Psych 320 Final Study Guide

Sarah has experienced brain damage making it difficult for her to understand spatial layout. Which area of her brain has most likely sustained damage?

Parahippocampal place area (PPA)

Which part of the brain is important for touch, pressure, and pain?

Parietal lobe

Posner and coworkers (1978) deduced which of the following from their research?

People move their attention from one place to another.

Which problem provides an example of how functional fixedness can hinder solution of a problem?

Two-string problem

Which of the following is not one of the types of units found within a parallel distributed processing model?

Working units

According to Rosch, the ____ level of categories is the psychologically "privileged" level of category that reflects people's everyday experience.

basic

Murdoch's "remembering a list" experiment described the serial position curve and found that memory is best for ____ of a list.

both the first and last words

Paul Broca's and Carl Wernicke's research provided early evidence for

localization of function.

According to the multiple trace hypothesis, the hippocampus is involved in retrieval of

remote, episodic memories.

Elaborative rehearsal of a word will LEAST likely be accomplished by

repeating it over and over.

The circle problem, in which the task is to determine the length of a line inside a circle, was proposed to illustrate

representation and restructuring.

The radiation problem can be solved using

representation and restructuring.

Kieran found that studying for his Spanish exam made it more difficult to remember some of the vocabulary words he had just studied for his French exam earlier in the day. This is an example of

retroactive interference.

Lamar has just gotten a new job and is attending a company party where he will meet his colleagues for the first time. His boss escorts him around to small groups to introduce him. At the first group, Lamar meets four people and is told only their first names. The same thing happens with a second group and a third group. At the fourth group, Lamar is told their names and that one of the women in the group is the company accountant. A little while later, Lamar realizes that he only remembers the names of the people in the first group, though he also remembers the profession of the last woman he met (the accountant). Lamar's experience demonstrates

retroactive interference.

Consider the sentence, "Because he always jogs a mile seems like a short distance to him."The principle of late closure states that this sentence would first be parsed into which of the following phrases?

"Because he always jogs a mile"

The effective duration of short-term memory, when rehearsal is prevented, is

15-20 seconds or less.

A circular plate rests at the center of a small square table. Around the table are a total of four chairs, one along each side of the square table. A person with unilateral neglect sits down in one of the chairs and eats from the plate. After he is "finished," he moves to the next chair on his right and continues to eat from the plate. Assuming he never moves the plate and he continues with this procedure (moving one chair to the right and eating) how many chairs will he have to sit in to eat all the food on the plate?

3

Dominic is at a job interview sitting across from the company's CEO, Ms. Bing. While she takes a phone call, Dominic tries to recall her first name. Her business card is on the desk, but its orientation is not facing Dominic straight on. The business card has the initial of Ms. Bing's first name, so Dominic mentally rotates that initial letter into a straight-up orientation. For which angle (compared to the final straight-up orientation) would you predict Dominic would be fastest in identifying the initial?

30 degrees

Which of the following reaction time data sets illustrates the typicality effect for the bird category, given the following three trials? (NOTE: Read data sets as RTs for Trial 1: Trial 2: Trial 3) ​ Trial 1: An owl is a bird. Trial 2: A penguin is a bird. Trial 3: A sparrow is a bird.

583: 653: 518 msec

To demonstrate the complexity of human perception, a challenge took place in California where entrants had to design a motorized vehicle that could drive through a 55-mile course without human assistance. The winning vehicle was only able to stay on the course and avoid various obstacles while traveling at a rate of ____ miles per hour.

7

Using the partial report procedure in his "letter array" experiment, Sperling was able to infer that participants initially saw about ____ percent of the 12 letters in the display.

82

______ is a "typical" member of a category.

A prototype

​Which of the following analogies would provide the best description for how research progresses in cognitive psychology?

A trail from which one thing leads to another.

According to Collins and Quillian's semantic network model, it should take longest to verify which statement below?

A turtle is an animal.

Which of the following neural components is NOT found at the receiving end of neurons?

Axon

Which of the following psychologists is known for research on operant conditioning?

B.F. Skinner

Conduct an experiment where participants see a number of target letters flashed briefly on a screen and are told to immediately write down the letters in the order they were presented. It is most likely that the target letter "P" will be misidentified as

C.

The "Little Albert" experiment involving the rat and the loud noise is an example of which of the following types of experiments?

Classical conditioning

Which term below is most closely associated with semantic networks?

Cognitive economy

Which statement below is most closely associated with levels of processing theory?

