Chapter 8 Practice Test

Eliza's family loves to tell the story of how she "stole the show" as a 2-year-old, dancing at her aunt's wedding reception. Even though she was so young, Eliza can recall the event clearly. How is this possible?

Eliza's immature hippocampus and lack of verbal skills would have prevented her from encoding an explicit memory of the wedding reception at the age of two. It's more likely that Eliza learned information (from hearing the story repeatedly) that she eventually constructed into a memory that feels very real.

When you feel sad, why might it help to look at pictures that reawaken some of your best memories?

Memories are stored within a web of many associations, one of which is mood. When you recall happy moments from your past, you deliberately activate these positive links. You may then experience mood-congruent memory and recall other happy moments, which could improve your mood and brighten your interpretation of current events.

Psychologists involved in the study of memories of abuse tend to DISAGREE about which of the following statements?

We tend to repress extremely upsetting memories

Children can be accurate eyewitnesses if

a neutral person asks nonleading questions soon after the event, in words the children can understand

Long-term potentiation (LTP) refers to

an increase in a cell's firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation.

The concept of working memory

clarifies the idea of short-term memory by focusing on the active processing that occurs in this stage.

When a situation triggers the feeling that "I've been here before," you are experiencing ______________ ______________.

déjà vu

The psychological terms for taking in information, retaining it, and later getting it back out are ______________, ______________, and ______________.

encoding; storage; retrieval

Sensory memory may be visual (______________ memory) or auditory (______________ memory).

iconic; echoic

Amnesia following hippocampus damage typically leaves people unable to learn new facts or recall recent events. However, they may be able to learn new skills, such as riding a bicycle, which is an ______________ (explicit/implicit) memory.

implicit

Ebbinghaus' "forgetting curve" shows that after an initial decline, memory for novel information tends to

level out

Memory aids that use visual imagery (such as peg words) or other organizational devices (such as acronyms) are called ______________.

mnemonics

A psychologist who asks you to write down as many objects as you can remember having seen a few minutes earlier is testing your

recall

Freud proposed that painful or unacceptable memories are blocked from consciousness through a mechanism called ______________.

repression

Specific odors, visual images, emotions, or other associations that help us access a memory are examples of

retrieval cues.

The hour before sleep is a good time to memorize information, because going to sleep after learning new material minimizes ______________ interference.

retroactive

Our short-term memory for new information is limited to about ______________ items.

seven

When forgetting is due to encoding failure, meaningless information has not been transferred from

short-term memory into long-term memory.

We may recognize a face at a social gathering but be unable to remember how we know that person. This is an example of ______________ ______________.

source amnesia

The hippocampus seems to function as a

temporary processing site for explicit memories

When tested immediately after viewing a list of words, people tend to recall the first and last items more readily than those in the middle. When retested after a delay, they are most likely to recall

the first items on the list.

One reason false memories form is our tendency to fill in memory gaps with our reasonable guesses and assumptions, sometimes based on misinformation. This tendency is an example of

the misinformation effect.