Cognitive Psychology Test Questions, Exam Questions, Quiz Questions

1. Human brains have a distinct division-of-labor strategy. Each task is achieved as a result of multiple brain areas working together. But the work of the various parts of the brain must be compiled into a finished whole. The issue of how this reassembly works is referred to as:
A. the reassembly law
B. the ultimate puzzle.
C. the Humpty Dumpty dilemma
D. the binding problem.
2. Which of the following is a "structural" or "static" neuroimaging technique?
A. PET
B. ERP
C. CAT scan
D. fMRI.
3. Which of the following is likely to be stored in episodic memory?
A. your recall of what the color red looks like
B. your knowledge that people tend to be happy when they receive gifts.
C. your knowing that the word 'table' names a type of furniture
D. your recollection of what you had to eat last New Year's Eve
4. The two major visual pathways of the brain, one projecting to the parietal lobe and one to the temporal lobe can be called:
A. The "analytic" and "wholistic" systems
B. The "what" and "where" systems
C. The "cortical" and "subcortical" systems
D. The "color" and "shape" systems
5. Which of the following items would you recognize the fastest (with the shortest presentation duration), assuming that your experimental procedures controlled adequately for guessing?
A. XXNXX
B. HNBCE
C. N
D. BENCH
6. What is the major function of the occipital lobe?
A. Language
B. Motor control
C. Vision
D. Body sense
7. Some researchers explain Capgras Syndrome as:
A. a subtype of schizophrenia
B. a simple failure of visual recognition
C. a failure of long-term memory, because patients cannot remember what their own close family members look like
D. the result of a disconnection between a cognitive appraisal and a sense of familiarity
8. Evidence from anarthric (speech-less) patients suggests that:
A. subvocalization does not use words
B. these patients are unable to subvocalize
C. muscles necessary for speech are also needed for subvocalization
D. muscles needed for speech are not needed for subvocalization
9. When we proofread a paper, we sometimes perceive letters that are not there, thereby failing to detect spelling errors on the page. A similar phenomenon, perceiving aspects of the stimulus that are not actually present, has been documented in hearing. This phenomenon is called:
A. the word-frequency effect
B. the verbal-transformation effect
C. the phonemic restoration effect
D. the biased-perceiver effect
10. When one criticizes introspectionism for not enabling one scientist to check another scientist's observations, one is accusing it of being too:
A. subjective
B. clinical
C. dynamic
D. objective
11. What is one way in which a feature net (for recognizing words) can account for the fact that letter strings that follow the spelling patterns of English are recognized faster than letter strings that don't?
A. including bigram detectors as nodes in the net
B. including whole-word nodes in the net
C. including the correct primitive features in the net
D. including hypercomplex features as nodes in the net
12. The Nobel prize winners Hubel and Weisel observed that specific neurons in the cat's visual system responded to particular visual inputs. This is often taken as evidence for:
A. Distinct "what" and "where" systems
B. Top-down processing
C. Visual feature detectors
D. Object template detectors
13. A researcher wishes to define the receptive field for a particular neuron in the visual cortex. To do this, the researcher will need to specify:
A. an area within the visual field, with the cell firing if the appropriate target appears within the area
B. the brain area from which the neuron is receiving its input
C. the portion of the neuron that receives input from neighboring neurons
D. where the neuron is located within the visual cortex
14. Primary visual cortex (area V1) in the right hemisphere of the brain receives information from:
A. Visual information that reaches left eye
B. Left visual field
C. Visual information that reaches right eye
D. Right visual field
15. In using the articulatory rehearsal loop, the central executive temporarily relies on storage:
A. in a subvocal bank
B. in a visual form in visual memory
C. in episodic memory
D. in a phonological buffer
16. The finding that you can find a tilted line in a bunch of vertical lines faster than you can find a vertical line in a bunch of tilted lines is called:
A. geon processing
B. search asymmetry
C. the context effect
D. figure-ground organization
17. A number of techniques have been developed that allow us to examine the moment-by-moment activity levels of specifically defined brain areas. These techniques are called:
A. chronometric techniques
B. psychometric assessment
C. neuroimaging techniques
D. EEG measurement
18. One of the ways in which the various projection areas in the visual cortex are organized is considered to be more important than others. Which way?
