Psychology 405 Quiz Questions

Donovan volunteers his time to campaign for Joel Goodman. He spent all afternoon putting up "Goodman for Congress" signs around his town and arrived back at Goodman headquarters just in time to watch the Goodman-Hernandez debate on TV. Donovan was eager to watch the candidates debate each other, even though he was 100% sure he was going to vote for Goodman. Donovan's first response to the debate will most likely be

"Did you hear how well Goodman answered that question on job creation?"

The rule of the Wason four-card problem is, "If there is a vowel on one side, then there is an even number on the other side." Let's say you are presented with A, 8, M, and 13, each showing on one of four cards. To see if the rule is valid, you would have to turn over the cards showing

A & 13

Which of the following statements is true of police lineups?

A sequential lineup increases the chance that the witness compares each person in the lineup to his or her memory of the event

Which statement below is NOT true, based on the results of memory research?

Although eyewitness testimony is often faulty, people who have just viewed a videotape of a crime are quite accurate at picking the "perpetrator" from a lineup

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

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

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

a build-up and release of proactive interference

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

a chemical process that takes place at the synapse

When cleaning her closet, Nadia finds her 20-year-old wedding photo album. As she flips through the pictures, she starts to cry joyful tears. Seeing the photos and rekindling the emotions of her wedding day most likely activated her

amygdala

An experiment on the phonemic restoration effect would most likely include

an extraneous cough

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

Colin Cherry's experiment in which participants listened to two different messages, one presented to each ear, found that people

could focus on one message and ignore the other one at the same time

In the "War of the Ghosts" experiment, participants' reproductions contained inaccuracies based on

cultural expectations

When investigating the serial position curve, delaying the memory test for 30 seconds

decreases the recency effect

Funahashi and coworkers recorded neurons in the PF cortex of monkeys during a delayed response task. These neurons showed the most intense firing during

delay

Greg was recounting a fishing tale of the one that got away: "I had a huge ahi tuna on my line. I fought for it for a few minutes, then my line snapped. The tuna swam away across the pond." Greg's friend, Matt, didn't believe his story because Matt knew that tuna are salt-water fish and aren't found in ponds. Greg's account contains

descriptive information that is inconsistent with base rate information

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 showed the importance of _____ in how we understand sentences in real-life situations.

environmental context

If Peyton Manning, a professional football player, wanted to remember his 16-digit credit card number, which of the following memory techniques would you recommend?

he should think of the numbers as a sequence of football statistics

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

hippocampus

The stroop effect demonstrates...

how automatic processing can interfere with intended processing

Chaz is listening to his grandma reminisce about the first time she danced with his grandpa 60 years ago. When his grandma says, "It seemed like the song would play forever," Chaz understands that it is more likely his grandma was listening to a radio playing and not a CD. This understanding requires Chaz use a(n)

instrument inference

The task of determining the object responsible for a particular image on one's retina is called the

inverse projection problem

By comparing reaction times across different tasks, Donders was able to conclude how long the mind needs to perform a certain cognitive task. Donders interpreted the difference in reaction time between the simple and choice conditions of his experiment as indicating how long it took to

make a decision about the stimulus

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

A property of control processes in the modal model of memory is that they

may differ from one task to another

The main difference between early and late selection models of attention is that in late selection models, selection of stimuli for final processing doesn't occur until the information is analyzed for

meaning

The observation that older adults often become nostalgic for the "good old days" reflects the self-image hypothesis, which states that

memory for life events is enhanced during the time we assume our life identities

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

The idea that we remember life events better because we encounter the information over and over in what we read, see on TV, and talk about with other people is called the

narrative rehearsal hypothesis

The concept of distributed neural coding proposes that a specific object, like a face, is represented across a number of

neurons

The study of behavior of humans with brain damage is called

neuropsychology

People perceive vertical and horizontal orientations more easily than other orientations according to the

oblique effect

Speech segmentation is defined as

organizing the sounds of speech into individual words

The process by which small objects become perceptually grouped to form larger objects is the principle of

perceptual organization

One of Chomsky's most persuasive arguments for refuting Skinner's theory of language acquisition was his observation that children

produce sentences they have never heard

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

recognition

The water-jug problem demonstrates that one consequence of having a procedure that does provide a solution to a problem is that, if well-learned, it may prevent us from

seeing more efficient solutions to the problem

The idea of a grandmother cell is consistent with...

specificity coding

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

Gentner and Goldinmeadow (2003) illustrated that analogical encoding causes problem solvers to pay attention to ____ features that ____ their ability to solve other problems.

