Cognitive Psychology Test Questions, Exam Questions, Quiz Questions

Which way in which the various projection areas in the visual cortex are organized is most important?
A) They are organized functionally, so that some represent knowledge of biological objects, some represent knowledge of artifacts, some represent knowledge of dangers, etc)
B) They are organized as topographic maps, maintaining a (roughly) 1:1 correspondence to location in the visual world
C) They are organized differently in the left and the right hemispheres
D) They are organized by brightness, with some areas being very sensitive to dim light and others most sensitive to bright light.
The concept of "degree of fan" refers to:
A) how many associative links radiate out from a node.
B) the rate at which activation of a node returns to baseline levels.
C) the speed with which a node will respond to a given input.
D) the relationship between thoughts and concepts.
In a tachistoscopic procedure, a word is likely to be more difficult to recognize if:
A) the word has an unusual spelling pattern.
B) it is a word the participant has encountered recently.
C) the word is semantically related to a recently presented word.
D) it is a word used frequently in the language.
The phenomenon in which you perceive a speech sound that belongs in a familiar word, but was actually missing when the word was pronounced, is called:
A) the word-frequency effect.
B) the phonemic restoration effect.
C) the biased-perceiver effect.
D) the verbal-transformation effect.
Providing a "title" for a confusing passage may help later recall because
A) it facilitates maintenance rehearsal
B) it leads to intentional learning
C) it permits clever guessing
D) it helps people understand the content
In connectionist theorizing, the strength of the association between two nodes is referred to as the association's:
A) activation potential.
B) connection weight.
C) associativity.
D) activation strength.
In the classroom demonstration, you probably "recognized" the word SWEET even though it wasn't on the list of words you were supposed to remember. This is an illustration of the effect of what in recognition?
A) state-dependent learning
B) depth of processing
C) familiarity
D) retroactive inhibition
The fact that people have difficulty perceiving repeated rapid changes in a scene is called
A)subliminal perception
B)hemifield neglect
C)semantic masking
D)change blindness
By using leading questions and misinformation, researchers have been able:
A) to shape how participants remember the details of an event, but they have been unable to change how participants remember the sequence of actions in the event.
B) to alter virtually any aspect of participants' memories and have even been able to create memories for entire events that never took place.
C) to shape how a real event is remembered, but they have been unable to lead participants into remembering an event that never took place.
D) to shape how participants remember the objects present as an event unfolded, but they have been unable to influence how participants remember the people who participated in the event.
The phenomenon of source confusion reflects the fact that:
A) recognition testing is more difficult than recall testing.
B) we are best able to recall material if we are in a mental state similar to the one we were in during learning.
C) source memories seem to last longer than the sense of familiarity.
D) we are often better at recognizing that something is familiar than we are at determining why it is familiar.
Your textbook relates the phenomenon of gist recall most closely to:
A) implicit memory
B) schemata
C) inattention
D) primacy
Three of the following four properties are thought to be attributes of automatized skills. Which property is NOT an attribute of an automatized skill?
A) it is the basis of selective (rather than divide
D) attention
B) it can go on independently of awareness
C) it is largely independent of intention, and is difficult or impossible to inhibit
D) it requires few or no resources
The auditory cortex follows the principle of contralateral control. Thus,
A) the right temporal lobe receives equal input from both ears.
B) the right temporal lobe receives most of its input from the left ear.
C) the information received by the right temporal lobe depends on whether the listener favors their right or left ear.
D) the right temporal lobe receives most of its input from the right ear.
The principle of minimal attachment refers to:
A) a heuristic used to determine the referent of pronouns within a sentence.
B) a processing strategy in which the listener constructs the simplest possible phrase structure that will accommodate the words heard to that point.
C) a principle of speech perception determining the connection between adjacent phonemes.
D) a rule of conversation governing how successive statements within a conversation are related to each other.
Which lobe of the cerebral cortex is most closely involved in processing of auditory signals?
A) Parietal
B) Occipital
C) Frontal
D) Temporal
PET (positron emission tomography) scans show:
A) whether a participant is learning something new or remembering prior learning.
B) minute details of brain anatomy.
C) what a participant is thinking at the moment the test is taken.
D) brain areas that are currently consuming a particularly high level of glucose.
One reason why organization facilitates memory is that organization facilitates:
A) recency
B) the visuospatial scratchpad
C) maintenance rehearsal
D) retrieval
Which of the following is not true for explicit memory?
A) Explicit memory is often tested by recall testing or by a standard recognition test.
