Psych Exam 2 Practice Questions

The memory technique that associates rhymes with a list of words in a particular order is called the __________.

pegword method

Homeostasis is a state of...

physiological stability

It is not useful to estimate IQ based on self-reports because people with __________ may well overestimate their own abilities.

poor metacognitive skills

What part of the brain did investigators note was "highly g-loaded" for reasoning tasks?

prefrontal cortex

When we have encountered a stimulus before, we are able to identify it more quickly and easily. The term for this subtype of implicit memory is __________.

priming

The entrance exam that Jacklyn is taking for graduate school has a number of questions, such as glove is to hand as sock is to ______. Questions of this type are considered to be

problems of inducing structure

Our memory for how to do things is called __________.

procedural memory

Psychologists measure people's memory abilities by assessing three capacities: __________.

recall, recognition, and relearning

Which mental phenomenon can be defined as "the retention of information over time"?

memory

A child's first words are generally spoken at about what age?

10-13 months

Heredity is credited with ____% of the variation in intelligence among

50

According to Piaget's cognitive-development theory

Children actively construct knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world

The WISC, WIPPSI, and WAIS-IV are all variations on an approach to intelligence testing originally developed by __________.

David Wechsler

__________ allows you to remember auditory stimuli for up to 5 or 10 seconds.

Echoic memory

The average IQ of the population has been rising by about three points per decade. This phenomenon, named for the researcher who discovered it, is called the __________.

Flynn Effect

ZAK, BOL, GID, YAF, and other nonsense syllables were used in some of the earliest studies of memory, conducted by __________.

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Which of the following statements is true? -It is easier to implant a false memory from the recent past than a false memory from the distant past. -It is easier to implant a false memory that is plausible than one that is implausible. -Recovering repressed memories is like rewinding a videorecording of one's life events. -It is nearly impossible to implant a false memory in a person, unless the person is high in suggestibility.

It is easier to implant a false memory that is plausible than one that is implausible.

Mark and Kathy take their 2-year-old son to the supermarket every Saturday. Each week, the same sequence of events unfolds: Their son screams, demanding that they buy him treats. Although they refuse to give in to his demands, he continues to scream. Finally, either Mark or Kathy gets in their son's face and yells at the top of their lungs "Shut up!" He stops screaming instantly. What operant conditioning concepts are illustrated in this story?

Punishment

As Kayla was introduced to the seven members of the committee who would be interviewing her for a scholarship, she silently repeated all the names to herself, in order. Kayla was using

Rehearsal

According to the Atkinson-Shiffrin model of memory, the memory system that allows for the sensation of a visual pattern, sound, or touch to linger for a brief moment after the sensory stimulation is over is called the...

Semantic Memory

Janis knows that you have been studying eating behavior in your psychology class and asks you to explain why, in spite of her best interests, she always overeats on Thanksgiving day when she is at her parents' house. Which of the following would be the LEAST likely claim you would tell her?

She consumes more food because of the quantity of food that is presented. She is likely to consume more food because of the variety of food that is presented. She consumes more food because she is in the presence of other people.

Which IQ test, first published in 1916, was originally developed for children but has since been extended to adults, and involves testing vocabulary and memory for pictures, naming familiar objects, repeating sentences, and following commands?

Stanford-Binet

When we need to make an important decision, and carefully consider all the angles and options, we are using __________ thinking.

System 2

That frustrating feeling of knowing you know something but cannot pull it out of your brain at the moment you want it is known as the TOT phenomenon, because __________.

TOT stands for "tip-of-the-tongue"

In order to weaken or eliminate a conditioned response, you would present

The Conditioned Stimulus alone several times

How do children develop special attachments to their mothers, according to John Bowlby...?

The infant is biologically programmed to emit behaviors that triggers a protective response from adults

In a study on decision making, Timothy Wilson and his colleagues gave female college students a choice of five art posters to take home but gave them different directions about how to make their choice. Which group of students was happier with their poster choice after a few weeks had passed?

The students who "went with their gut" and took the posters they liked without thinking it over.

When trying to recall an event, which of the following processes best describes how that takes place?

We actively reconstruct our memories using cues and information available to us.

