ago, you read a story called "Le Petit Prince" ("The Little Prince") in French. According to the encoding-specificity principle, you would be likely to remember more about the story if

you were asked questions about it in French.