Cognitive Psychology Final Exam Review
Which of the following suggests that the analog approach cannot always explain how mental images are represented?
After viewing ambiguous objects (e.g., the star of David), people have difficulty recognizing portions of the objects (e.g., a parallelogram).
In a mental rotation task, which of the following best describes the relationship between the angle of rotation required to align pairs of objects and the reaction time to decide whether two objects are the same?
Angle of rotation and reaction time are positively correlated for picture-plane and depth pairs.
Imagine that you participated in an experiment where you were seated in a professor's office for 35 s, and then you were taken to another room where you were given a memory test for the objects in the office. Which of the following outcomes would you be least likely to experience?
False recall of objects not typically found in an office.
In the experiment where participants were asked about the presence of features on animals that were either smaller but strongly associated with the animal (does a cat have claws?) or larger but less well associated with the specific animal (e.g., does a cat have a head?), what was the effect of manipulating whether participants were asked to imagine the animals on their reaction time to answer the questions?
Imagining produced faster responses about larger features (e.g., head) than smaller features (e.g, claws), whereas not imagining produced faster responses for smaller features than larger features.
Imagine that you were asked to estimate the distance between pairs of establishments in a geographic area that you had memorized. How would the number of landmarks in between those establishments influence your distance estimates?
Increases in the number of intervening landmarks would increase distance estimates.
When participants were asked to memorize a fictional map with landmarks placed various distances apart from each other and then imagine themselves traveling between different pairs of landmarks, what was the effect of the distance between pairs on the reaction time to "arrive" at the destination?
It took participants longer to mentally travel between location that were at further physical distance.
In the experiment on memory for gender stereotypes (Dunning & Sherman, 1997), how did the consistency of sentences with those stereotypes affect memory?
Participants remembered sentences that were consistent stereotypes most often.
According to the border bias phenomenon, how do people estimate distances depending on how they are located relative to a geographic border?
People estimate the distance between locations as larger if they are on different sides of the border.
Which of the following statements best describe the difference between perception and mental imagery?
Perception involves using environmental stimuli and information from long term memory whereas mental imagery using only information from long term memory.
According to your textbook, which of the following cognitive activities are not a form of spatial cognition?
Rehearsing a passage of text.
In the Implicit Association Task, what pattern of results is taken as evidence that participant holds an implicit stereotype?
Responses are faster for the key paired with concepts that are consistent with the stereotype.
What is the distinction between semantic and episodic memory?
Semantic memory refers to general knowledge, whereas episodic memory refers to memory for specific events.
In Barlett's (1932) study, how did prior knowledge interact with experimental materials when British students read the Native American story "The War of Ghosts" and were later tested on the details of the story?
Students recalled details more consistent with a British perspective and forgot details inconsistent with that perspective.
Why are cognitive psychologists less interested in the information-processing approach than they were in earlier years?
They now realize that the complexity of human thinking requires more sophisticated models.
Which of the following best describes the results from the experiment where participants mentally rotated an object after either watching a motor rotate the object or after physical rotating it themselves?
Unique brain activity in the motor cortex associated with manually rotating the object suggested that motor processing can underlie mental rotation.
According to the spatial framework model, which dimensions are represented most effectively?
Vertical
what is the difference between quantity and accuracy approaches to memory?
accuracy emphasizes an exact match between recalled information and actual events, while quantity assesses the amount of correct information retrieved
a researcher hypothesizes that a certain form of amnesia impairs explicit memory but does not affect implicit memory. which of the following dissociations would support their prediction?
amnesiacs shoe deficit in free recall, but no difference in completing word fragments with the first word that comes to mind relative to healthy controls
one of the memory impairments that hm experienced after having his hippocampi removed was that he could not form new memories of events that occur after surgery. what is this memory disorder called?
anterograde amnesia
one advantage of that studies of autobiography memory have over memory experiments involving word list is
autobiographical memory studies have more ecological validity
Which of the following statements is the least consistent with the suggestion that basic-level categories are special?
basic level names have the fewest semantic association.
imagine that you are in a psychology experiment and you are asked to remember various strings of letter, such a DIYFBIYMCA. how would chunking make it easier to remember these strings?
by reducing the number of units to remember
according to current conceptions of working memory processes the finding that working memory span is larger words with fewer rather than more syllables suggest that words with fewer syllables
can be rehearsed more often in a limited amount of time
according to george miller, short term memory
can store 7 plus or minus 2 units of information
Which statement best describes how categories compare to concepts?
concepts are mental representations of objects group based on common features, whereas categories are groups of the actual objects themselves.
which if the following movements emphasized the human tendency to actively organize what we see?
connectionism
which of the following characterizes autobiographical memories?
despite some errors, they are largely accurate and reach back to early childhood memory errors typically concern peripheral instead of central details they are constructive and blend related experiences at retrieval
according to the levels of processing framework, which of the following encoding operations is the "deepest" from of processing?
determining if words rhyme with another word
the atkinson shiffrin modal model of memory inspired research on which of the following
differences between short-term long-term memory item properties that improve storage in short term memory how short term processing influence storage in long term
how does the encoding specificity principle differ from the levels of processing framework?
encoding specificity proposes that encoding operations are most effective when they are similar tot he operations used at retrieval
According to the prototype approach to categorization, categories tend to have graded structure. Which of the following statements is consistent with this idea?
exemplars within a category vary in their representativeness.
in their comparison of metacognitive estimates of test performance for high and low performing students, dunning, johnson, ehrlinger, and Kruger (2003) found that?
high performance accurately estimate their performance, whereas low performers are overconfident in their performace
According to the parallel distributed processing approach, graceful degradation can explain:
how the brain provides partial memories
Which of the following is not a characteristic of the parallel distributed processing approach?