structural; enhance

The fortress problem involves a fortress and marching soldiers, while the radiation problem involves a tumor and rays. Therefore, the two problems have very different

surface features

The idea that the rules governing the grouping of words in a sentence is the primary determinant of the way a sentence is parsed is part of the _____ approach to parsing.

syntax-first

Computer programs have been designed that can recognize matching human faces with the same accuracy as a human being, but the computer loses its efficiency at this process when

the faces are viewed from an angle

A synapse is...

the gap that separates two different neurons

Which statement below is most closely associated with the early history of the study of imagery?

thought is always accompanied by imagery

The word "bad" has ____ phoneme(s).

three

Kirk is a generally anxious person. His anxiety sometimes gets in the way when he tries to make decisions. The anxiety Kirk feels is an example of an ________ emotion.

incidental

Bonnie has ordered her monthly supply of medicines through the mail for the past five years. Except for one order, all orders have arrived within two business days. Bonnie placed an order yesterday, and she expects to receive her order tomorrow. Bonnie is using

inductive reasoning

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

When we look at a record of the physical energy produced by conversational speech in a person's native language, we see that the speech signal

is continuous

According to the typicality effect,

items that are high in prototypicality are judged more rapidly as being in a group

The investigation of how behavior is strengthened by presentation of positive reinforcers (e.g., food) or withdrawal of negative reinforcers (e.g., shock) is best known as

operant conditioning

Which theorist is responsible for proposing the idea of a filter model of attention?

Donald Broadbent

Who introduced the flow diagram to represent what is happening in the mind?

Donald Broadbent

The "cognitive revolution"...

was a gradual process that occurred over a few decades

Recent research on memory, based largely on fear conditioning in rats, indicates that

when a memory is reactivated, it becomes capable of being changed or altered, just as it was immediately after it was formed

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

15-20 seconds or less

The "magic number," according to Miller, is

7 plus or minus 2

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 of the following is an example of a semantic memory?

I remember the big island of Hawaii has many active volcanoes

Which of the following is a criticism of analytic introspection?

It produces variable results from person to person.

Given what we know about the operation of the phonological loop, which of the following word lists would be most difficult for people to retain for 15 seconds?

MAC,CAN,CAP,MAN,MAP

Amber lives in a housing development between two parallel streets that both connect to a freeway. She usually takes the street to the south when heading southbound on the freeway to work, but that street is closed for repairs for three months. Amber takes the street to the north during that time. After the street to the south is re-opened, she continues to take the street to the north, even though it is a slightly longer route. Continuing to take the street to the north represents

a mental set

Action potentials occur in the

axon

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

basic

The tendency to think that a syllogism is valid if its conclusion is believable is called the ________.

belief bias

________ is the process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.

binding

The memory mechanism Hebb proposed is associated with

both changes at the synapse and long term potentiation

The experimental technique that involves removing part of the brain is known as

brain ablation

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

The key structural components of neurons are

cell body, dendrites, axon

Which of the following would not be an important factor in automatic processing?

close attention

A mental conception of the layout of a physical space is known as a

cognitive map

When the process of analogical problem solving was applied to the fortress and radiation problems, which of the following represented the mapping step of this process?

connecting the fortress with the tumor

Learning in the connectionist network is represented by adjustments to network

connection weights

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

____ transforms new memories from a fragile state, in which they can be disrupted, to a more permanent state, in which they are resistant to disruption.

consolidation

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

Which of the following everyday scenarios is most likely to support what the early selection approach would say about how attention will affect the performance of the two tasks involved?

conversing on the phone while doing a crossword puzzle

In the movie Apollo 13, astronauts aboard a damaged spacecraft have to build a carbon dioxide filter out of random items that are aboard the ship with them. If they do not, they will all die rapidly of carbon dioxide poisoning. The fact that they are able to do so with the help of experts on Earth is similar to the _______ approach developed by Ronald Finke.

divergent thinking

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

According to your textbook, perception goes beyond the simple receipt of sensory information. It is involved in many different cognitive skills. Which of the following is not one of those skills as noted by the chapter?

experiencing neuromodulation

The principle illustrated when most people are able to recognize a variety of examples of chairs even though no one category member may have all of the characteristic properties of "chairs" (e.g., most chairs have four legs but not all do) is

family resemblance

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

far side of the front yard, away from the house

Holyoak and Koh presented different versions of the light bulb problem to assist in solving the radiation problem. They found the ____ version to be more effective, because it had ____ features in common with the radiation problem.

fragile glass; structural

The _____ lobe of the cortex receives information from all of the senses and is responsible for coordination of the senses, as well as higher cognitive functions such as thinking and problem solving.

