Cognitive psych final

Nick has perfected the skill of tuning out his mother's lectures about cleaning his room while still being able to text his friends and listen to music. What concept is Nick displaying?

Broadbent's filter

Josiah is trying to speak to his wife, but his speech is very slow and labored, often with jumbled sentence structure. Josiah may have damage to which area of the brain?

Broca's area

Lydia is 48 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy as an undergraduate. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and she participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations. Which of the following alternatives is most probable?

a. Lydia is a U.S. Congresswoman.

Which of the following is an example of unconscious inference?

a. Perceiving that a partially covered automobile continues beneath the cover

From a thinking perspective, when faced with making a decision, the suggestion to "Go with your gut" would emphasize ________, while the suggestion "Take your time" would place emphasis on ________.

Type 1; System 2

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

An animal might learn how to navigate a maze through the use of ___.

a cognitive map

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.

d. rate of nerve firing

Which component of Broadbent's model of attention is focused on the meaning of a stimulus?

detector

Which of the following likely led early telephone companies to create phone numbers using the format 213-555-1234 rather than a format such as 21776-551873-0633295?

digit span

Suppose you're studying in the library and you hear someone else's cell phone conversation, which, in turn, causes you to lose your focus on your work. This example illustrates ___.

distraction

Yvonne is attempting to listen to a conversation from her friend while simultaneously being alert for an expected cell phone call. This example illustrates ___.

divided attention

Which term best reflects the aspect of memory that people lose with age?

experience

Which of the following is the key factor in the cocktail party effect?

filter

Suppose you're shown five rows containing five letters each. You're then told to recall only one row of letters. In doing so, you're utilizing ___.

the partial report method

Which of the following terms does NOT reflect Baddeley and Hitch's concept of working memory?

unlimited

When Javier talks about last night's basketball game with his friend Carol over coffee, which of the following internal thoughts reflect Javier's working memory?

"The game was close and exciting."

As a result of gaps in the behaviorist paradigm, the new cognitive paradigm began to emerge in which decade?

1950s

Kaplan and Simon's experiment presented different versions of the mutilated checkerboard problem. The main purpose of their experiment was to demonstrate that

b. the way the problem is represented can influence the ease of problem solving.

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

b. top-down processing.

Why did Ebbinghaus study memory for nonsense syllables?

because nonsense syllables have no inherent meaning

Primacy effect is to recency effect as ___ is to ___.

beginning; end

The tendency to think that a syllogism is valid if its conclusion is believable is called the _________________.

belief bias

Which of the following statements best describes how neurons communicate with one another?

c. A chemical process takes place in the synapse.

According to your textbook, perception goes beyond the simple receipt of sensory information. It is involved in many different cognitive skills. Which of the following is NOT one of those skills as noted by the chapter?

c. Experiencing neuromodulation

In the mid-20th century, the study of the mind began using which technique or model inspired by digital computers?

c. Information processing model

Flashbulb memory is best represented by which of the following statements?

c. It is memory for the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an emotional event that remains especially vivid but not necessarily accurate over time.

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

c. When someone accurately identifies a word in a song on a radio broadcast despite static interfering with reception

The sequence of steps that includes the image on the retina, changing the image into electrical signals, and neural processing is an example of _____ processing.

c. bottom-up

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

c. decision making.

The "imagery debate" is concerned with whether imagery

c. is based on spatial or language mechanisms.

Groups of interconnected neurons are referred to as

c. neural circuits.

The value that stays the same as long as there are no signals in the neuron is known as

c. resting potential.

Imagine that your friend James has just taken up the habit of smoking cigars because he thinks it makes him look cool. You are concerned about the detrimental effects of smoking on his health, and you raise that concern to him. James gets a bit annoyed with your criticism and says, "My grandfather smoked cigars, and he lived to be 100!" You might point out that a major problem with his argument involves

c. sample size.

Stereotypes are reinforced by all of the following EXCEPT

c. the falsification principle.

The dramatic case of patient H.M. clearly illustrates that ___________ is crucial for the formation of long-term memories.

c. the hippocampus

Stanny and Johnson's "weapons focus" experiment, investigating memory for crime scenes, found that

c. the presence of a weapon hinders memory for other parts of the event.

Transfer-appropriate processing is likely to occur if

c. the type of encoding task matches the type of retrieval task.

By listing numbers as (212) 555-1234, telephone companies use which technique to help people remember their own and others' phone numbers?

chunking

Attention, perception, memory, and decision making are all different types of mental processes in which the mind engages. These are known as different types of

cognition

The branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of the mind is called

cognitive psychology.