B) Explicit memory is generally accompanied by a sense that one is remembering a specific prior episode.
C) Explicit memory is typically revealed as a priming effect.
D) Explicit memory is usually assessed by direct, rather than indirect, testing.
The term "introspection" refers to:
A) the process of each person looking within, to observe his or her own thoughts and ideas.
B) the technique of studying thought by interpreting the symbols used in communication.
C) the procedure of examining thought processing by monitoring the brain's electrical activity.
D) the process through which one individual seeks to infer the thoughts of another individual.
Linguistic rules seem to be the source of children's "over-regularization errors." This sort of error occurs, for example, whenever a child:
A) says "I goed" or "He runned."
B) fails to distinguish between similar speech sounds.
C) sees a squirrel and says, "There's a cat!"
D) uses a regular sequence of words to express an idea even though a different sequence would be more effective.
Participants hear a list of 30 words and are then asked to recall the words. The participants are particularly accurate in their recall of the first few words they hear, an effect known as:
A) the primacy effect.
C) the U-shaped response pattern.
B) the recency effect.
D) the priming effect.
The fact that people tend initially to misunderstand sentences like "Because he ran the second mile went quickly" or "the secretary applauded for his efforts was soon promoted" is referred to as
A) linguistic universals
B) trace detection
C) phoneme restoration
D) garden-pathing
Chronometric analysis exploits the fact that:
A) age influences memory capacity.
B) thinking is poorer "out loud."
C) mental tasks take time.
D) women are faster than men on some memory tasks.
Modern psychology turned away from behaviorism in its classic form because:
A) an organism's behavior can be changed by learning.
B) psychology rejected behaviorism's emphasis on an organism's subjective states.
C) our behavior is routinely determined by our understanding of stimuli.
D) humans are more similar to computers than to other species studied in the laboratory.
If you study the word "black" in the context of the word "train," you will recall it much better to the cue "train" than to the cue "white," even though "white" is almost certain to make you think of "black." This is called
A) hypermnesia
B) repression
C) encoding specificity
D) failure of free association
The smallest units of language that carry meaning are called:
A) phonetic elements.
B) words
C) phonemes
D) morphemes.
A lexical-decision task is generally used to assess:
A) the holding capacity of a participant's working memory.
B) how rapidly participants can "look up" a word in their "mental dictionary."
C) the content of a participant's memory nodes.
D) the degree of fan for the nodes representing the target word.
Which of the following is true of Very Short Term Visual Memory (VSTM)?
A) information is encoded phonologically
B) information must be attended to for it to be stored
C) it is organized as an associative network
D) its contents lasts for a few hundred milliseconds at most
In prototype theories, how is an object categorized?
A) Comparing it with all the instances you remember of the categories.
B) Finding out whether a defining feature is present or not in this object.
C) Determining whether the object follows the rules that define the category
D) Comparing it with an "ideal" instance, which has all of the typical features of other instances.
A participant is asked to recall a series of numbers, and the participants chooses to think about the numbers as though they were years (e.g., "1, 9, 9, 7" becomes "the year I turned 16"). The participant is placing more information into the memory unit known as a(n):
A) package.
B) sentence
C) chunk
D) image.
Which of the following cognitive processes or phenomena has the Stroop color-naming task been used to study?
A) encoding specificity
B) heuristics
C) automatic processing
D) explicit memory
In Biederman's RBC (Recognition By Component) model, Geons are:
A) Features that may be detected by primitive feature detectors.
B) Object parts that are parsed arbitrarily.
C) The whole object.
D) Object parts that are parsed using nonaccidental features.
In a test of working memory capacity, participants are best able to remember:
A) similar-sounding words, because they usually look alike.
B) long words, because they contain more phonological information.
C) short words, because they can be rehearsed more quickly.
D) abstract words, because they provide more opportunity for elaboration.
The term "basic-level category" refers to:
A) the most general level of categorization participants can think of.
B) the most specific level of categorization participants can think of.
C) the most natural level of categorization, neither too specific nor too general.
D) the level of categorization regarded by most participants as indisputable.
If you, as a scientist, really want to talk about mentalistic notions (images, thoughts, ideas, and the like), which of the following approaches would you NOT adopt:
A) cognitive psychology
B) cognitive science
C) introspectionism
D) behaviorism
In a propositional network, a token node would be used to represent __________ while a type node would be used to represent ___________.
