Midterm Practice Test - Memory and Cognition

In which year was positron emission tomography (PET) introduced and made it possible to see which areas of the human brain are activated during cognitive activity?

1976

According to your text, which of the following movies is LEAST accurate in its portrayal of a memory problem?

50 first dates

When does bottom-up processing start?

When environmental energy stimulates the receptors

Who founded the first laboratory of scientific psychology at the University of Leipzig in Germany?

Wilhelm Wundt

Explicit memory is to ___________ as implicit memory is to ___________.

aware, unaware

Action potentials occur in the

axon

You look at a rope coiled on a beach and are able to perceive it as a single strand because of the law of

good continuation

A bottom-up process is involved in fixating on an area of a scene that

has high stimulus salience

The recency effect occurs when participants are asked to recall a list of words. One way to eliminate the recency effect is to

have participants count backwards for 30 seconds after hearing the last word of the list

If the intensity of a stimulus that is presented to a touch receptor is increased, this tends to increase the __________ in the receptor's axon.

rate of nerve firing

The primacy effect is attributed to

recall of information stored in long-term memory

Which part of the nervous system picks up information from the outside environment?

receptors

This multiple-choice question is an example of a ___________ test.

recognition

According to Tulving, an episodic memory is distinguished by the process of ________ it.

reliving

When we search a scene, initial fixations are most likely to occur on __________ areas.

high-saliency

A man suffering from Korsakoff's syndrome would be able to perform which of the following activities without difficulty?

identifying a photograph of his childhood home

___________ memories are those that we are not aware of.

implicit

Why is it easier to study brain tissue from newborn animals than brain tissue from adults?

the density of cells in a newborn brain is small compared with the density in an adult brain

Broadbent's model is called the early selection model because

the filter eliminates the unattended information right at the beginning of the flow of information

Broadbent's model is called an early selection model because

the filter eliminates unattended information at the beginning of the information flow

Which of the following would have the most semantic regularities?

a shopping mall

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

a smaller response set

Which of the following is similar to early ideas scientists had about the brain's physical properties?

a web

A person with strong ________ would likely have a deeper experience of Bayesian influence.

beliefs

One function of ___________ is to pull information out of long-term memory.~

the central executive

Which of the following is NOT an example of a physical regularity in your text?

Angled orientation

A task with the instructions "Read the following words while repeating 'the, the, the' out loud, look away, and then write down the words you remember" would most likely be studying

Articulatory suppression

Verbal Behavior was written by

B. F. Skinner

What does the field of neuropsychology study?

Behavior of people with brain damage

Which of the following is consistent with the idea of localization of function?

Brain areas are specialized for specific functions, specific areas of the brain serve different functions, neurons in difference areas of the brain respond best to different stimuli

Josiah may have damage to which area of the brain?

Broca's area

The key structural components of neurons are the

Cell body, cellular membrane, and transmitters

Which of the following stimulus characteristics most challenges the processing capacity of short-term memory?

Complexity

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

Donald Broadbent

Taking clay and sand to create bricks, which are then used to build modular wall panels, which are then assembled to construct tall buildings, is similar to which of the following neural concepts?

Hierarchical 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 does NOT characterize the information processing (IP) approach to the study of cognition?

IP emphasizes stimulus - response relationship in cognitive processes

Which of the following is a criticism of analytic introspection?

It produced variable results from person to person

The use of the term artificial intelligence was coined by

John Mccarthy

Scene schema is

Knowledge about what is contained in a typical scene

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

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

May differ from one task to another

Amhad is doing an experiment in which he has to choose between the object he has been shown previously (the target object) and another object. Choosing the target object will result in a reward. What sort of task is Amhad doing?

Object discrimination problem

What is a key difference between dendrites and axons?

One sends information and the other receives information

Which memory is used for physical actions?

Procedural memory

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

Semantic memory

Which of the following represents the correct progression of information as it moves through the primary memory stores?

Sensory, short term, long term

Procedural memories are also known as ________ memories.

Skill

Which of the following events is most closely associated with a resurgence in interest in the mind within the study of psychology?

Skinner's publication of the book, Verbal Behavior

Which term best reflects the core concept of echoic memory?

Time

If a word is identified more easily when it is in a sentence than when it is presented alone, this would be an example of _____ processing.

Top - down

Researchers understood that KF had experienced a decline in short-term memory capacity because he had a digit span of ________ .

Two

With which of the following sentences would the author disagree?