What distinguishes working memory from short-term memory?

complexity

Your text describes the occurrence of a "cognitive revolution" during which dramatic changes took place in the way psychology was studied. This so-called revolution occurred parallel to (and, in part, because of) the introduction of

computers

Suppose someone has told you a phone number, and you're repeating it over and over again to yourself with the hope that you'll remember it before you dial the number. This example is a type of a ___ called ___.

control process; rehearsal

Which statement below is most closely associated with levels of processing theory?

d. Deep processing involves paying closer attention to a stimulus than shallow processing and results in better processing.

According to the levels of processing theory, which of the following tasks will produce the best long-term memory for a set of words?

d. Making a connection between each word and something you've previously learned

Which of the following scenarios best illustrates how effective or ineffective maintenance rehearsal is in transferring information into long-term memory?

d. Serena's keys were stolen from her purse. She cannot give a detailed description of her keychain to the police, even though she used it every day for three years.

Suppose that, as a participant in an imagery study, you are asked to memorize the four outside walls of a three-story rectangular house. Later, you are asked to report how many windows are on the front of the house. You will probably be fastest to answer this question if you create an image as though you were standing

d. at the far side of the front yard, away from the house.

Given its definition, expected utility theory is most applicable to deciding whether to

d. buy first-class or coach tickets for a spring break trip.

Ali works for Citrus Squeeze, a company that makes orange juice. Sales of their calcium-enhanced OJ have been poor, and the product was cancelled. His factory still had three cases of cartons, and Ali was told he could take them if he wanted them. With the cartons, Ali made several birdfeeders for his backyard and also planted tree seedlings in some of them; he used the remaining ones to build a "fort" for his four-year-old son. Ali's use of the cartons represents

d. divergent thinking.

The first experiments in cognitive psychology were based on the idea that mental responses can be

d. inferred from the participant's behavior.

Paul Broca's and Carl Wernicke's research provided early evidence for

d. localization of function.

Political propaganda is an effective tool to manage and control the public due to the effect of ________.

priming

When you just ride a bike without consciously thinking about how to do so, this illustrates ___ memory.

procedural

Celia loved to knit when she was a young girl, but she hadn't done it in years. So she was excited when she joined a group making blankets for homeless kids and started knitting like she had just done it yesterday. What did Celia access to start knitting again?

procedural memory

The fusiform face area (FFA) in the brain is often damaged in patients with

prosopagnosia

Neurons in the skin that detect a spider crawling up your leg are called ________.

receptors

When the police ask the victim of a crime to look through mugshots of past criminals, they hope that the victim's ________ will help them to identify and arrest a suspect.

recognition

You have been studying for weeks for a nursing school entrance exam. You love the idea of becoming a nurse, and you have been enjoying learning about the material for your exam. Each night, you put on comfortable clothes and study in the quiet of your lovely home. Memory research suggests you should take your test with a(n) ________ mindset.

relaxed

Memories of the past that have been pushed out of a person's consciousness are considered to be ________.

repressed

In the context of language, another term for "heuristics" is ________.

rules

Because Robbie will be late to the big outdoor concert, he tells Serena to wear that ugly lime green top. This will increase Serena's ________ so Robbie can find her in the crowd.

salience

Your friend has been sick for several days, so you go over to her home to make her some chicken soup. Searching for a spoon, you first reach in a top drawer beside the dishwasher. Then, you turn to the big cupboard beside the stove to search for a pan. In your search, you have relied on a kitchen

schema

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

The Gestalt principle of pragnanz is focused on which of the following concepts?

simplicity

According to the phonological similarity effect, we're more likely to confuse words or letters that ___ similar. For example, "F" is more likely to be misidentified as ___.

sound; "S"

Considering the fortress and the radiation problems together, the fortress problem represents the _________________ problem.

source

Given that Betty is fluent in Spanish, she can tell when one word ends and the next one begins. This illustrates ___.

speech segmentation

In your CogLab experiment, the reaction time measure was the time between the:

stimulus onset and the subject's response

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

structuralism

Which of the following components of neural function is distinguished by being an absence of material?

synapse

The brain asymmetry demonstration in your CogLab experiment predicts that right handed participants will have a higher hit rate for words shown in the right visual field...

than in the left visual field

In your CogLab experiment, which of the following was not necessarily involved in a simple detection task of a visual stimulus?

the brain double checks the stimulus information.

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.

Which of the following is NOT considered a starting point for perception?

thinking

What is a key function of the phonological loop?

to prevent decay

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

Iconic memory is to echoic memory as _____ is to _____.

vision; sound

When you're trying to understand what your professor is talking about in a lecture, which of the following is LEAST important to aid this process?

visuospatial sketch pad

People tend to overestimate

what negative feelings will occur following a decision more so than positive feelings.

