Psychology Into To Memory Practice Problems

Maria is a thirteen-year-old congenitally deaf child who was born to hearing parents living in a remote, rural area. Since birth her parents have provided love, nourishment, educationally enriching toys, and developed their own hand signals to communicate with her about basic necessities. However, Maria did not begin to learn sign language until she was twelve and the family moved to a city and encountered members of a deaf community. Maria has found it very difficult to learn sign language, no matter what her instructors try. Which of the follow concepts best explains Maria's difficulty learning sign language?

A sensitive period

Which of the following scenarios best demonstrates the role of context effects in memory?

Amy studied for a vocabulary test in the same classroom and at the same time of day as the normal class, and she performed better on the test than students who studied in different classrooms under different conditions.

Professor Belvedere wants to help her anatomy students memorize the names of different parts of the body. Which of the following techniques will best help her students?

Asking her students questions about the meaning of each word.

Five-year-old Tahani is entering a school where English is the only language spoken, but in her home, her family uses a combination of both English and her family's native language. When she starts school, she takes a test measuring her English language development. Her score is well below that of the other children in her class, most of whom live in homes where only one language is spoken. Which of the following is the most likely explanation for Tahani's test scores?

Because Tahani speaks more than one language, her proficiency in each language may come later than for her monolingual peers.

Which of the following scenarios is an example of retroactive interference?

Carl tries to remember the name of his first boss, but he cannot because he keeps thinking of the name of his current boss.

Dr. Porter is studying the effectiveness of two intervention programs to improve the outcomes of children who have an intellectual disability. Which of the following groups of children should she include in her study?

Children who have an IQ between 50 and 69

Maki is a three-month-old living in a household of Japanese speakers. Which of the following best describes how her ability to discriminate phonemes will develop?

Currently, she will likely be able to discriminate the phonemes \l\ and \r\; after she reaches about eight months of age, she will have begun to lose the ability to discriminate these phonemes.

Creativity is most closely associated with which of the following?

Divergent thinking

When Gustavo goes through lists of inventory items and thinks about whether each one is a fruit or not, he remembers more of the items on those lists later than when he goes through lists of inventory items and does not think about what each item is. Which of the following concepts best explains Gustavo's performance?

Elaborative encoding, because engaging in deeper processing improves memory.

Which of the following psychologists is most strongly associated with research on false memories?

Elizabeth Loftus

Dr. Rudolph's class has a big test coming up next week. Which of the following students is using a studying strategy that is most likely to lead to memory consolidation?

Elizabeth studies for a half hour before she goes to bed each night the week before the exam.

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.

Which of the following best illustrates Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve?

Erik studied Italian in college. After he graduated, he went backpacking in Europe, where he realized he had forgotten a lot of Italian. Years later, he went on another trip to Italy and was surprised to discover that he remembered about the same amount of Italian as during his first trip.

A psychologist has just developed a new test that he hopes will be a good measure of intelligence. At the surface level, the questions appear to be the types of puzzles and problems that would provide an intellectual challenge and give insight into someone's intellectual abilities. Unfortunately, when he distributes the test to a classroom of college students, it does not appear to perform similarly to existing measures of intelligence. The test does not predict student GPAs and in fact is better at predicting performance on a measure of anxiety than intelligence. Which of the following characteristics does the new intelligence test possess?

Face validity, because the test looks like it should measure intelligence.

Martin has been heavily influenced by the work of Lewis Terman. Which of the following perspectives on intelligence would Martin most likely have?

Intelligence is primarily a biologically based capacity.

Which of the following describes one of the functions of the temporal lobe of the brain?

It is where the declarative memories are stored.

Which of the following statements is true of insight problem solving?

It requires an incubation period in which the problem solver can start fresh on the problem

When studying for a vocabulary test, Catherine read one of her vocabulary words and its definition aloud several times. About twenty seconds later, she still remembered the word's meaning, but then she moved on to the next word in the list without engaging in any further strategies to enhance her memory. The next day, she tested herself on the same vocabulary word at the same time, in the same mood, and in the same location as when she had first studied the word, but she could not remember its definition. It is most likely that Catherine could not remember the word because she failed to engage which of the following memory functions?

Long-term memory, because Catherine failed to encode the word; therefore, the word did not become a part of her long-term memory.

Which of the following activities most directly relies on the hippocampus?

Memorizing the layout of a neighborhood

Ms. Reagan, who is a teacher, agrees more with Howard Gardner's theory of intelligence than Charles Spearman's theory of intelligence. Which of the following scenarios would she most agree with?

Ms. Reagan thinks that her students exhibit more than one type of intelligence. For example, she notices her student Noel plays well with others as well as alone.

Which of the following is true of analogies in supporting problem solving?

Relevant analogies usually help people solve problems, and people do spontaneously think of relevant analogies.

After visiting her professor's office, Rachel writes down everything she remembers seeing there. She correctly remembers many details, but she falsely remembers seeing books even though there were no books in the office. Additionally, she did not remember seeing a skull that was in the office. Which memory concept best explains why Rachel falsely encoded the books and failed to encode the skull?

Schemas

To help himself remember the name of his new colleague, Hope, Jose thinks about the meaning of her name—the feeling of hopefulness. Which of the following concepts best corresponds to Jose's strategy?

Semantic encoding.

Which of the following scenarios involves using cued recall?

Steven studies a list of word pairs and is later given the first word of each pair and asked to recall the second word in the pair.

Dr. Sosa administers the first exam to all his introductory psychology students, which amounts to 250 students total. The mean for the first exam was 75%. The grades for Dr. Sosa's classes are distributed as shown below. Dr. Sosa concludes the students in his class are achieving appropriate mastery of the material. Why is this conclusion invalid?

The distribution is positively skewed.

After Doug witnessed two cars involved in a car accident, a police officer asked Doug how fast the cars were going when the accident happened. According to research by Elizabeth Loftus, which of the following questions could the officer ask that would make Doug most susceptible to the misinformation effect?

Were there other people around who witnessed the accident?

Which of the following best describes the primacy effect?

When people have better recall of things that occur at the beginning of a sequence.

Average IQ scores have increased steadily over the past 100 years. It has been argued that this effect is most likely due to...

an increase in the average number of years in school

Martine needs a hammer but cannot find one. As she looks around her apartment, her gaze passes over a metal paperweight and some other objects that could potentially serve as a makeshift hammer. However, she is so focused on these objects' typical uses that she does not think to use any of them as a hammer. Martine is experiencing which of the following?

functional fixedness

The cerebellum is most directly involved in...

motor learning

The difference between divided attention and selective attention is that divided attention...

requires more automatic processing than selective attention does.

Piper reads about someone described as adventurous and extroverted. She then judges that this person is more likely to be a lawyer who enjoys hiking than a lawyer who does not. The best explanation for Piper's error is that she is basing her judgment on...

the representativeness heuristic

Maeve wants to change her college major but has decided not to because she is close to finishing. She believes that the time she has spent in her current program will be wasted if she changes now. Maeve is experiencing...

the sunk-cost fallacy