A) what a cat could do... my cat Fred
B) my cat Fred .... cats in general
C) cats in general...my cat Fred
D) cats in general....what a cat could do
In a study by Brewer and Treyens, participants waited in an experimenter's office for the experiment to begin. After they left the room, they learned that the study was about their memory for that office. This study demonstrated:
A) that people make assumptions using schemata to fill in gaps in their memory.
B) that people tend to notice only those items in the environment that most fit with their expectations .
C) that college students do not know what professor's offices typically contain.
D) that college students' memories are much worse than the memories of other groups in society.
According to exemplar theory, typicality effects:
A) are produced by the fact that the exemplars in memory for each category tend to resemble each other.
B) are difficult to explain.
C) should be observed with categories having homogeneous membership, but not with more variable categories.
D) reflect the fact that typical category members are probably frequent in our environment and are therefore frequently represented in memory.
A patient has suffered brain damage and, as a result, now seems to ignore all information on the left side of her world. If shown words, she only reads the right half of the word; if asked to copy a picture, she only copies the right half. This patient seems to be suffering from:
A) the unilateral neglect syndrome
B) parietal syndrome
C) right hemiblindness
D) a hemispherectomy.
In the video, the musician Clive Wearing was suffering from
A) inability to enjoy music
B) loss of implicit memory
C) anterograde amnesia
D) proactive inhibition
A researcher creates a series of synthetic speech sounds gradually ranging, in uniform small steps, from a "ta" sound at one extreme to a "da" sound at the other extreme. Participants are asked to identify each of these sounds. The researcher should expect to find that:
A) participants are able to identify the sounds at the extremes of the range but are confused by all other sounds
B) a participant's perceptions of the sounds show an abrupt transition, with all of the sounds closer to "ta" clearly identified as "ta," while all of the sounds closer to "da" are clearly identified as "da."
C) participants identify sounds close to "ta" as "ta" and identify sounds close to "da" as "da," but they are unable to identify the sounds midway between these
D) as the sounds gradually shift from "ta" to "da," a participant's pattern of responding gradually shifts from "ta" to "da."
The "misinformation effect" refers to the fact that false information, presented after a participant has encoded an event, can intrude into the participant's subsequent recall of the event. This "planting" of memories
A) is only possible if done by an authority figure
B) is not restricted to laboratory procedures
C) seems restricted to small memory errors
D) seems possible for remembered actions but not remembered objects.
An expert is asked to comment on the confidence-accuracy relationship of an eyewitness's report. The expert should state that:
A) confidence levels are a poor indicator of the accuracy of recall
B) the higher the witness's confidence, the more likely the memory is accurate
C) the lower the witness's confidence, the more likely the memory is accurate
D) extremely high confidence is a good indicator of an accurate memory, but more moderate levels of confidence are uninformative.
Your mental representation of a set of entities (things, events, properties, whatever) is called a(n):
A) concept
B) category
C) distributed representation
D) network
Which of the following is a "structural" or "static" neuroimaging technique?
A) fMRI
B) PET
C) CAT scan
D) ERP
Which of the following is a possible "prototype" of a concept?
A) The entire set of instances of the category that you have experienced
B) The logical combination of features that explicitly define the concept
C) The distributed network that defines a concept in a connectionist theory
D) An "ideal" instance, which has all of the most typical features of other instances
When doing a dichotic listening experiment, subjects may be able to report their own name in the unattended ear. Which of the following theory can be rejected with this evidence?
A) Feature integration theory
B) Filter theory
C) Attenuation theory
D) Late selection theory.
The "one-is-a-bun" scheme is a(n)
A) mnemonic device
B) response threshold
C) automatic response
D) memory node
The word superiority effect can easily be explained by
A) geons
B) a feature net model
C) the figure-ground effect
D) the magno and the parvo systems in the visual cortex
Which of the following statements about eye movements is true?
A) When reading, eyes fixate for about 250-300 ms, then quickly jump ahead a few spaces
B) When reading, eyes normally make smooth pursuit movements
C) When eyes make saccades, they just from one position to another, so it is hard for the brain to put words together into meaningful sentences
D) When tracking a moving finger (in the peephole demo), the eyes make saccades.
The recognition of faces:
A. resembles other forms of recognition in that our ability to recognize faces is relatively unimpaired by changes in viewing angle or orientation
B. differs from other forms of recognition in that face recognition appears not to be influenced by expectation or knowledge effects
C. is influenced by configurational factors, suggesting that a model based on feature detection will provide a poor explanation of face recognition
D. seems to rely on the detection of features and geons, indicating that the recognition by components model can be applied to face recognition