We can consider the mind extraordinary if it is used for extraordinary purposes

Donald Broadbent was the first person to develop which of the following?

a flow diagram depicting theming as a processing information in a sequence of stages

Donald Broadbent was the first person to develop which of the following?

a flow diagram depicting the mind as processing information in a sequence of stages

On what factor do working memory and short-term memory most differ?

activity

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

an inborn biological program

A technique in which trained participants described their experiences and thought processes in response to stimuli is known as

analytic introspection

Wundt's approach, which dominated psychology in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was known as

analytic introspection

A task with the instructions "Read the following words while repeating 'the, the, the' out loud, look away, and then write down the words you remember" would most likely be studying

articulatory suppression

Have you ever tried to think of the words and hum the melody of one song while the radio is playing a different song? People have often noted that this is very difficult to do. This difficulty can be understood as

articulatory suppression

Ming is taking a memory test. She is more likely to recall the name of a popular singer if she had

attended the singers concert last year with her boyfriend

During a visit to the local museum, you appreciate the incredible beauty of the paintings displayed. Your ability to see the paintings as complete pictures rather than individual, disconnected dots of color, texture, and location occurs through a process called __________.

binding

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

binding

Which organ is unique in that it appears to be static tissue?

brain

Newell and Simon were among the first to use computers for artificial intelligence. Their computer program

created proofs for problems in logic

Consider the following definition of the mind: The mind is a system that creates representations of the world so that we can act within it to achieve our goals. Which element of the mind does this definition emphasize?

functioning and survival

The staff working in the air traffic control tower at a busy airport can be considered a suitable metaphor for which of the following?

central executive

The difficulty we have in recognizing even an obvious alteration in a scene is called __________ blindness.

change

In Donders's experiment on decision making, when participants were asked to press one button if the light on the left was illuminated and another button if the light on the right was illuminated, they were engaged in a

choice reaction time

The "Little Albert" experiment involving the rat and the loud noise is an example of which of the following types of experiments?

classical conditioning

Which of the following terms is correct in context with "Pairing one stimulus with another"?

classical conditioning

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

close attention

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli is called

cocktail party effect

The study of the physiological basis of cognition is known as

cognitive neuroscience

Illusory conjunctions are

combinations of features from different stimuli

Determining the sequence of DNA in humans was a major scientific advance that opened the door to new ideas about illness and approaches to treatment. An individual's unique DNA sequence is similar to which of the following?

connectome

Early studies of brain tissue that used staining techniques and microscopes from the 19th century described the "nerve net." These early understandings were in error in the sense that the nerve net was believed to be

continuous

Regarding free recall of a list of items, which of the following will most likely cause the recency effect to disappear by preventing rehearsal?

counting backward for 30 seconds before real

Donders's main reason for doing his choice reaction time experiment was to study

decision making

Which of the following could be considered as always taking a "working vacation"?

default mode network

The technique where the participant's task is to focus on the message in one ear, called the attended ear, and to repeat what he or she is hearing out loud is known as

dichotic listening

Which of the following is an experimental procedure used to study how attention affects the processing of competing stimuli?

dichotic listening

The idea that specific cognitive functions activate many areas of the brain is known as

distributed representation

Which of the following word strings all refer to the same pathway?

dorsal, where, action

Which of the following best describes the result of attention in the context of perception?

enhancement

"I remember being really excited last year, when my college team won the national championship in basketball." This statement is an example of ___________ memory.

episodic

Which of the following is not a stage in the information processing model of memory?

episodic memory

What does the principal of neural representation state?

everything a person experiences is based on representations in the person's nervous system

Ramon is looking at photos of athletes in a sports magazine. He is focusing on their body parts, particularly their chest and legs. Which part of Ramon's brain is activated by this viewing?

extra striate body area (EBA)

Neurons that respond to specific qualities of objects, such as orientation, movement, and length, are called

feature detectors

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

The landmark discrimination problem is more difficult to do if you have damage to your _____ lobe.

frontal

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

Viewpoint ________ is the ability to recognize the same object even if it is seen from different perspectives.

invariance

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

inverse projection problem

According to Tulving, the defining property of the experience of episodic memory is that

it involves mental time travel

Which of the following statements is the most accurate with regard to specificity coding?

it is unlikely to be correct because there are too many stimuli in the world to have a separate neuron for each

Semantic memory is to ________ as episodic memory is to ________.

