Memory and Cognition

Maria is a thirteen-year-old congenitally deaf child who was born to hearing parents living in a remote, rural area. Since birth her parents have provided love, nourishment, educationally enriching toys, and developed their own hand signals to communicate with her about basic necessities. However, Maria did not begin to learn sign language until she was twelve and the family moved to a city and encountered members of a deaf community. Maria has found it very difficult to learn sign language, no matter what her instructors try. Which of the follow concepts best explains Maria's difficulty learning sign language?

A sensitive period

Which of the following scenarios best demonstrates the role of context effects in memory?

Amy studied for a vocabulary test in the same classroom and at the same time of day as the normal class, and she performed better on the test than students who studied in different classrooms under different conditions.

Professor Belvedere wants to help her anatomy students memorize the names of different parts of the body. Which of the following techniques will best help her students?

Asking them questions about the meaning of each word

Which of the following is an example of a prelinguistic event?

Babbling

Five-year-old Tahani is entering a school where English is the only language spoken, but in her home, her family uses a combination of both English and her family's native language. When she starts school, she takes a test measuring her English language development. Her score is well below that of the other children in her class, most of whom live in homes where only one language is spoken. Which of the following is the most likely explanation for Tahani's test scores?

Because Tahani speaks more than one language, her proficiency in each language may come later than for her monolingual peers.

Which of the following scenarios is an example of retroactive interference?

Carl tries to remember the name of his first boss, but he cannot because he keeps thinking of the name of his current boss.

Maki is a three-month-old living in a household of Japanese speakers. Which of the following best describes how her ability to discriminate phonemes will develop?

Currently, she will likely be able to discriminate the phonemes \l\ and \r\; after she reaches about eight months of age, she will have begun to lose the ability to discriminate these phonemes.

According to Benjamin Whorf's linguistic relativity hypothesis, which of the following is true?

Different languages predispose those individuals who speak them to think about the world in different ways.

Creativity is most closely associated with which of the following?

Divergent thinking

When Gustavo goes through lists of inventory items and thinks about whether each one is a fruit or not, he remembers more of the items on those lists later than when he goes through lists of inventory items and does not think about what each item is. Which of the following concepts best explains Gustavo's performance?

Elaborative encoding, because engaging in deeper processing improves memory.

Which of the following psychologists is most strongly associated with research on false memories?

Elizabeth Loftus

Dr. Rudolph's class has a big test coming up next week. Which of the following students is using a studying strategy that is most likely to lead to memory consolidation?

Elizabeth studies for a half hour before she goes to bed each night the week before the exam.

Which of the following is an example of the tip-of-the-tongue effect?

Emma is telling her friend what she did over summer vacation when she discovers she cannot think of a specific word that she would like to say. She stops telling the story, because she has the distinct feeling that she is about to be able to think of the word if she waits just a moment.

An individual's ability to remember the day he or she first swam the length of a swimming pool is most clearly an example of which of the following kids of memory?

Episodic

A teenager would most probably draw on which of the following to recall her tenth birthday party?

Episodic memory

Which of the following best illustrates Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve?

Erik studied Italian in college. After he graduated, he went backpacking in Europe, where he realized he had forgotten a lot of Italian. Years later, he went on another trip to Italy and was surprised to discover that he remembered about the same amount of Italian as during his first trip.

Failure to recognize that an object typically not used for a particular purpose can, in fact, serve that purpose illustrates which of the following?

Functional fixedness

Martine needs a hammer but cannot find one. As she looks around her apartment, her gaze passes over a metal paperweight and some other objects that could potentially serve as a makeshift hammer. However, she is so focused on these objects' typical uses that she does not think to use any of them as a hammer. Martine is experiencing which of the following?

Functional fixedness

After Doug witnessed two cars involved in a car accident, a police officer asked Doug how fast the cars were going when the accident happened. According to research by Elizabeth Loftus, which of the following questions could the officer ask that would make Doug most susceptible to the misinformation effect?

How fast were the cars going when they smashed into each other?

Which of the following describes one of the functions of the temporal lobe of the brain?

It is where declarative memories are stored.

Which of the following statements is true of insight problem solving?

It requires an incubation period in which the problem solver can start fresh on the problem.

Which of the following is an example of metacognition?

Knowing the effectiveness of different strategies for learning statistical formulas

When studying for a vocabulary test, Catherine read one of her vocabulary words and its definition aloud several times. About twenty seconds later, she still remembered the word's meaning, but then she moved on to the next word in the list without engaging in any further strategies to enhance her memory. The next day, she tested herself on the same vocabulary word at the same time, in the same mood, and in the same location as when she had first studied the word, but she could not remember its definition. It is most likely that Catherine could not remember the word because she failed to engage which of the following memory functions?