Deep processing involves paying closer attention to a stimulus than shallow processing and results in better processing.

Which approach to categorization can more easily take into account atypical cases such as flightless birds?

Exemplar

Which of the following is NOT associated with the semantic network model?

Family resemblance

Paivio (1963) proposed the conceptual peg hypothesis. His work suggests which of the following would be most difficult to remember?

Freedom

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

Graduating from college at age 22

________ memories are those that we are not aware of.

Implicit

Which of the following statements is the most accurate with regard to specificity coding?

It is unlikely to be correct because there are too many stimuli in the world to have a separate neuron for each.

Which of the following is a criticism of analytic introspection?

It produces variable results from person to person.

The use of the term "artificial intelligence" was coined by

John McCarthy.

Suppose you are in your kitchen writing a grocery list, while your roommate is watching TV in the next room. A commercial for spaghetti sauce comes on TV. Although you are not paying attention to the TV, you "suddenly" remember that you need to pick up spaghetti sauce and add it to the list. Your behavior is best predicted by which of the following models of attention?

Late selection

Models designed to explain mental functioning are constantly refined and modified to explain new results. Which of the following exemplifies this concept based on the results presented in your text?

Replacing the STM component of the modal model with working memory

In a study, participants listened to the following tape recording: Rumor had it that, for years, the government building had been plagued with problems. The man was not surprised when he found several spiders, roaches, and other bugs in the corner of the room. As participants heard the word "bugs," they completed a lexical decision task to a test stimulus flashed on a screen. To which of the following words would you expect participants to take the longest to respond to?

SKY.

The ____ states that the nature of a culture's language can affect the way people think.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The following statement represents what kind of memory? "The Beatles stopped making music together as a group in the early 1970s."

Semantic

Which of the following is NOT an example of an implicit memory?

Semantic memory

People playing the parlor game "20 Questions" often use hierarchical organization strategies. One player asks up to 20 yes/no questions to determine the identity of an object another player has selected. The player's questions usually start as general and get more specific as the player approaches a likely guess. Initial questions asked by a player are often one of three questions: "Is it an animal?" "Is it a vegetable?" and "Is it a mineral?" Each of these three questions describes which level of categorization?

Superordinate

The episodic buffer directly connects to which two components in Baddeley's model of memory?

The central executive and long-term memory

You are conducting a study on how fluency influences the phonemic restoration effect. You study two groups of non-native English speakers, one with a year of English classes and the other with 10 years. All of your stimuli are in English. Who would you expect to show the greatest phonemic restoration effect?

The group with 10 years of English instruction

Which of the following is most closely associated with implicit memory?

The propaganda effect

Carly is an interior design student. As part of her internship, she is redesigning a small kitchen for a client. She would like to expand the kitchen and add a dining area. Before creating sketches for the client, she imagines the new layout in her mind, most likely using

a depictive representation.

Mental-scanning experiments found

a direct relationship between scanning time and distance on the image.

A specific person's face is represented in the nervous system by the firing of

a group of neurons each responding to a number of different faces.

The propositional approach may use any of the following EXCEPT

a spatial layout.

The results of Gauthier's "Greeble" experiment illustrate

an effect of experience-dependent plasticity.

Mia has lived in New York City all her life. She has noticed that people from upper Manhattan walk really fast, but people from lower Manhattan tend to walk slowly. Mia's observations are likely influenced from a judgment error based on her using

an illusory correlation.

Bransford and Johnson's study had participants hear a passage which turned out to be about a man on the street serenading his girlfriend in a tall building. The wording of the passage made it difficult to understand, but looking at a picture made it easier to understand. The results of this study illustrated the importance of _______ in forming reliable long-term memories.

an organizational context during learning

Dr. Curious is doing a follow-up study to the mutilated checkerboard problem experiment. In this new study, participants solve the following shoe problem before tackling the checkerboard problem. By doing this, Dr. Curious is studying the effect of _____ on problem solving.The shoe problem: A first-grade class is using a trampoline in gym class, so all the children have removed their shoes, which are all jumbled in a large pile. One of the students, Miguel, is leaving early, so the teacher tells him to grab his shoes and report to the lobby. In his hurry, Miguel grabs two identical left-footed, size 6 red sneakers and runs to his mother still sock-footed. Will the remaining students be able to shoe-up with the remaining shoes without getting a foot-ache?

analogies

The radiation problem was used in your text to illustrate the role of ____ in problem solving.

analogy

The procedure in which trained participants describe their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli presented under controlled conditions is known as

analytic introspection.

