Psychology Memory, Cognition, and Research Methods: Key Concepts and Studies
The ratio of mental age to chronological age of a child of average intelligence is
1:1
Which of the following is the median score?
6
Which of the following best explains why Groups 1 remembered more details of the story than Group 2?
Distributed practice
Which of the following demonstrates semantic memory?
Elizabeth knows the formula to calculate the area of a square.
A childhood friend asked Jeffrey whether he remembered where they went on summer vacation when they were eight years old. Jeffrey's ability to recall correctly will rely on which of the following?
Episodic memory
A psychologist designed a study to test the effects of cell phone use on driving safety. Participants were randomly assigned either to drive an automobile simulator while talking to a friend on a cell phone or to drive a simulator without talking on a phone Which type of research does the scenario describe?
Experimental
A teacher gave a standardized test to students measuring their achievement in school. A student's test score of 86 is at the 42nd percentile. This means that this student has which of the following?
Scored the same as or higher than 42 percent of her fellow students
Which of the following increases the chance that an individual will remember a telephone number that has been called several times within a short period?
Rehearsal
A psychologist gives the same test to a class of students at the beginning of the day and again at the end of the school day. The extent to which test scores are similar across the two administrations demonstrates which of the following test properties?
Reliability
Which of the following is a valid conclusion that the researchers could have drawn from the data?
The new test produces scores that are generally unrelated to those produced by the original test.
When a list of words is learned in order, the words most likely to be forgotten are those that represent which of the following?
in the middle of the list
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
The correlation between scores obtained on two halves of a single test yields information about the test's
reliability
The Flynn effect refers to the
rise in average IQ scores over time
Using cell phones while driving increases the number of accidents because use of the phones requires
selective attention
While at a crowded gathering, Zach realized that his attention was being drawn away from his conversation every time a person nearby said the word "exactly." Zach's response is an example of
the cocktail party effect
The teacher noticed that the afternoon class recalled more presidents that the morning class did and concluded that this was caused by time of day. Which of the following is a confounding variable?
The grade level of the students
Researchers repeatedly presented a picture of a goat along with other animals and asked participants to rank how closely the picture of the goat matched their prototype of a "mammal". The graph depicts the rankings of each participant based on the number of exposures. What type of research has been conducted?
Correlational Study
Which of the following is the most useful strategy to help a student retain the words in a vocabulary list?
Using each word in a sentence
The reversible figure above illustrates the Gestalt organizing principle of
figure-ground
In a research study, participants were randomly assigned to two conditions. One group of participants received a drug once per day for four weeks. The drug increases the speed of communication between neurons. Other participants did not receive the drug. Researchers found that those who took the drug demonstrated an increased memory recall. What type of research design was conducted in this scenario?
Experiment
Which of the following statements describes the Flynn effect?
Intelligence quotient (IQ) scores in the United States were higher in 2003 than in 1993.
The Flynn effect is best illustrated by which of the following statements?
Intelligence scores increase from generation to generation.
Tina is reading an important letter when she accidentally splashes water on the paper. The water has smudged a few words, but she is still able to understand what the letter says. This can be explained by
top-down processing
Which of the following is the mean for Group 2?
6
Which of the following is an example of metacognition?
Knowing the effectiveness of different strategies for learning statistical formulas
What was the median number of alternative uses generated for the eraser?
6
A large group takes a standardized test and scores produce a normal distribution. The mean score is 50 with a standard deviation of 8. Mary's score is 59. Approximately what percentage of students achieved a lower score than Mary?
84
According to the formula for an intelligence quotient (IQ), the IQ of a ten-year-old child with a mental age of eight and a half years is which of the following?
85
Researchers studying stereotype threat are concerned that approximately 80 percent of study participants are drawn from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies that comprise only 12 precent of the world's population. Of the following explanations, which best represents why this finding leads to such uneasiness among psychologists?
A representative sample is essential if researchers are to generalize the results to the entire population.
What type of graph would Dr. Rolph use to represent these data?
A scatterplot
Which of the following types of tests is designed to measure an individual's knowledge of a subject?
Achievement
Time can no longer create new memories as a result of an accident. Tim is experiencing which of the following types of amnesia?
Anterograde
Matt finds that when he is doing chores around his home, he can listen to an audiobook and still remember what the story was about. However, when his friends texts him about their plans for the weekend, he realizes that he has to rewind his audiobook because he forgot was the story was about. Which of the following accurately describes the level of processing Matt experiencing for doing chores around his home
Automatic
The results depicted in which segment are inconsistent with the serial postion effect?
B. C
Jeremy is a doctoral student who wants to investigate the effectiveness of a new mnemonic device with third graders. His plan includes asking the children to complete an informed consent form. Which of the following reasons would cause his research project to be denied by an Institutional Review Board?
Children can express approval but only parents or legal guardians can provide consent.
A cognitive psychologist is interested in examining whether the type of math class is related to the effectiveness of a new study strategy. Which of the following scattergrams represents the data as depicted in the data set?