frontal

Experts categorize problems based on

general principles that problems share

Noam Chomsky proposed that

humans are genetically programmed to acquire and use language

One reason that most people do not easily solve the original (abstract) version of the Wason four-card problem is that they

ignore the falsification principle

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

illusory correlation

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

"Early" researchers of imagery (beginning with Aristotle until just prior to the dominance of behaviorism) proposed all of the following ideas EXCEPT

imagery requires a special mechanism

Regarding children's language development, Noam Chomsky noted that children generate many sentences they have never heard before. From this, he concluded that language development is driven largely by

inborn biological program

Katie and Inez are roommates taking the same psychology class. They have a test in four days during a 10:00 - 11:00 AM class period. Both women intend to study for three hours, but because of different work schedules, Katie will study one hour for each of the next three days, while Inez will study three hours the day before the exam. What could you predict about their performances?

katie should perform better because of the spacing effect

Scene schema is

knowledge about what is contained in a typical scene

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

observable behavior

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.

organizational context during learning

"You can't have any pudding unless you eat your meat," says a man to his son at the dinner table. This is an example of

permission schema

According to Treisman's "attenuation model," which of the following would you expect to have the highest threshold for most people?

platypus

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

pragnaz

An important contribution to the field of psychology resulting from Wilhelm Wundt founding his laboratory at the University of Leipzig in 1879 was

producing PhDs who later established psychology departments at other schools, including some in the United States.

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

prosopagnosia

B.F. Skinner, the modern champion of behaviorism, proposed that language is learned through

reinforcement

In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's character grows frustrated as he experiences the same day in his life over and over again. With each "passing" day, he is able to respond to people's actions more and more quickly because of

repetition priming

The misinformation effect can be explained by

retroactive interferences

Jeannie loves to dance, having taken ballet for many years. She is now learning salsa dancing. Although the movements are very different from the dances she is familiar with, she has found a successful memory strategy of linking the new dance information to her previous experiences as a dancer and to her own affection for dance. This strategy suggests reliance on

self-reference effect

Remembering that a tomato is actually a fruit rather than vegetable is an example of ________ memory.

semantic

The predominant type of coding in LTM is...

semantic

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

semantic memory

The _____ model includes associations between concepts and the property of spreading activation.

semantic network

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

When you listen to someone speaking a foreign language with which you are unfamiliar, the words may all seem to sound the same. You may find yourself wondering how those speakers are communicating when they are using the same words over and over again. The Gestalt law that is affecting you here is the law of

similarity

When presenting lineups to eyewitnesses, it has been found that a(n) ____ lineup is much more likely to result in an innocent person being falsely identified.

simultaneous

Your text describes the case of M.G.S. who underwent brain surgery as treatment for severe epilepsy. Testing of M.G.S. pre- and post-surgery revealed that the right visual cortex is involved in the

size of the field of view

Compared to the whole-report technique, the partial-report procedure involves

smaller response set

The experiment for which people were asked to make fame judgments for both famous and non-famous names (and for which Sebastian Weissdorf was one of the names to be remembered) illustrated the effect of _____ on memory.

source misattributions

In their imagery study, Finke and Pinker presented a four-dot display briefly to participants. After a two-second delay, participants then saw an arrow, and their task was to indicate whether the arrow would have pointed to any of the dots in the previous display. The significance of their results was they called into question the ____ explanation of imagery.

tacit knowledge

Experts ___ than novices

take a more effective approach to organizing the solution to a problem

Damage to Wenicke's area is in which lobe of the brain?

temporal

One way to ensure that a person does not remember that a word was presented to them in the past (when testing priming) is to

test patients with amnesia

Rosch and coworkers conducted an experiment in which participants were shown a category label, like car or vehicle, and then, after a brief delay, saw a picture. The participants' task was to indicate as rapidly as possible whether the picture was a member of the category. Their results showed

the priming effect was most robust for basic level categories

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Symposium on Information Theory, George Miller presented a paper suggesting that...

there are limits to the human ability to process information

Which of the following stimuli were used in Ebbinghaus's "memory" experiment discussed in your text?

three letter nonsense words

Your text describes cross-cultural studies of categorization with U.S. and Itzaj participants. Given the results of these studies, we know that if asked to name basic level objects for a category, U.S. participants would answer ____ and Itzaj participants would answer ____.

tree;oak

Which of the following would be in a basic level category?

truck

Behaviorists branded the study of imagery as being unproductive because

visual images are invisible to everyone except the person experiencing them