Chapter 1 - Introduction to Cognition

How does the question "What is 723 divided by 6?" differ in terms of cognition from the question "How many hands did Aristotle have?

It involves the implementation of procedural knowledge.

How does the priming phenomenon complicate models of cognition?

It requires a mechanism to account for the influence of contextual meaning.

According to the word frequency effect, which of the following words should take the shortest amount of time to identify in a long-term memory search?

Lunch

Why might the process analysis assumption about the operation of human cognition fail to describe reality?

Operations in the human brain may be done in parallel in some circumstances.

In what way did the introduction of computer technology influence the contemporary understanding of psychological processes?

Researchers realized the internal machinations of a computer were similar to that of the human mind.

Which of the following is the first step in the process of cognition when reading the question, "How many hands did Aristotle have?"

Sensory recognition

How does the study of professional typists provide support for the existence of parallel processing in human cognition?

Skilled typists appear to encode new information at the same time they type old information.

How did the practical challenges of World War II contribute to the cognitive revolution in the field of psychology?

Technical operators made errors of attention that occurred outside rote learning contexts.

Which of the following best describes the concept of metacognition?

The act of thinking about thought itself

Which of the following best encapsulates the definition of cognition?

The collection of processes used to perceive and use information from the environment

Why did the structuralist approach to psychology developed by Edward Titchener fail to form a coherent understanding of cognition?

The emphasis on subjective experience produced inconsistent results between researchers.

Why do most studies of cognition lack direct ecological validity?

The extreme complexity of human cognition requires the study of individual minute components.

Which of the following best describes the mental processes that occur when answering simple factual questions like "Does a taxi have wheels?"

The mind rapidly matches external sensory information against memory, and then assembles the meaning.

How do the differences in recall accuracy between the beginning, ends, and middles of lists inform our understanding of cognitive processes?

The oldest information is recalled more accurately than new information, even after longer delays.

Which of the following best describes the standard model of memory?

The senses translate environmental data into short-term memory. and a mental process runs checks against long-term memory.

Which of the following is an example of an implicit rather than an explicit memory?

The steps involved in riding a bicycle

How did British researchers Cherry and Broadbent contribute to the emerging cognitive consensus with their work on wartime psychology?

The study of attention concerned internal processes rather than conditioned responses.

Why are response times a fundamental measurement tool used in cognitive research?

They track one of the chief observable attributes of mental processes.

How does top-down processing differ from bottom-up processing?

Top-down processing involves existing knowledge rather than environmental information.

How were Chomsky's linguistic criticisms of behaviorism backed up by the work of verbal learning researchers?

Verbal learning researchers discovered that people form associations between words.

Why does the question "Does a robin have wings?" take less time to answer than the question "Does a robin have feet?"

Wings are more readily associated with birds than are legs. The second question likely requires slightly more conscious processing than does the first question.

Sensory inputs first interact with the memory system when they

become encoded by perceptual mechanisms.

The topic of embodiment examines

how our interaction with the physical world influences thought.

Hermann von Ebbinghaus's early experiments with memory demonstrated that

information can persist in memory even if it can't be consciously recalled.

According to Allen Newell and Herb Simon, the human mind is most like a computer in that

it is fed symbols and manipulates them internally.

Which of the following examples is an analogy of the concept of channel capacity?

A kindergarten teacher cannot make out any specific words when his students shout out all at once.

Which of the following statements best describes the relationship between cognition and temporal orientation?

A successful organism must be able to anticipate the effects of its actions.

Which of the following experimental results would be the easiest to replicate?

An experiment with small p-values and large effect sizes

Technical operators made errors of attention that occurred outside rote learning contexts.

Bruner and Miller founded a landmark center for study at Harvard University.

Which of the following research goals would most likely fall under the purview of behaviorism?

Determining the most effective audio cue to announce an emergency broadcast

Doug studies vocabulary for hours and has the list down pat, but tries and fails to come up with the definition of a tricky word while taking the actual test. Which of the following most likely describes this failure of memory?

Doug did not successfully retain the definition of the word in his mental storage.

An experiment measured vocal response times to increasingly complex sets of multiplication questions. The results showed that compared to college students, fourth graders took much longer to respond as the question complexity increased. Which of the following best explains this difference?

Fourth graders did not have the relevant information stored strongly in memory.

How did Aristotle's thinking influence the foundations of psychology?

He insisted on using objective observation to formulate a theory of how learning takes place

Which of the following questions is most likely to fall under the purview of cognitive psychology?

How much brighter does one light source have to be than another for an observer to notice a difference?