Exam 2: Ch. 3, 4, 5

Imagine yourself walking from your car, bus stop, or dorm to your first class. Your ability to form such as picture in your mind depends on

the visuospatial sketch pad

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

the word "platypus"

Working memory differs from short-term memory in that

working memory is concerned with the manipulation of information

Dichotic listening occurs when

different messages are presented to the left and right ears

Brief sensory memory for sound is known as

echoic memory

When a person is shadowing a message, he or she is

saying the message out loud

Information remains int he sensory memory for

seconds or a fraction of a second

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 Broadbent's filter model, the stages of information processing occur in which order?

sensory store, filter, detector, memory

The primary effect of chunking is to

stretch the capacity of STM

Stayer and Johnston's (2001) experiment involving simulated driving and the use of "hands-free" vs. "handheld" cell phones found that

talking on either kind of phone impairs driving performance significant;y and to the same extent

The cocktail party effect is

the ability to pay attention to one message and ignore others, yet hear distinctive features of the unattended messages

The automatic process exhibited in the standard Stroop effect is

reading words

What was the name of the painting that Alfred Yarbus used in his experiment involving eye tracking?

"An Unexpected Visitor"

The phenomenon in which we do not notice differences in an object unless we attend to it is called ___________?

"change blindness"

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

15-20 seconds

Which of the following sets of results shows evidence of proactive interference with a three-trial recall task? (Note: Read the selections as percent correct for Trial 1: Trial 2: Trial 3)

80% : 40% : 30%

What is the name of the physicist and philosopher who noticed that when uniformly colored strips of paper were placed next to each other, they appeared to have a gradient of shading, but not when isolated? (Incognito)

Ernst Mach

What was the name of the German physicist and physician who concluded that the brain makes assumptions about incoming visual data that are based on previous experience

Hermann von Helmholtz

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

The word-length effect shows that it is more difficult to remember

a list of long words than a list of short words

Which of the following would likely be an input message into the detector in Broadbent's model?

a message with a German accent

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

a smaller stimuli set

In support of late selection models, Donald McKay showed that the presentation of a biasing word on the unattended ear influenced participants' processing of ___________ when they were ____________ of that word.

ambiguous; unaware

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 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

in the consistent-mapping condition

Articulatory suppression does all of the following EXCEPT it

interferes with semantic coding

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

it takes a strong signal to cause activation

According to your text, students often overlook function of memory they take for granted such as

labeling familiar objects

Suppose twin teenagers are vying for their mother's attention. The mother is trying to pay attention to one of her daughters, though both girls are talking (one about her boyfriend, one about a school project). According to the operating characteristics of Treisman's attenuator, it is most likely the attenuator is analyzing the incoming messages in terms of _____________

meaning

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

meaning

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

meaning

STM's capacity is best estimated as seven (plus or minus two)

meaningful units

It is easier to perform two tasks at the same time if

one is handled by the sketch pad and one is handled by the phonological loop

When a 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 a person has a digit span of two, this indicates that he has ___________ memory

poor short-term

Jill's friends tell her they think she has a really good memory. She finds this interesting so she decides to purposefully test her memory. Jill receives a list of to-do tasks each day at work. Usually, she checks off each item as the day progresses, but this week, she is determined to memorize the to-do lists. On Monday, Jill is proud dot find that she remembers 95% of the tasks without referring to the list. On Tuesday, her memory drops to 80%, and by Thursday, she is dismayed to see her performance has declined to 20%. Jill does not realize that she is demonstrating a natural mechanism of memory known as

proactive interference

Suppose you (a student) are asked by a teacher to learn a poem you will recite in front of your class. Soon after, both you and a classmate, J.P., are asked by another teacher to learn the lyrics to an unfamiliar song. When you and J.P. are later asked to remember the song lyrics, you have a much more difficult time recalling them than J.P. does. This impairment of your performance is most likely attributable to

proactive interference