knowing, remembering

Suppose you are in your kitchen writing a grocery list, while your roommate is watching TV in the next room. A commercial for spaghetti sauce comes on TV. Although you are not paying attention to the TV, you "suddenly" remember that you need to pick up spaghetti sauce and add it to the list. Your behavior is best predicted by which of the following models of attention?

late selection

In Donders's research on human decision making, he found that it took ____________ to decide which of two buttons to push in response to a stimulus.

less than one second

The theory of unconscious inference includes the

likelihood

The primacy effect (from the serial position curve experiment) is associated with ___________ memory.

long-term

Which of the following is NOT a conclusion from the case of H.M., who had an operation to help alleviate his epileptic seizures?

long-term memories are unaffected by savage to the hippocampus

If you are folding towels while watching television, you may find that you don't have to pay much attention to the act of folding while keeping up with the storyline on the TV show. Folding the towels would be an example of a(n) ________ task.

low- load

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 term semantics, when applied to perception, means the

meaning of a scene, often related to what is happening within the scene

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

once processing had become automatic

Speech segmentation is defined as

organizing the sounds of speech into individual words

A 10-month-old baby is interested in discovering different textures, comparing the touch sensations between a soft blanket and a hard wooden block. Tactile signals such as these are received by the __________ lobe.

parietal

One of the defining characteristics of implicit memory is that

people are not conscious they are using it

The Gestalt psychologists believe that _____.

perception is affected by experience, but built-in principles can override experience

Chantal has frontal lobe damage. She is doing a problem-solving task in which she has to choose the red object out of many choices. She can easily complete this repeatedly, but when the experimenter asks her to choose the blue object on a new trial of the task, she continues to choose the red one, even when the experimenter gives her feedback that she is incorrect. Chantal is displaying

perseveration

Robin lost the softball game for her team when she ran toward home and was thrown out at the plate. The coach asked her, "Why did you run? You knew it was a risky move." Robin replied, "But I heard you yell, 'Go! Go!'" The coach replied, "I was saying, 'No! No!'" Robin's ill-fated run was the result of a ________ error.

phonological

The "filter model" proposes that the filter identifies the attended message based on

physical characteristics

The fact that trees are more likely to be vertical or horizontal than slanted is an example of ____.

physical regularity

Ebbinghaus's "memory" experiments were important because they

plotted functions that described the operation of the mind

Behaviorists believe that the presentation of ____________ increases the frequency of behavior.

positive reinforcers

According to Treisman's feature integration theory, the first stage of perception is called the __________ stage.

preattentive

Physiological studies indicate that damage to the brain's ___________can disrupt behaviors that depend on working memory.

prefrontal cortex

Models designed to explain mental functioning are constantly refined and modified to explain new results. Which of the following exemplifies this concept based on the results presented in your text?

replacing the short term memory component of the modal model with working memory

Models designed to explain mental functioning are constantly refined and modified to explain new results. Which of the following exemplifies this concept based on the results presented in your text?

replacing the short-term memory component of the modal model with working memory

As the ________ of a stimulus increases, ________ tends to ________.

salience, fixation, increase

The notion that faster responding occurs when enhancement spreads within an object is called

same-object advantage

Entering a church service and seeing someone selling hot dogs and cotton candy from a cart near the altar would be perceived as a violation of

scene schema

The predominant type of coding in long-term memory is

semantic

The demonstration in your text that asks you to visualize scenes such as an office, a department store clothing section, a lion, and a microscope often results in more details in the scene of the office or department store than the scene with the lion or microscope. The latter two tend to have fewer details because most individuals from modern society have less knowledge of _____ in those scenes.

semantic regularities

Which of the following terms does NOT reflect the concept of control processes?

sensory

Richard Atkinson and Richard Shiffrin's (1968) model of memory, which was introduced a year after the publication of Neisser's book, described the flow of information in the memory system as progressing through three stages. Which memory holds incoming information for a fraction of a second and then passes most of this information to short-term memory?

sensory memory

Digit span is one measure of capacity of

short term memory

Endel Tulving, one of the most prominent early memory researchers, proposed that long-term memory is subdivided into all of the following components EXCEPT

short term memory

Observations that people may actually process and manipulate information rather than simply store it for brief periods of time challenged the conceptualization of

short term memory

Which of the following statements about short-term memory is FALSE?