A task with the instructions "Read the following words while repeating 'the, the, the' out loud, look away, and then write down the words you remember" would most likely be studying

articulatory suppression.

Suppose that, as a participant in an imagery study, you are asked to memorize the four outside walls of a three-story rectangular house. Later, you are asked to report how many windows are on the front of the house. You will probably be fastest to answer this question if you create an image as though you were standing

at the far side of the front yard, away from the house.

The finding that people tend to incorrectly conclude that more people die from tornados than from asthma has been explained in terms of the

availability heuristic.

Action potentials occur in the

axon.

In explaining the paradox that imagery and perception exhibit a double dissociation, Behrmann and coworkers suggested that perception necessarily involves _____ processing and imagery starts as a _____ process.

bottom-up; top-down

Kaplan and Simon's experiment presented different versions of the mutilated checkerboard problem. The main purpose of their experiment was to demonstrate that

bread and butter

The prototype approach to categorization states that a standard representation of a category is based on

category members that have been encountered in the past.

Difficulty in recognizing an alteration - even a very obvious one - in a scene is called ________ blindness.

change

The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind is called

cognitive psychology.

Illusory conjunctions are

combinations of features from different stimuli.

The given-new contract is a method for creating

comprehension between a speaker and a listener in a conversation.

Two different definitions of ________ offered by your book include (a) "the mental representation of a class or individual," and (b) "the meaning of objects, events, and abstract ideas."

concepts

One of the key properties of the _____ approach is that a specific concept is represented by activity that is distributed over many units in the network.

connectionist

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 where several students incorrectly remembered hearing the word sleep, false memory occurs because of

constructive memory processes.

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.

In the lexical decision task, participants are asked to

decide whether a string of letters is a word or a non-word.

An experiment measures participants' performance in judging syllogisms. Two premises and a conclusion are presented as stimuli, and participants are asked to indicate (yes or no) if the conclusion logically follows from the premises. Error rates are then calculated for each syllogism. This experiment studies _____ reasoning.

deductive

The idea that specific cognitive functions activate many areas of the brain is known as

distributed processing.

Ali works for Citrus Squeeze, a company that makes orange juice. Sales of their calcium-enhanced OJ have been poor, and the product was cancelled. His factory still had three cases of cartons, and Ali was told he could take them if he wanted them. With the cartons, Ali made several birdfeeders for his backyard and also planted tree seedlings in some of them; he used the remaining ones to build a "fort" for his four-year-old son. Ali's use of the cartons represents

divergent thinking.

A high threshold in Treisman's model of attention implies that

it takes a strong signal to cause activation.

Elementary school students in the U.S. are often taught to use the very familiar word "HOMES" as a cue for remembering the names of the Great Lakes (each letter in "HOMES" provides a first-letter cue for one of the lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, Superior). This memory procedure usually works better than repeating the names over and over. The use of this familiar word provides an example of

elaborative rehearsal.

According to Ebbinghaus's savings curve, savings is a function of

elapsed time.

Tanenhaus and coworkers' eye movement study presented participants with different pictures for interpreting the sentence, "Put the apple on the towel in the box." Their results support

environmental context

Sometimes a behavioral event can occur at the same time as a cognitive process, even though the behavior isn't needed for the cognitive process. For example, many people look toward the ceiling when thinking about a complex problem, even though "thinking" would likely continue if they didn't look up. This describes a(n)

epiphenomenon.

Colin Cherry's experiment in which participants listen to two messages simultaneously, one in each ear, found all but which of the following?

even deaf individuals process auditory information, even on a non-conscious level.

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.

Cosmides and Tooby tested participants' ability to solve variations of the Wason problem, including ones containing stories about a particular culture. Their results showed that ____ is not always necessary for conditional reasoning.

familiarity

In New Guinea, tribes that had been isolated for centuries were found that

had a large number of sophisticated language systems.

The Stroop effect demonstrates

how automatic processing can interfere with intended processing.

Shepard and Meltzer's "image rotation" experiment was so influential and important to the study of cognition because it demonstrated

imagery and perception may share the same mechanisms.

According to your text, imagery enhances memory because

imagery can be used to create connections between items to be remembered.

A researcher records a brainstorming session in an industrial research and development department rather than in an artificial laboratory setting. Later, she analyzes the recorded discussions, identifying certain problem-solving techniques. This research is an example of ____ research.

in vivo problem-solving

Hebb's idea of long-term potentiation, which provides a physiological mechanism for the long-term storage of memories, includes the idea of

increased firing in the neurons.