A. They are organized by brightness, with some areas being very sensitive to dim light and others most sensitive to bright light.
B. They are organized as topographic maps, maintaining a (roughly) 1:1 correspondence to location in the visual world
C. They are organized functionally, so that some represent knowledge of biological objects, some represent knowledge of artifacts, some represent knowledge of dangers, etc.
D. They are organized differently in the left and the right hemispheres
19. Which of the following would a classical behaviorist be least likely to study?
A. a participant's beliefs
B. principles that apply equally to human behavior and to the behavior of other species.
C. a participant's response to a particular situation
D. changes in a participant's behavior that follow changes in the environment
20. You have to name the color of ink in which something is printed. Which of the following "somethings" will result in the slowest naming time?
A. A word in a foreign language
B. A nonsense word
C. A word that describes shape rather than color
D. A color word
21. A patient with visual agnosia will probably show an inability to:
A. identify common objects in plain view.
B. remember a list of words heard one hour before.
C. detect brief flashes of light.
D. recall the color of familiar objects (e.g., that stop signs are re
D..
22. 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
23. "Bottom-up" (or "data-driven") mechanisms
A. the process by which researchers seek to develop new theories by paying close attention to the available data
B. mechanisms for which activity is influenced by thoughts provided by the individual
C. the scientific process in which all claims must be rooted in well-established biological evidence
D. mechanisms for which activity is primarily triggered and shaped by the incoming stimulus information
24. Search asymmetries can be interpreted as evidence for which of the following claims?
A. In general, if a feature can be recognized swiftly by the visual system, so can the mirror image of that feature
B. Virtually any visual configuration can be used as a feature, provided that the configuration is not too complex
C. The perceptual system pays special attention to symmetrical targets, indicating that symmetry is one of the features of great importance in pattern recognition
D. An occurrence of an element (such as a gap) can constitute a feature for the visual system, even though the absence of that element (no gap) does not constitute a feature
25. Biederman's Recognition by Components (RBC) model:
A. can recognize three-dimensional objects provided they are seen from the appropriate viewing angle
B. does not rely on a hierarchy of detectors
C. makes use of geon detectors, which in turn trigger detectors for geon assemblies
D. asserts that priming takes place primarily at levels higher than the level of geon detectors
26. As a neuromaging techinque, ERP is characterized by
A. Low spatial and low temporal resolution
B. Low spatial and high temporal resolution
C. High spatial and high temporal resolution
D. High spatial and low temporal resolution
27. 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. introspectionism
B. cognitive psychology
C. cognitive science
D. behaviourism
28. If a researcher applies mild electrical current to a specific area of an animal's right hemisphere primary motor projection area, which of the following is likely to happen?
A. a chaotic movement of the entire animal
B. no movement at all
C. a specific movement of a body part on the left side of the animal
D. a specific movement of a body part on the right side of the animal
29. In an experiment in which a participant first saw an outline picture of an object with half the contours erased, and then saw a second outline picture of an object with half the contours erased. The fact that the experimental participant was as fast to name the second picture under one condition as s/he was in a condition in which the second picture was identical to the first has been taken to support Biederman's geon theory. Which condition was it?
A. The first and the second pictures showed different geons
B. The first and the second pictures had the same names
C. The first and the second pictures were mirror images of one another
D. The first and the second pictures showed the same geons, just different parts of each geon
30. Which of the following is not one of the levels of David Marr's levels of understanding of an information processor?
A. Hardware of machine
B. Algorithm used
C. Speed of operation
D. Function computation