short term memory stores an exact replica of sensory stimuli

Suppose you're on the phone with a customer support representative who gives you a ticket number for your records. You're later transferred to a different representative who asks for your ticket number, but you've forgotten it. This probably occurred because the number was only temporarily stored in your

short-term memory

You are at a parade where there are a number of marching bands. You perceive the bands that are all in the same uniforms as being grouped together. The red uniforms are one band, the green uniforms another, and so forth. You have this perceptual experience because of the law of

similarity

Work with brain-injured patients reveals that ___________ memory does not depend on conscious memory.

simplicity and procedural

Research suggests that the capacity of short-term memory is

somewhat small, holding only about seven items at one time

When conducting an experiment on how stimuli are represented by the firing of neurons, you notice that neurons respond differently to different faces. For example, Arthur's face causes three neurons to fire, with neuron 1 responding the most and neuron 3 responding the least. Roger's face causes three different neurons to fire, with neuron 7 responding the least and neuron 9 responding the most. Your results support __________ coding.

sparse

Before the advent of intercoms, old mansions had a sash in each room. Each sash was connected to a bell on a master board in the servants' office. When someone pulled a sash in a particular room, a bell corresponding to the room would ring on the master board, informing a servant where to go to provide assistance.

specificity coding

The idea that an object could be represented by the firing of a specialized neuron that responds only to that object is called _____________.

specificity coding

When Carlos moved to the United States, he did not understand any English. Phrases like "Anna Mary Can Pi and I Scream Class Hick" didn't make any sense to him. Now that Carlos has been learning English, he recognizes this phrase as "An American Pie and Ice Cream Classic." This example illustrates that Carlos was not capable of ____ in English.

speech segmentation

It's often said that "life doesn't exist in a vacuum." However, the emptiness of ________ is critical for brain functioning.

synapses

The type of coding that occurs in a particular situation primarily depends on the ________.

task

One function of ___________ is to pull information out of long-term memory.

the central executive

When the axon is at rest, the inside of the neuron has a charge that is 70 millivolts more negative than the outside. This difference will continue as long as

the neuron is at rest

How does the phenomenon of apparent movement work?

the perceptual system creates the perception of movement from stationary images

Which of the following is most closely associated with implicit memory?

the propaganda effect

Edgar Adrian studied the relationship between nerve firing and sensory experience by measuring how the firing of a neuron from a receptor in the skin changed as he applied more pressure to the skin. He found that

the rate of nerve firing increased as he increased the pressure

What differentiates bottom-up processing from top-down processing?

the source of information

Which book was written by Thomas Kuhn?

the structure of scientific revolutions

Placing tomatoes, onions, jalapenos, garlic, cilantro, and lime juice into a blender and turning it on to produce salsa is similar to which of the following?

the synchronization stage of the executive attention network

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

the word "platypus"

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

Who developed the concept of the cognitive map?

tolman

Perceiving machines are used by the U.S. Postal Service to "read" the addresses on letters and sort them quickly to their correct destinations. Sometimes, these machines cannot read an address because the writing on the envelope is not sufficiently clear for the machine to match the writing to an example it has stored in memory. Human postal workers are much more successful at reading unclear addresses, most likely because of

top-down processing

The Stroop effect occurs when participants

try to name colors and ignore words

According to the model of working memory, which of the following mental tasks should LEAST adversely affect people's driving performance while operating a car along an unfamiliar, winding road?

trying to remember the definition of a word they just learned

Members of a security team are stationed on rooftops surrounding a large city plaza before a scheduled rally. Suddenly, three team members in different locations radio in to the command center, each stating that they have spotted a suspicious box on the ground with a pipe coming from the top. What enables the security team members to report seeing the same object despite being stationed on different rooftops?

viewpoint invariance

The "cognitive revolution"

was a gradual process that occurred over a few decades

Which term best reflects what we do with an image projected onto our retina?

we interpret it

The likelihood principle states that

we perceive the object that is most likely to have caused the pattern of stimuli we have received

Josiah is trying to speak to his wife, but his speech is very slow and labored, often with jumbled sentence structure.

wernicke's area

What is the process of unconscious inference?

when our perceptions are the result of inferences that we make about the environment

Evidence for the role of top-down processing in perception is shown by which of the following examples?

when someone accurately identifies a word in a song on a radio broadcast despite static interfering with reception

Anne Treisman's attenuator analyzes the incoming message in terms of all of the following EXCEPT

whether the perceptual load is low or high

The ability to manipulate information in memory temporarily while remembering something else is called

working memory

Working memory differs from short-term memory in that

working memory is engaged in processing information