Sperling's delayed partial report procedure provided evidence that

information in sensory memory fades within 1 or 2 seconds.

Consider the following conditional syllogism:Premise 1: If I study, then I'll get a good grade.Premise 2: I got a good grade.Conclusion: Therefore, I studied.This syllogism is

invalid.

Viewpoint ________ is the ability to recognize the same object even if it is seen from different perspectives.

invariance

Evidence that language is a social process that must be learned comes from the fact that when deaf children find themselves in an environment where there are no people who speak or use sign language, they

invent a sign language themselves.

During a professional baseball game, a long fly ball is hit down the first base line toward the foul ball pole. If it goes to the right of the pole it will be a foul ball, and if it goes to the left it will be a home run. The umpire making this call will have the most difficulty making the judgment because

it can be very difficult to distinguish one item from another when it there is overlap between the two.

If you are folding towels that have just come out of the laundry while watching television, you may find that you don't have to pay much attention to the process of folding the towels. This sort of familiar task that does not require much of your attention would be an example of a(n) ________ task.

low-load

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 solution to the candle problem involves realizing that the

match box can be used as a shelf.

The Stroop effect demonstrates people's inability to ignore the ______ of words.

meaning

Shepard and Meltzer measured the time it took for participants to decide whether two objects were the same (two different views of the same object) or different (two different objects). These researchers inferred cognitive processes by using

mental chronometry.

The scanning task used by Kosslyn involves

mental images.

Gallese and colleagues (1996) noted that certain types of neurons, now called ________ neurons, activated when a monkey grasped food on a tray, but also activated when they watched the experimenter grasping food on a tray.

mirror

In a procedure called diffusor tensor imaging (DTI), the way in which ________ diffuse(s) along the length of a nerve fiber is measured to determine how different nerves communicate with each other.

neurotransmitters

Donald Hebb proposed that memory is represented in the brain by structural changes in all of the following EXCEPT the

neurotransmitters.

According to the behaviorists, only the study of ________ should be the emphasis of the science of psychology.

observable behavior

In Schneider and Shiffrin's experiment, in which participants were asked to indicate whether a target stimulus was present in a series of rapidly presented "frames," divided attention was easier

once processing had become automatic.

By using a(n) _____, a country could increase the percentage of individuals agreeing to be organ donors dramatically.

opt-out procedure

The pegword technique is particularly suitable for use when you need to remember items based on their

order

Experience resulting from stimulation of the senses and information from the senses that can help guide our actions is called

perception.

When light from a flashlight is moved quickly back and forth on a wall in a darkened room, it can appear to observers that there is a trail of light moving across the wall, even though physically the light is only in one place at any given time. This experience is an effect of memory that occurs because of

persistence of vision.

If kittens are raised in an environment that contains only verticals, you would predict that most of the neurons in their visual cortex would respond best to the visual presentation of a

picket fence.

If a person has a digit span of two, this indicates that he has _____ memory.

poor short-term

Behaviorists believe that the presentation of_______ increases the frequency of behavior.

positive reinforcers

The notion that every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible is called the law of

pragnanz.

Research in neuroeconomics has found that the function of the ________ may be to deal with the cognitive demands of a given task, while the ________ is responsible for handling emotional goals such as resenting an unfair outcome.

prefrontal cortex; insula

Lucille is teaching Kendra how to play racquetball. She teaches her how to hold the racquet, where to stand, and how to make effective shots. These learned skills that Lucille has acquired are an example of ________ memory.

procedural

The maintenance rehearsal task of learning a word by repeating it over and over again is most likely to

produce some short-term remembering, but fail to produce longer-term memories.

Ty has finished work on his doctoral dissertation. He studied how most adults understand words, specifically the priming effects of categorically related words and submitted a proposal to be included in a psychological conference to present his work to his peers. Presentations at the conference are grouped based on the particular topic in psychology under consideration. It is most likely that Ty's work will be presented in a conference session on

psycholinguistics.

This multiple choice question is an example of a ____ test.

recognition

Imagine that your friend James has just taken up the habit of smoking cigars because he thinks it makes him look cool. You are concerned about the detrimental effects of smoking on his health, and you raise that concern to him. James gets a bit annoyed with your criticism and says "George Burns smoked cigars, and he lived to be 100!" You might point out that a major problem with his "George Burns" argument involves

sample size.