A mental "rule of thumb" for problem-solving is referred to as

a heuristic

Ann had her purse snatched as she walked out to her car. The police investigating the crime ask Ann to try to pick the purse-snatcher out of a line-up of eight suspects. The police are basically using

a recognition task to recover info from Ann's memory

The initial stage of learning a response is called

acquisition

Which term describes a step-by-step process of learned procedures we can use to solve particular problems?

algorithms

Omar's wife conceived a baby seven days ago, and does not yet know she is pregnant. His wife's pregnancy is currently in the

germinal stage

Which of the following describes the term "schema"?

an organized knowledge structure or mental model that we have stored in memory

Many scientific breakthroughs have come by way of __________, which involves recognizing similarities between two unrelated subjects. This type of problem-solving allows us to look at things in a new way.

analogies

According to Robert Sternberg, intelligence can be divided into three major parts:

analytical intelligence, creative intelligence, and practical intelligence

When people rely on mental shortcuts to reach a conclusion or make a decision, they often fail to take into account how common a behavior or characteristic is in general. This kind of information is called the __________ by psychological scientists.

base rate

Jade rearranges the letters HITREDBAT into "hit red bat." This is an example of

chunking

Without even noticing that you are doing it, what memory technique do you use to remember larger quantities of information, even though your short-term memory capacity only holds about nine bits of information?

chunking

Humans have developed strategies that keep our decision-making to a manageable minimum by relying on "fast and frugal" thinking. This kind of frugality is more generally known as __________.

cognitive economy

Because we process so much information every day, our brains have become __________ in order to economize our mental effort.

cognitive misers

Controlled studies of speed reading show that after a person is reading more than 400 words per minute __________.

comprehension is cut in half

Studies have shown the students perform slightly better on exams if they are tested in the same room where they learned the material. This is evidence for __________.

context-dependent learning

Which term means a certain window of time in which a particular ability, such as language, must be learned in order for it to be learned at all?

critical period

The two primary reasons why short-term memories fade are __________ and __________.

decay; interference

Hermann Ebbinghaus discovered the law of __________, which says that people tend to remember information better when they spread their learning out over long intervals rather than cram it into short ones.

distributed versus massed practice

There are various techniques available to help people improve their ability to recall material. For example, when you remember something new by connecting it mentally to something you already know, you are using

elaborative rehearsal

Neuroimaging studies of the brain show that the sensory areas become active when we think about objects, actions, and events. This is consistent with the __________ view of thinking.

embodied

The model of the mind that takes into account the human ability to mentally simulate experiences is called the __________ model.

embodiment

We can use mnemonics to help us __________ information we want to retain in our memories.

encode

Researchers told teachers that 20 percent of children who had taken an IQ test were "bloomers" who would soon reach their full intellectual potential, even though in reality those children were no different from the other children in the group. Later in the year, when these "bloomer" children were tested, they scored four points higher than the rest of the group. This outcome is an example of __________.

expectancy effects

More than 300 convicted prisoners to date have been released because DNA evidence showed they were innocent, despite confident testimony from __________.

eyewitnesses

People who believe intelligence is __________ tend to take more academic risks than people who do not have this mindset.

flexible

Which of the following terms refers to the capacity to learn new ways to solve problems, a capacity that tends to decline with age?

fluid intelligence

Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences can also be thought of as comprising different __________.

frames of mind

Nathalia listens intently as her economics professor describes the 4 percent unemployment rate in her county. Troubled by this statistic, she later talks with her friend Gigi, who is enrolled in a different section of the same economics course. "Unemployment in our county is horrible!" laments Nathalia. "What do you mean?" replies Gigi. "The professor clearly told us that 96 percent of people in our county have a job, which sounds pretty good to me." Which barrier to reasoning rationally could be affecting Nathalia and Gigi's conclusions?

framing

Helle is trying to hang up a picture in her dorm room. She has the framed picture, she has the nail, but she does not have a hammer. She puts the project aside until her roommate comes in and suggests that Helle use her clog shoe to hammer in the nail. Which of the following would explain why Helle did not think of this solution immediately?

functional fixedness

In a research study in which people were asked to figure out how to mount a candle on the wall when they were given only a candle, a book of matches, and a box of tacks, what concept was being tested?

functional fixedness

Although it is presented as the most common kind of memory loss in the popular media, with depictions of someone losing all memory of his or her past, __________ is not actually the most common kind of amnesia.

generalized amnesia

Language is a system that allows us to create an infinite number of meaningful combinations of words and to communicate new ideas. This is because language is __________.

generative

When an outcome happens that makes you think "I knew it all along," be careful that you are not giving in to __________.

hindsight bias

Schemas refer to concepts in our memories about __________.

how certain actions, objects, and ideas relate to each other

The successful resolution of the .... Results in the experience of a unified sense of self

identity vs. role confusion

Longitudinal studies of the stability of IQ through adulthood generally reveal that __________.

intelligence is relatively stable over time, but not perfectly so, as indicated by strong positive correlations

Which of the following refers to a theory that argues that characteristics of language shape our thoughts, but does not go so far as say that language actually defines our thinking?

linguistic relativity

Although many types of studies show that IQ is heritable (that is, it runs in families), there's one situation in which this does not appear to be the case. This is for people, especially children, who __________.

live at or below the poverty line

To remember information such as a telephone number until you can finish dialing it, you could just say the number over and over again until it is fixed in your mind. This memory technique is called __________.