According to your CogLab, if you show a split-brain patient a word in their right visual field they

would be able to say the word aloud

Which of the following should have the lowest threshold for being activated to attention according to Treisman?

your name

What does the field of neuropsychology study?

Behavior of people with brain damage

Why does counting backwards after reciting a list of words eliminate the recency effect?

The last words are lost in short-term memory (STM).

How does the phenomenon of apparent movement work?

The perceptual system creates the perception of movement from stationary images.

What is the upper limit for holding information in long-term memory?

no limit

John Watson believed that psychology should focus on the study of

observable behavior

If you're having problems with your vision, then it's likely that there could be a problem with your ___ lobe.

occipital

Which term best describes the task of factoring the equation 9x 2 + 5x - 7 = 4x 2 - 2x + 8?

Analytical

Why can we consider Tolman one of the early cognitive psychologists?

Because he used behavior to infer mental processes

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

Classical conditioning

Which one of these early pioneers in cognitive psychology was the first to undertake quantitative measurements of mental processes?

Ebbinghaus

A synapse is

Gap between neurons

Harry is creating a chart that compares the four perspectives on object perception. Which perspective should Harry place under the "Bottom-Up" heading on his chart?

Gestalt principles

Suppose a subject began recall of a list of words after counting backwards for 30 seconds. What would be the likely consequence of doing this?

I had dinner at the sushi place.

________ occurs when a person gives up trying to solve a tough problem and then suddenly comes up with the answer while doing something else.

Incubation

___ founded behaviorism which ___ the study of inner mental processes.

John Watson; rejected

What is a scene schema?

Knowledge of what a scene typically contains

Which substance is released when signals reach the synapse at the end of the axon?

Neurotransmitters

Although each frame of the film has an image of people in a raft on water, the audience in the movie theater sees a group of people paddling and traveling down a swift rushing river. From a Gestalt perspective, the movement of the people and water is ________.

apparent motion

While George takes the bus home, he is thinking about how to resolve a difficult issue at work. This is an example of the mind ___.

as a problem solver

According to Baddeley, the central executive controls ________.

attention

The lesson to be learned from the imagery techniques for memory enhancement (e.g.,, the pegword technique) is that these techniques work because

c. they showcase the fact that memory improvement requires a great deal of practice and perseverance.

The perception pathway corresponds to the _____ pathway, while the action pathway corresponds to the _____ pathway.

c. what; where

The key structural components of neurons are the

cell body, dendrites, axons

For decades, children waiting to see the dentist have done a familiar challenge in Highlights magazine. They compare two illustrations that look almost identical and try to identify 15 things that are different. What are the children engaging in?

change detection

Which of the following would play a key role in research on the physiology of cognition?

functional magnetic resonance imaging

The use of positron emission tomography enables psychological research to examine the _____.

functioning of the brain

Research shows that ___________ does not improve reading comprehension because it does not encourage elaborative processing of the material.

highlighting

Which of the following terms best reflects the concept of cognition?

ideas

Perception is NOT essential for

improving empathy

Which of the following illustrates how we can miss things even if they are clearly visible?

inattentional blindness

In the Tower of Hanoi problem, the _________________ state involves having three discs stacked on the left peg, with the middle and right pegs empty.

initial

In the two-string problem, tying the pliers to one of the strings best represents a(n) _________________ state.

intermediate

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

invariance

As Latoya sat down to take her final exam in European History, what did she draw upon to answer the 100 questions?

long-term memory

Moving around an object enhances our perception of it due to which of the following?

multiple views

Joe and Meg are doing a study in psychology. Joe is asked to push a button as soon as he sees a red light, whereas Meg is asked to push a red button if she sees a red light and a green button if she sees a green light. From the information, who appear(s) to be involved in a task measuring choice reaction time?

only Meg

The process by which small objects become perceptually grouped to form larger objects is the principle of perceptual

organization

If kittens are raised in an environment that contains only verticals, you would predict that most of the neurons in their visual cortex would respond best to the visual presentation of a

picket fence

The notion that every stimulus pattern is seen in such a way that the resulting structure is as simple as possible is called the law of

pragnanz

In the experiment in which participants sat in an office and then were asked to remember what they saw in the office, participants "remembered" some things, like books, that weren't actually there. This experiment illustrates the effect of __________ on memory.

schemas

Suppose you're at a loud party where you're trying really hard to listen to a conversation that you're having with a friend. In doing so, you're showing ___.

selective attention

All of the following illustrate implicit memory EXCEPT ___

semantic knowledge

The trail left by a moving sparkler is an example of the ___ at work.

sensory memory

According to Broadbent, where does the process of rehearsal take place?

short-term memory

Which of the following deserves credit for the recency effect?

short-term memory (STM)

Fundamentally, the principle of good figure emphasizes ___ in perception.

simplicity

Gestalt psychologists consider problem solving as a process involving

b. reorganization or restructuring.