When Sam listens to his girlfriend Susan in the restaurant and ignores other people's conversations, he is engaged in the process of ____ attention.

selective

The three structural components of the modal model of memory are

sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory.

In a dichotic listening experiment, ______ refers to the procedure that is used to force participants to pay attention to a specific message in one ear among competing messages in the other ear.

shadowing

According to memory research, studying is most effective if study sessions are

short and across several days.

A person with a reduced digit span would most likely have a problem with ________ memory.

short-term

Observations that people may actually process and manipulate information rather than simply store it for brief periods of time challenged the conceptualization of

short-term memory.

The propaganda effect demonstrates that we evaluate familiar statements as being true

simply because we have been exposed to them before.

According to the idea of _____, when we read a sentence like, "Carmelo grabbed his coat from his bedroom and his backpack from the living room, walked downstairs, and called his friend Gerry," we create a simulation of Carmelo's apartment and keep track of his location as he moves throughout the apartment.

situation models

Considering the fortress and the radiation problems together, the fortress problem represents the _____ problem.

source

Collins and Quillian explained the results of priming experiments by introducing the concept of _____ into their network model.

spreading activation

Many people receive unsolicited calls from telemarketers or unwanted "junk" mailers advertising offers for products such as cable or internet services or cellular phone companies. Most people do not consider these offers and do not make a change to the plans or services that they receive because they do not want to make a decision that requires serious consideration or thought. This is an example of the ________ bias.

status quo

If we were conducting an experiment on the effect knowledge has on categorization, we might compare the results of expert and non-expert groups. Suppose we compare horticulturalists to people with little knowledge about plants. If we asked the groups to name, as specifically as possible, five different plants seen around campus, we would predict that the expert group would primarily label plants on the _____ level, while the non-expert group would primarily label plants on the _____ level.

subordinate; basic

When two people engage in a conversation, if one person produces a specific grammatical construction in her speech and then the other person does the same, this phenomenon is referred to as

syntactic priming.

The evolutionary approach proposes that the Wason problem can be understood in terms of people's

tendency to detect when others are cheating.

A syllogism is valid if

the conclusion follows logically from the two premises.

In the famous obedience research conducted by Stanley Milgram, a participant was instructed to read a list of word pairs (e.g., "nice day," "blue dress," "fat neck") to another person. The participant would then read the list again but would only provide the first word. The other individual was to recall the word that went with this cueing word. This is an example of

the consolidation-reconsolidation effect.

Some suggest that students should study in a variety of places. This suggestion is based on research showing that people remember material better if they learned it in a number of different locations, compared to studying the same amount of time in one location. The suggestion solves a problem raised by

the encoding specificity principle.

Brain imaging studies reveal that semantics and syntax are associated with which two lobes of the cerebral cortex?

the frontal and temporal lobes

The dramatic case of patient H.M. clearly illustrates that ____ is crucial for the formation of LTMs.

the hippocampus

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.

Shallow processing of a word is encouraged when attention is focused on

the physical features of the word.

Janet is alone in a room that contains a chair and a shelf with a book resting on top. She attempts to retrieve the book, but the shelf is a foot above her reach. How will Janet retrieve the book? Psychologists would NOT classify this scenario as a problem because

the solution is immediately obvious.

Brain-imaging techniques can determine all of the following EXCEPT

the structure of individual neurons.

Imagine yourself walking from your car, bus stop, or dorm to your first class. Your ability to form such a picture in your mind depends on which of the following components of working memory?

the visuospatial sketch pad

The lesson to be learned from the imagery techniques for memory enhancement (for example, the pegword technique) is that these techniques work because

they showcase the fact that memory improvement requires a great deal of practice and perseverance.

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

they took themselves.

A researcher had participants read each of the sentences below and measured the time it took to read each sentence.Trial 1: The lamb ran past the cottage into the pasture.Trial 2: The dog ran past the house into the yard.The participants' response times were longer for _____ because of the _____ effect.

trial 1; word frequency

An advantage of the exemplar approach over the prototype approach is that the exemplar approach provides a better explanation of the ________ effect.

typicality

Amedi and coworkers used fMRI to investigate the differences between brain activation for perception and imagery. Their findings showed that when participants were ____, some areas associated with non-visual sensation (such as hearing and touch) were ____.

using visual images; deactivated

The best description of the purpose of think-aloud protocols is that they are used to determine

what information a person is attending to while solving a problem.

People tend to overestimate

what negative feelings will occur following a decision more so than positive feelings.

The pathway leading from the striate cortex to the parietal lobe is known as the

where pathway.