ZAPS Homework

Imaging you are a web designer working on an interactive website. You need a symbol to indicate to users that they will start a timed task. Based on the ideas present in this lap, which of the following symbols would be most effective for this purpose?

"Go" in a circular sign.

Which of the following statements most accurately describes the deficits of someone with prosopagnosia?

"I see faces, but I can never be sure of the identity of a person based on his or her face."

What would be the best way to remember the following sequence by chunking? 247314911

24 - 7 - 314 -911

What is meant by the term "chunk" in the context of working memory and memory span?

A chunk is a unit of information that is grouped in a meaningful way.

What is memory distortion?

A collection of phenomena that demonstrate how our long-term memories are not always permanent.

What is cognition?

A mental activity that includes thinking and the understanding gained from thinking, such as memory and intelligence.

What is a stroop test?

A task designed to measure conflicts between two sensory inputs that perhaps the mostly widely used and important of all cognitive test.

Which of the following scenarios is an example of attentional blink?

A waiter is telling two friends about the daily specials when a neighboring table erupts in laughter. The friend ask the waiter to repeat the last few items because their attention was diverted by the sudden loud laughs.

Research conducted on homographs (e.g., bat or minute) in lexical decision tasks predicts that you are likely to _________________________.

Activate multiple meaning of the words, and partially activate closely related words.

Why might memory span for digits and letters (like "2" or "T") be better than for unfamiliar nonsense syllables (like "gorb" or "trep")?

Because nonsense syllables are difficult to store as "chunks" since they're unfamiliar.

Magdalena is a TA grading a set of chemistry quizzes. As she grades each quiz, she observes that it is far more difficult to remember the sequence of correct answers for the multiple-choice questions—A, D, C, C, B, D, A—than it is to remember the answers to the fill-in-the-blank questions—helium, boron, chlorine—even though she has to keep far fewer letters in her mind in total for the multiple-choice questions (7) than for the short-answer questions (19). What is the primary reason for this?

Because the 19 letters in "Helium, boron, chlorine" are arranged into meaningful cunks.

What is semantic interference?

Being distracted by the meaning of words.

Based on the ideas presented in this ZAPS lab, under which of the following conditions do you think participants would be able to most quickly name the color in which the stimuli are written or drawn?

Colored "Blobs"

What is the difference between Congruent and Incongruent trials?

Congruent: Words and colors match. Incongruent: Wors and colors don't match.

Imagine you have been asked to find the following object pictured on the left of the accompanying array on the right. Which type of search do you think this would be?

Conjunction Search: when the object matches the rest presented.

Imagine you have two friends majoring in English. Albany specializes in Shakespearean literature and Daisy specializes in 20th-century American literature. If they were both given Shakespeare's Macbeth to read, how would they most likely differ in their reading and comprehension of the play?

Daisy would understand less and read more slowly than Albany.

What is lateralization?

Different parts of the brain have different functions, and the left and right hemispheres of the brain have their own specializations.

Studying for an important exam while watching television is not very efficient because it is an example of?

Divided Attention

A person's mental lexicon is organized alphabetically, and functions like a virtual dictionary.

FALSE

Imagine you have been asked to find the following object pictured on the left of the accompanying array on the right. Which type of search do you think this would be?

Featured Search: when the object doesn't match the rest presented.

Based on the ideas presented in this ZAPS lab, which of the following tasks would you expect to be the most difficult visual search for someone to complete?

Finding 3 of spades in a deck of 52 playing cards that vary in suit and numbers.

A region of the____in the right hemisphere shows heightened activity levels when a person perceives upright faces.

Fusiform Gyrus

What is reaction time?

How long it takes for the psychological process to occur in the brain.

Imagine (or maybe you don't have to imagine) that your psychology class takes place in a musty old room. Maybe it smells damp and the desks are uncomfortable. For the final exam in your class, you are scheduled to take the exam in a different room in a new building with comfortable chairs. Based on what you have learned about encoding specificity, what might you expect?

It will be more difficult to recall information in the new location

What is Corpus Callosum?

Large fibers of axons that connect both left and right hemispheres of the brain.

Yesterday, your roommate had some bad luck. They failed a big exam, lost their keys, and cracked the screen on their phone. You noticed that they also started pointing out other negative experiences from their past - like a fight with a friend in high school and a C in a class in their first year. What effect might help explain why they are more easily recalling negative events from their past?

Mood congruency effect

n this memory span task, most people's memory span for letters with different sounds is better than their memory span for letters that sound the same. Why might this be?

Most people repeat the letters to themselves to remember them, so when the letters sound the same it is easier to mix them up.

The word "Banana" appears on the left screen, and the split brain patient is told to use her right hand to select the object named on the screen: Will she be able to fetch the banana?

NO

The word "Banana" appears on the right screen, and the split brain patient is told to use her left hand to select the object named on the screen: Will she be able to fetch the banana?

NO

Which of the following is a key finding from research using memory tests like the one in this ZAPS lab?

People believe the lure word was presented in the list just as frequently as other words that actually did appear in the list.

What is prosopagnosia?

People with prosopagnosia have great difficulty distinguishing different faces from one another.

Hearing or reading a word frequently increases the ease and speed of its recognition because of this phenomenon in lexical decision.

Repetition Priming

When you prepared for tests with vast vocabulary lists (the SAT, for instance), you studied words and their meanings repeatedly so that you would be able to understand and use these words in context when necessary. By doing this, you were taking advantage of a phenomenon in lexical decision called _______________.

Repetition Priming

A cross-country driver decides to eat at a local restaurant she has never heard of. She walks in and sees a counter that contains cash register machines; a menu hangs above the counter. Behind the counter, employees wearing headsets and paper hats hustle to and fro, pulling food from a service window and placing it onto trays. These images will most likely trigger a ________ that will lead the traveler to believe she should ________ .

Schema; order at the counter and then seat herself.

Our attentional system cope with the overwhelming among of information that we encounter on a daily basis engaging in selective attention, and by extension, the attention blink?

TRUE

We find it rather difficult to recognize inverted faces because inversion changes the relationships among individual facial features.

TRUE

Words are most likely stored in the mental lexicon by semantics, so that table would be closer to chair than it would be to tape.

TRUE

This operation span task measures working memory by...

Testing how well you can remember words while silvong math problems.

Being able to drive a car while you carry on a conversation with a friend in the passenger seat is explained by?

The ability to automize driving and dedicate the majority of your attention to the conversation.

What is Selective attention?

The ability to focus our attention on one event or piece of information, while blocking background noise or irrelevant stimuli.

Why is working memory important for language comprehension?

The comprehender needs to hold the message in memory and update it with new words as they are heard or read.

What is Divided attention?

When out attentional resources are allocated to at least two tasks or pieces of information at once.

The word "Banana" appears on the left screen, and the split brain patient is told to use her left hand to select the objects named on the screen: Well she be able to fetch the banana?

YES

The word "Banana" appears on the right screen, and the split brain patient is told to use her right hand to select the object named on the screen: Will she be able to fetch the banana?

YES

The difference between short-term memory and working memory is that...

short-term memory describes a temporary information store, while working memory also involves processing or manipulating information.