Cognitive Exam 1 Quiz Questions

Which of the following statements provides the best summary of why confidence is important to the topic of memory strategies and metacognition?

"In general, people are overconfident that they will remember material accurately."

Which of the following statements reflects the best understanding about how to apply the distributed-practice effect?

"It's best to take breaks between your study sessions so that your learning trials are spread across time."

Which of the following statements provides the most accurate summary of the neuroscience research on attention?

"One kind of attention task activates the frontal lobe, and a different kind of attention activates the parietal lobe."

Chapter 2 discusses a concept in object recognition called the "viewer-centered approach." Which of the following statements provides the most accurate description of this approach?

"This is a modification of the recognition-by-components approach, to explain how we perceive an object from an unusual angle."

Which of the following statements best summarizes the research on face perception?

"We process faces in terms of their general structure; for other objects, we are more likely to process isolated features."

Suppose that several psychologists want to explore interpersonal interactions during adulthood. Which of the following topics would be most consistent with the cognitive approach?

"When meeting someone for the first time, what attribute does a person perceive most quickly, gender or ethnicity?"

The information-processing approach maintains that human mental processes are similar to those of:

A computer

The recognition-by-components theory argues that we recognize an object by:

Analyzing the arrangement of simple 3-dimensional shapes that form the object

The process of asking participants to describe their experiences and thought processes in response to the stimuli presented to them is called:

Analytic introspection

The face-inversion effect indicates that:

Faces are processed holistically rather than through their isolated parts

Which of the following experiments had results to support the conclusion that it is difficult to switch attention between separate channels?

Broadbent's "Split-scan" experiment

Learning about cognition is important for several reasons; which of the following is NOT a reason your book provides?

Cognitive psychology was the precursor to behaviorism, which is the prevailing viewpoint in psychology today

What interdisciplinary field includes neuroscience, philosophy, sociology, and linguistics?

Cognitive Science

Suppose that you are studying for a social psychology exam, and you decide to try asking yourself questions about why people act differently in groups than when they are alone. According to the research on memory strategies, your technique would:

Encourage a deep level of processing

You have no difficulty distinguishing between the letters O and W, but it takes longer to distinguish between the letters O and Q. Which theory of object recognition does this support?

Feature-analysis theory

Hermann Ebbinghaus made many important contributions to the development of cognitive psychology. Which of the following was NOT one of them?

First to use choice reaction time to infer underlying mental processes

Suppose that Sanjay is taking the Stroop test, and the first item shows the word "red," printed in blue ink. According to your textbook, one reason that he will have trouble reporting the ink color (blue) for this item is that:

He has had more experience in reading words than in identifying ink colors

Suppose that you hear a lecture about memory improvement, and the speaker says, "We must remember the value of desirable difficulties." The speaker is likely making the point that:

If students test themselves several minutes after learning some material, they will make more errors, which will encourage them to spend more time studying.

Which of the following researchers thought that psychological research should only focus on observable behavior and not on underlying mental processes?

John Watson

Suppose that researchers show you one blue X surrounded by 25 red X's. According to the discussion of visual search, you would locate that blue X:

Just as quickly as if there were only 3 other red X's

Which of the following statements provides the best summary of the decline of behaviorism and the rising popularity of the cognitive approach?

Many psychologists favored the cognitive approach, because the behaviorist approach could not account for complex thought processes.

Which of the following women was an early researcher in memory who reported the recency effect and became the first female president of the American Psychological Association?

Mary Whiton Calkins

Why should you pay attention to metamemory if you want to improve your memory?

Metamemory can help you decide which strategies work best for you.

According to our in-class discussion of object recognition and the information that your book provides:

Object recognition must involve both top-down and bottom-up processes

On a dichotic listening task,

People notice little about the message that they are supposed to ignore

Broadbent's "Filter Model" of selective attention proposes that the filter identifies the attended message based on:

Physical characteristics

Suppose that you need to remember to pick up a book at the library after class today. This kind of memory task is an example of:

Prospective memory

When Sam listens to her girlfriend, Susan, in the restaurant and ignores other people's conversations, she is engaged in the process of ____ attention.

Selective

Suppose that a friend at your college says that she can multitask very effectively, even when two tasks are challenging. Based on the information in Chapter 3, you would conclude that:

She may believe that she can multitask effectively, but the research does not support this belief

Almeda is studying for her biopsychology exam by creating a diagram for the parts of the human nervous system. Her diagram shows two basic divisions, the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system; each of these systems is further divided and then subdivided. Almeda is using:

The hierarchy technique

Imagine that you're studying for your first exam in this course by reviewing each topic and asking how the information might be relevant to the career you want to pursue. Your study technique makes use of:

The self-reference principle

Who wrote the first textbook on cognitive psychology?

Ulric Neisser

According to the Gestalt psychology approach to visual perception:

We tend to see well-organized patterns, rather than random-looking stimuli

How is the tip-of-the-tongue experience relevant to metacognition?

When people report a tip-of-the-tongue state, they accurately assess that they are close to identifying the missing word

Researchers have conducted many studies about how students allocate their time when studying for an exam. In general, these studies show that:

Without time pressure, students spend more time studying difficult material

You can identify a letter more accurately when it appears in a word than when it does not. This phenomenon is called the:

Word superiority effect

Suppose that you are looking at a flower garden containing dozens of yellow tulips and one red tulip, which seems to stand out conspicuously. According to Anne Treisman's theory, the explanation for this phenomenon is that:

You automatically processed some features (such as the color of the flower) during distributed attention

Suppose that you are looking at an object on your desk. Which of the following is the best example of the term, perception?

You combine your previous knowledge, together with the information registered by your eyes

According to your textbook, consciousness refers to:

Your awareness of the outside world and of your perceptions, images, and feelings

The template model of object recognition would have the most difficulty explaining:

how people recognize letters of the alphabet if you turned the letters upside-down.