maintenance rehearsal

A memory that is actually false but "feels real" and can be triggered by, for example, looking at a list of associated words, is called a(n) __________.

memory illusion

In Piaget's theory, the most obvious change as children move from the sensorimotor stage to the preoperational stage is an extraordinary increase in

mental representation

Sometimes when we are trying to solve a problem, we get stuck by looking at the problem in only one way. This phenomenon is known as __________.

mental set

Dee Dee has to remember 4 items that he needs at the corner market, so he visualizes the path he will take to get there. He imagines a bar of soap hanging from a large tree, envisions a roll of paper towels next to a stoplight, "sees" a packet of gum on the newspaper rack, and imagines the fire hydrant spurting out soda. Which memory strategy is Dee Dee relying on?

method of loci

According to Bandura, your motivation to perform an observed response depends

on your expectation of being reinforced for the response

Claudia wants to send a fragile vase to her parents for their anniversary, but she can't find any appropriate packing material in her house. She decides to pop some popcorn and use that to pack around the vase. In this case, Claudia has

overcome functional fixedness in solving her problem

Kailee has learned the word "kitty," but she uses this word when she is referring to cats, bunnies, squirrels, and other small furry animals. Kailee's use of this word illustrates

overextension

Under most circumstances, which is a comparatively easier memory retrieval task to perform?

recognition

If a test yields nearly identical scores when it is retaken after a two-month interval, the test is said to be

reliable

When we judge the likelihood of an event based on how prevalent that event has been in our past experience, we are relying on the __________ heuristic.

representativeness

Operant conditioning is a type of learning in which

responses come to be controlled by their consequences

Which of the following is one of the three processes of memory?

retrieval

In Pavlov's orignial experiement on classical conditioning, the unconditioned response was

salivation elicited by meat powder

Although using __________ can sometimes lead to mistakes, they provide us with a frame of reference for interpreting new situations.

schemas

Larry tells you that his 10-year-old cousin recently completed an intelligence test that translated raw scores into deviation IQ scores. Larry knows that his cousin's score was 120, but he is not sure what this means. You should tell him that his cousin

scored above the mean for 10-year-olds

When we make a decision, we are __________.

selecting from a set of alternatives

Zhenya remembers that St. Paul is the capital of Minnesota. Alina remembers that she lived in St. Paul when she was 12 years old. Zhenya is demonstrating __________ memory, whereas Alina is demonstrating __________ memory.

semantic; episodic

In which memory system is information retained for the shortest amount of time?

sensory memory

The procedure in which reinforcers gradually guide one's actions toward a desired behavior is called

shaping

Studies of twins raised apart showed that intelligence correlations between these siblings was __________ those of twins raised together.

similar to

Charles Spearman did not believe that g or "general intelligence" explained everything. He posited the existence of another factor that he called "s" for __________, which would govern how well we perform in a particular domain.

specific intelligence

Studies of intelligence and memory, reaction time, brain structure, and other related concepts converge on a core finding: Intelligence is related (although imperfectly) to __________.

speed of information processing

During the eugenics movement in the 1920s, laws were passed in 33 U.S. states requiring the __________ of people with low IQs.

sterilization

Which of the following terms refers to the grammatical rules that govern how we put words together into meaningful groups?

syntax

When we make a guess as to how likely something is to happen based on how quickly the answer comes to mind we are using __________.

the availability heuristic

When we seek out evidence that supports an opinion or belief that we already hold, we are engaging in __________.

the confirmation bias

Warrick was posing for his girlfriend while she painted a picture for her art class. She had asked him to hold his mouth in a frown because she was trying to depict someone who was sad and dejected. Now that he has finished posing, Warrick finds that he is feeling somewhat unhappy, but he is not really sure why. This type of reaction is consistent with which of the following?

the facial feedback theory

After seeing your new neighbor walking very stiffly and primly by your house wearing horn-rimmed glasses on a chain, a cardigan sweater, and her hair in a bun, you decide she must be a librarian. Your judgment is based on

the representativeness heuristic

Mental activities such as learning, remembering, perceiving, communicating, believing, and deciding can all be included under the overarching term __________.

thinking

The term "mondegreen" refers to certain song lyrics that are commonly misheard as completely different strings of words, often combinations that make no sense. Mondegreens are an example of __________ processing.

top-down

Shaquille is a professional basketball player. He never knows for sure which of his shots will result in a basket, but the more shots he takes, the more baskets he makes. In this example, Shaquille's shooting is being reinforced on

variable-ratio schedule

The fact that children in different cultures ____ in the age at which basic motor skills appear demonstrates that ____.

vary somewhat, environmental factors can slow or accelerate early motor development

Harlow's research with monkeys raised with two types of artificial mothers found that when frightened, infant monkeys went to the artificial mother that...

was made of cloth