information processing occurs in a serial fashion
the relationship between memory confidence and memory accuracy
is moderately correlates showing that higher confidence sometimes, but not always is associated with more accurate memories
the episodic buffer, a late addition at baddleys working memory model, has been describes as intermediate to working and long term memory. what aspects of the episodic buffer are most consistent with this characterization?
it combines accessible verbal and visual information with information from long term memory
when an individual experiences an event such as a car accident and is later told that the car ran a stop sign when it passed through a yield sign, what effect does this information typically have on the individuals memory for the original event?
it impairs memory for the original event by creating retroactive interferance
an english speaking individual is attempting to learn the German word for parachute "fallschirm." The individual notices that the word sounds similar to "fall chimp" (a falling chimpanzee) and associates the word with an image of chimpanzee falling off a edge and opening a parachute. which of the following mnemonics does this example describe?
keyword method
godden and baddeley (1975) demonstrated environmental context effects in scuba divers who either learned and were tested on land and/or under water. what did their results show?
learning and testing in the same context produced better recall
overall, how do memory experts compare to novices on measures of cognitive ability?
memory experts only superior to novices on the memory tasks they have practiced
which of the following concepts best describes the subjective awareness of how well one has understood what one has read?
metacomprehension
Despite it's ability to explain a huge variety human behaviors in cognitive tasks, the Adaptive Control of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) model does not appeal to _______?
neurobiological plausibility
tip of tongue states occur when people know the target word they are searching for but cannot recall it. which of the following provides evidence that the word is available in memory but not immediately accessible?
people are able to identify attributes of target words more often than chance
one piece of evidence for the phonological loop comes from experiments in which people are asked to recall strings of letters that either have similar soundings names ( C T D G V B) or different sounding names (C W Q K R X) which of the following results occurs in these studies?
people recall fewer letters with similar sounding names
Which of the following best describes how the boundary extension phenomenon illustrates schema effects memory for visual scenes?
people remember viewing a greater portion of a scene with clipped boundaries than was actually shown.
what does research show regarding the accuracy of flashbulb memories?
people sometimes remember flashbulb memories better than ordinary memories, but this is due to standard mechanisms such as rehearsal,distictivness, and elabortation
what underlies the own-ethnicity bias on face recognition?
people usually have more expertise with faces within their own ethnic groups
according to the study by walker and colleagues (1997) which best characterizes the forgetting of pleasant and unpleasant feeling associates with memories for earlier events?
pleasant feeling are forgotten less than unpleasant feeling
When participants were presented with scripts of common everyday activities, what ere the effects of the timing of the presentation of scripts labels?
presenting a label before the scripts produced better memory for script details.
a musician plagiarizes a portion of a song, but has no awareness of doing so. which of the follwoing could have prevented this memory error?
proactive interference
retrospective memory involves looking back into the past to retrieve details of events and ideas. How does this form of memory differ from prospective memory?
prospective memory involves remembering to perform an action in the future
what aspect of serial position curves in free recall shows evidence for short term memory?
recency effects indicate that items at the end of a list are better recalled because they are still in short term memory at the beginning of the recall period
the finding that memory performance diminishes across subsequent test of categorically related material, but can later recover when a new category is learned is referred to as
release from proactive interferance
what did roediger and karpickes (2006) research show when comparing the effects of repeated study and studying followed by a test on long-term memory?
repeated study produced better performance than testing at a short retentions interval, but testing produced better performance at longer retention intervals
which of the following is an indirect test of memory
repetition printing
a man is being tested in a cognitive psychology laboratory. If he has blind sight, he will
say he cannot see an object, even though he points in the correct direction
when watching a friend twirl a sparkler, you notice that it crates a trail that you perceive as continuous image. what underlies your perception of the light trail?
sensory memory allows you to retain a brief impression of the image
which statement best describes how information is stored temporarily, while working memory describes how information is permanently stored
short term memory describes how information is stored temporarily, while working memory describes how information is kept accessible and actively manipulated
How is situated cognition approach related to the concept of knowledge?
situated cognition allows us to use contextual cues to comprehend our immediate environment.
according to research on the effects of distributed practice, which of the following study strategies would result in the best long term memory for studies materials?
spacing your study across multiple sessions
A bird species common to North Carolina can be described in a variety of ways. For example, it could be called an animal, a bird, or a willow flycatcher. Of these three possible descriptions, which level of categorization would fit with "Willow flycatcher?"
subordinate
in baddeleys model of working memory, which of the follwoing best describes the relationship among the central executive, phonological loop, and visuospatial sketchpad?
the central executive is a storage free control mechanism that coordinates that activities of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad
experiments using the brown peterson technique revealed important theoretical information about the cause of forgetting in short term memory. what did these experiments show?
the difference in forgetting at short and long retention intervals was larger on later than earlier trails, indicating a critical role for interferance
why do researchers hypothesize that individuals suffering from depression sometimes have lower working memory?
the preoccupations of depressed individuals use some of the limited capacity.
what can we conclude from the research addressing the recovered memory debate?
there is truth to both perspective as documented cases of sexual abuse have been forgotten and later remembered and false memories can be generated in the labratory
which of the following accurately describes how students allocate their study time based on the difficultly of the material?
under time pressure, students allocate more time easily than difficult materials
Which of the following best describes how we categorize novel objects according to the exemplar approach?
we compare novel objects with a collection of memories of specific examples of the category.
Which of the following best describes how we categorize novel objects according to the prototype approach?
we compare novel objects with an ideal representation of the category.
which has been taken to suggest that working memory is not a unitary construct?
when two task are performed simultaneously, more interference when the task are from the same rather than different modalities
research on metacognitive prediction about test performance shows that individuals accurately predict?
which items they answered correctly, but not total scores