D.
Serena is in a hotel room with a cake that needs slicing, but she does not have a knife. She goes to the bathroom and comes back with a long strand of dental floss, which she uses to cut the cake. Serena has overcome which barrier to problem solving?
Functional fixedness
Which of the following would cognitive psychologists uses to describe to response of the volunteer who provided the lowest number of alternative uses for the tweezers?
Functional fixedness
Randy and Nina have four daughters and believe they are more likely to have a son than a daughter when they have another child. This is an example of which of the following concepts?
Gambler's fallacy
Which of the following is the best example of the cognitive process Jean Piaget called assimilation?
Having learned that his family pet is a dog, William sees a neighbor's cat and says, "Dog!"
Dr. Keith found that students who drink coffee demonstrate less focus and attention, as evidenced by lower test scores, and then claimed that he expected that result all along. Based on this description, which of the following is Dr. Keith displaying?
Hindsight bias
A psychology professor wants to investigate the study habits of students at her university. She cannot collect data from every student but hopes to use a subset of the students to draw accurate conclusions about the behavior of the student body. Which of the following features of research design will best address her goal?
Random sampling
Professor DuVall teaches two classes of psychology. For Class Y, their first quiz consisted of multiple-choice questions. Class Z's first quiz covered the same material, but the questions required that students write a short answer for each question. Professor DuVall compared the scores for Class Y a
Recall led to higher scores than recognition on this quiz.
Professor Jovan randomly assigns each student in her psychology class to one of three groups. Group X is required to post a journal entry week in which they discuss some aspect of psychology in daily life. Group X, Y and Z. The results are shown in the figure. Which of the following psychological principles are best supported by the data in the figure. Which of the following psychological principles are best supported by the data in the figure?
Repeated testing can improve learning and memory.
Which of the following is a binocular cue for depth perception?
Retinal disparity
One night, Noel went to a new restaurant. While waiting for her meal, she could not ignore the slurping sound the other diners made while eating. She was so focused on that sound that she could not even enjoy her meal. Which of the following concepts explains Noel's experience?
Selective attention
Using the data in sets A and B, which of the following statements is true?
Set B has a smaller standard deviation than set A.
Which of the following is the operational definition of the dependent variable?
Test scores on the class material
A psychologist designed a study to test the effects of cell phone use on driving safety. Participants were randomly assigned either to drive an automobile simulator while talking to a friend on a cell phone or to drive a simulator without talking on a phone. In the study, cell phone use can be described as
an independent variable
People respond more favorably when they are faced with a 95 percent success rate then with a 5 percent failure rate because of
framing
When Sophie reads her history assignments, she goes over them very carefully and tries to memorize each fact, Emma, on the other hand, studies by trying to relate the new information to things she has experienced, been told about by others, or seen in movies and on television. Emma's performance on history tests will probably be better than Sophie's due to differences in which of the following?
levels of processing
A major university develops an assessment that is meant to provide data on whether potential students will be successful at the university level. If there is a relationship between the results of the assessment and student success, that will best indicate that the assessment has
predictive validity
If students get approximately the same score on the second administration of a test as they did on the first, then the test is
reliable
A researcher interested in finding a simple way to estimate intelligence decides to evaluate skull circumference as a possible indicator of intelligence. He finds that the size of an adult's skull remains the same from one measurement to the next, but he finds that skull circumference is not a very good predictor of intelligence. In this example, skull circumference as a measure of intelligence is
reliable but not valid
When Lois looks at her wedding pictures, she had vivid memories of the early years of her marriage. The pictures serve as
retrieval cues
On individual intelligence tests such as the Stanford-Binet and Wechaler scales, an IQ of 100 indicates that the test taker
scored at the average level for test takers of the same age
Studying by focusing on the facts and not the meaning of information that has to be remembered involves
shallow processing
As you watch a friend walk away from you, your retinal image of your friend gets smaller. Despite this, you do not perceive him to be shrinking. This is an example of
size constancy
Research has shown that a major reason for poor performance while multitasking is that while multitasking, people
switch their attention rapidly from task to task, so they miss critical information associated with a task that is not receiving their attention
Malik completed a personality test in January, again in May, and once more in September. His three scores were very similar to one another. This similarity suggests that the test has
test-retest reliability
The results depicted in segment A are consistent with
the primacy effect
The feeling that you know someone's name, but cannot quite recall it, is an example of
the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon
Dr.Fredericks is interested in studying how quickly people forget what they learn in class. He teaches a class on biological psychology on a Monday. On Tuesday, he gives the class a quiz asking the students about details from the previous class. Which of the following procedures should Dr.Fredericks have followed to avoid the confounding variable of experimenter bias?
Double-blind
Dr. Adedeji is trying to measure the capacity of her students' short-term memories. She shows them a long series of numbers on a display for several seconds, and then has them write down as many numbers as they can remember in order. Dr.Adedeji has the students complete a survey in which she asks them "On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being highly effective, how well did you remember the numbers?"