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

Brain

Which of the following is NOT true of positron emission tomography (PET)?

b. It replaced functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) because it was less expensive.

What is a key difference between dendrites and axons?

b. One sends information and the other receives information.

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

Receptors

In the text's use of the Olympic Rings example, which Gestalt law contributes to the correct perception of five interlocking circles rather than nine separate segments?

Simplicity

Who developed a test that demonstrates the distractive power of some task-irrelevant stimuli?

Stroop

Who is considered the founding father of American Psychology and began studying concepts still present in cognitive research today?

William James

Marisol was pleasantly surprised when she walked into the hospital to visit her father and saw an espresso bar and a four-piece jazz quartet playing. What caused Marisol's response?

a deviation from her scene schema

Which of the following will likely NOT advance beyond sensory memory?

a firefly's glow

Which of the following would be an example of auditory coding in long-term memory?

a song you have heard many times before, repeating over and over in your mind

In an effort to get his sister Sharon to vaccinate her young children, Frank compiled the results from many scientific research studies that show the long-term health benefits of childhood vaccines. Yet when Frank presented the information to Sharon, she refused to believe him, stating that the research was clearly faked by large pharmaceutical companies. Sharon not only said that vaccines are risky but also now claims they are poisonous. What occurred in the conversation between Frank and Sharon?

a. Backfire effect

Consider the following argument: Observation: Here in Nashville, the sun has risen every morning. Conclusion: The sun is going to rise in Nashville tomorrow.

a. The argument is strong because there are a large number of observations.

Which of the following is true about Bayesian inference?

a. The probability of an outcome is determined by the prior probability and the likelihood of the outcome.

Imagine yourself walking from your car, bus stop, or dorm to your first class. Your ability to form such a picture in your mind depends on which of the following components of working memory?

a. The visuospatial sketch pad

Which of the following is a basic principle of Gestalt psychology?

a. The whole is different from the sum of its parts.

The finding that people tend to incorrectly conclude that more people die from tornados than from asthma has been explained in terms of the

a. availability heuristic.

The study of the physiological basis of cognition is known as

a. cognitive neuroscience.

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

a. good continuation.

The term semantics, when applied to perception, means the

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

Jenkins and Russell (1952) presented a list of words like "chair, apple, dish, shoe, cherry, sofa" to participants. In a test, participants recalled the words in a different order than the order in which they were originally presented. This result occurred because of the

a. tendency of objects in the same category to become organized.

The technique in which things to be remembered are placed at different locations in a mental image of a spatial layout is known as

a. the method of loci.

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.

a. top-down

Which of the following memories would NOT be an example of long-term memory?

acknowledging that you just sat down

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

analytic introspection.

Peter was so stressed about his presentation tomorrow that he was surprised to find himself pulling into his driveway after work. He didn't remember one bit of what is usually a nasty commute on packed roads. What enabled Peter to make it home safely?

automatic processing

Action potentials occur in the

axon

By comparing reaction times across different tasks, Donders was able to conclude how long the mind needs to perform a certain cognitive task. Donders interpreted the difference in reaction time between the simple and choice conditions of his experiment as indicating how long it took to

d. make a decision about the stimulus.

People perceive vertical and horizontal orientations more easily than other orientations according to the

d. oblique effect.

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.

d. speech segmentation

Illustrative of functional fixedness, people are more likely to solve the candle problem if

d. the box is empty.

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

d. the source of information

Asking people to recall the most influential events that happened during their college careers shows that __________ in people's lives appear to be particularly memorable.

d. transition points

Metcalfe and Wiebe gave participants problems to solve and asked them to make "warmth" judgments every 15 seconds to indicate how close they felt they were to a solution. The purpose of this experiment was to

demonstrate a difference between how people solve insight and non-insight problems.

Which of the following acts like a radio antenna in a car?

dendrite

Brain imaging has made it possible to

determine which areas of the brain are involved in different cognitive processes

Low-load tasks are to high-load tasks as _____ is to _____.

easy; difficult

Acquiring information and transforming it into long-term memory is

encoding

If you are thinking about experiences about a previous vacation, then you are most likely making use of ___ memories.

episodic

Suppose you recall that you had a pleasant conversation with a cashier the other day when you went to get coffee. This memory should be viewed as primarily being ___.

episodic

Remembering a fun family trip to the beach when you were six years old requires recalling a(n) ________ memory from ________ memory.

episodic; long-term

Which of the following types of exam questions is an example of recognition memory?

multiple-choice