Long-term memory, because Catherine failed to encode the word; therefore, the word did not become a part of her long-term memory.

Which of the following activities most directly relies on the hippocampus?

Memorizing the layout of a neighborhood

Elena is presented with a list of 20 numbers. When asked to recall this list, she remembers more numbers from the beginning than from the end of the list. This phenomenon demonstrates which of the following types of effect?

Primacy

Which of the following is true of analogies in supporting problem solving?

Relevant analogies usually help people solve problems, but people often do not spontaneously think of relevant analogies.

After visiting her professor's office, Rachel writes down everything she remembers seeing there. She correctly remembers many details, but she falsely remembers seeing books even though there were no books in the office. Additionally, she did not remember seeing a skull that was in the office. Which memory concept best explains why Rachel falsely encoded the books and failed to encode the skull?

Schemas

To help himself remember the name of his new colleague, Hope, Jose thinks about the meaning of her name—the feeling of hopefulness. Which of the following concepts best corresponds to Jose's strategy?

Semantic encoding

The linguistic relativity hypothesis of Benjamin Whorf suggests which of the following?

Speakers of different languages think differently due to the differences in their languages

Which of the following scenarios involves using cued recall?

Steven studies a list of word pairs and is later given the first word of each pair and asked to recall the second word in the pair.

Which of the following concepts refers to the structure and organization of a sentence?

Syntax

A person assembling a tool one week after reading the instructions can remember the first and last steps of the procedure but not the middle ones. This best illustrates which of the following?

The serial position effect

When rehearsal of incoming information is prevented, which of the following will most likely occur?

There will be no transfer of the information to long-term memory.

Which of the following represent, respectively, superordinate and subordinate categories for the basic-level category of "automobile"?

Vehicle, convertible

Which of the following best describes the primacy effect?

When people have better recall of things that occur at the beginning of a sequence

Processing every possible combination of the letters DBRI to arrive at the word BIRD is an example of the use of

an algorithm

John suffered a head injury in an accident five years ago. He now has clear memories of events that occurred before the accident, but he has great difficulty remembering any of the experiences he has had since the accident. John's symptoms describe

anterograde amnesia

A teacher asks students to think of as many uses for a brick as possible. By listing 50 uses, most of which the class finds new and unusual, Susan is displaying

divergent thinking

According to the information-processing view of memory, the first stage in memory processing involves

encoding

On a fishing trip, Ed realizes that he has mistakenly packed the sewing box instead of the tackle box. He wants to fish but returns home because he does not have any line or hooks. Ed's failure to realize that sewing thread can be used as fishing line and that a bent needle can be used as a hook is an example of

functional fixedness

Mental shortcuts or rules of thumb that help solve problems and reduce mental effort are called

heuristics

When a list of words is learned in order, the words most likely to be forgotten are those that are

in the middle of the list

Wolfgang Köhler considered a chimpanzee's sudden solving of a problem evidence of

insight

In a memory study, the experimenter reads the same list of words to two groups. She asks group A to count the letters in each word, and she asks group B to focus on the meaning of each word for a later memory quiz. During a recall test, participants in group B recall significantly more words than participants in group A. Memory researchers attribute this effect to differences in

levels of processing

When participants in dichotic listening experiments are repeating aloud a message presented in one ear, they are most likely to notice information on the unattended channel if that channel

mentions the participant's name

A word or part of a word that is in itself meaningful, but that cannot be broken into smaller meaningful units, is called a

morphene

The cerebellum is most directly involved in

motor learning

To score high on a test of creativity, a person's answers should be

original and valuable

All human languages have several basic sounds in common called

phonemes

Memory for automatic activities, such as bike riding and handwriting, is known as

procedural

The difference between divided attention and selective attention is that divided attention

requires more automatic processing than selective attention does

The rules of grammar are rules of

syntax

Matthew's parents are physicists, and so are the parents of several of his best friends. Therefore, Matthew believes that many people are employed as physicists. Matthew's reasoning is based on

the availability heuristic

A prototype is best defined as

the hypothetical "most typical" instance of a category

Piper reads about someone described as adventurous and extroverted. She then judges that this person is more likely to be a lawyer who enjoys hiking than a lawyer who does not. The best explanation for Piper's error is that she is basing her judgment on

the representativeness heuristic

Maeve wants to change her college major but has decided not to because she is close to finishing. She believes that the time she has spent in her current program will be wasted if she changes now. Maeve is experiencing

the sunk-cost fallacy

Noam Chomsky's view of language proposes that

there is an inherent language acquisition device

Metacognition refers to

thinking about thinking