Dr. Adedeji's survey led to self-report bias.
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.
In data set A, the mean is
11
In data set B, the range is
4
A student who scored at the mod would have how many points
5
Which of the following statistics best approximates the relation between the variables?
A correlation coefficient of -0.90.
Which of the following concepts most directly applies to Dr. Min's research question?
Divergent thinking
Which of the following elements of Dreith's research would most strengthen Dr. Keith's ability to infer a causal relationship between caffeine intake and improved focus and attention?
Dr. Keith keeps conditions the same between the two groups except for the independent variable.
Dr. Sanjay conducted a study to determine whether eating breakfast affects academic performance. At the beginning of the week, he gathered survey data from students in his third-grade class about whether they ate breakfast. The next day, Dr.Sanjay showed the students ten new vocabulary words. Three days later, he administered a test to the students to measure their word recall. After analyzing the data, he claimed that eating breakfast improves the ability to recall new words
Dr. Sanjay cannot make cause-and-effect claims from correlational data.
The claim that a whole is different from the sum of its parts is central to which of the following schools of thought?
Gestalt psychology
Which of the following is an example of semantic energy
Recalling the equation to determine the volume of a cylinder
Jalil goes to a part where he meets several new people. When he tells his brother about it the next day, he can only remember the names of the last 3 people that he met. Which of the following memory concept best describes Jalil's memory for the names of the people at the party?
Recency effect
Ten students were expected to learn about the geography of the major rivers, mountains, and cities of the US state of Arizona. Half of the students were given the same unlabeled map but had a word bank of terms to choose from. The students' scores are represented in the table. What conclusion can you based on the data?
Recognition is easier than recall.
Which of the following is the most appropriate criterion for evaluating the predictive validity of an intelligence test?
School grades
Which of the following describes Asano's knowledge of these types of facts
Semantic memory
Using a mathematical formula to find the solution to a problem is an example of
an algorithm
Short-term memory is best described in which of the following ways?
memory that can hold only a small amount of information
Which of the following scenarios best describes the monocular depth cue of relative size?
Yvonne judges the distance of an object based on how large the image is on the retina.
A researcher evaluated over 300 studies where algorithms were used to predict the future of the stock market. This study determined that algorithms accurately predicted the stock market within three percentage points on average. These findings were later provided to individuals who follow the market to inform them about when to sell or buy stocks. Which of the following research techniques best represents the research described?
Meta-analysis
Which of the following types of validity is established by demonstrating that there is a correlation between scores on a test and later academic performance
Predictive
The graph is an illustration of which of the following?
The testing effect
In a memory study, participants were given different things to focus on as they tried to remember words presented. For some of the words, they were asked whether the word was in capital letters (case); for others, whether the word rhymed with a target word (rhyme); and for still others, whether the word belonged in a given sentence (sentence). Which of the following statements is supported by the graph?
Participants in the case condition remembered fewer words because of shallow processing.
Researchers want to examine if there is a difference between the retention of implicit versus explicit memories. To conduct this research as an experiment, which of the following would be necessary?
Random Assignment
A group of researchers are investigating how different studying strategies impact how much participants remember on a test. They recruit 50 participants and have half of the participants spend 5 minutes reading the passage one time and then answering a series of multiple-choice questions on the material for another five minutes. Finally, the participants write down as many facts from the reading passage as they can in three minutes. Which of the following is the dependent variable of the study?
The number of facts the participants remember during the test phase
Which of the following best describes the conclusion researchers could make if the results of this study are statistically significant?
The results are not likely due to chance.
Dr. Nunez finds that the differences groups in her research on the use of heuristics in problem-solving was statistically significant. If the outcome of a study is statistically significant, it means which of the following?
The results are unlikely to be obtained if there is no difference between the control group and the experimental group.
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
An instructor conducted an experiment to determine the effects of two different methods of encoding on the amount students learned in introductory psychology. The results showed that the average amount learned by the group using the other encoding method. However, the difference was not statistically significant. Which of the following is the most appropriate conclusion to be
There is a possibility that the difference between the two groups occurred by chance.
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 is always true of standardized tests?
They are supposed to be administered and scored in a consistent manner.
Robyn finds a computer repair service online. She silently repeats the phone number in her mind until she locates her phone to call the repair service>
Working memory
The concept of g is most accurately defined as which of the following?
a single, underlying intellectual capacity measured by intelligence tests
Ricardo can remember the phone numbers of all of his childhood friends correctly Ricardo probably has which of the following?
highly superior autobiographical memory
In visual perception, size constancy occurs as an object comes closer to the viewer because the
image on the retina remains constant in size
When Judy is asked how many windows are in her home, she figures out the exact answer by mentally walking through her house and taking a count. This retrieval technique relies most heavily on
imagery
Research on stereotype threat indicates that students might not do as well as they can on a test if
they are informed that people of their ethnicity, age, or gender usually do not perform well on the tests
