Cognitive Psychology Test Questions, Exam Questions, Quiz Questions

The well-documented increase in auto accidents when a driver is talking on a cell phone is evidence for:
A. limitation on task-general resources
B. limitation on task-specific resources
C. the absence of resource limitations
D. change blindness
Cognitive psychologists often explain people's inability to do some kinds of things at the same time in terms of:
A. change blindness
B. limited capacity
C. selective attention
D. the parietal cortex
Which of the following statements best describes the change blindness?
A. Only very small changes in images can produce change blindness
B. Normal people have difficulty detecting an image change even if they are pointed out where the change takes place
C. Subjects who fail to detect changes in succeeding images have some brain damage
D. Attention is needed to detect a change in alternating images
The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon that:
A. you remember more people of the opposite sex than of the same sex when you meet them at a party
B. you remember the people you meet early in the evening better than people you meet late
C. you remember hearing your own name in the unattended channel in a dichotic listening experiment
D. you remember speakers with strange accents and speakers using a foreign language in the unattended channel of a dichotic listening experiment
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. a hemispherectomy
B. right hemiblindness
C. the unilateral neglect syndrome
D. parietal syndrome
When doing a dichotic listening experiment, which of the following is the subject most likely to be noticed in the unattended ear?
A. The speaker makes some grammar mistake when reading
B. The speaker missed one word when reading
C. The speaker changes from male to female
D. The speaker changes the topic being talked about
Schneider and Shiffrin did a series of experiments in which people had to decide whether one of several target letters is included in a test display of several letters. The reaction time to decide that a target letter was present indicated that:
A. the target letters were searched serially when the same target letters occurred trial after trial but were searched in parallel when different target letters occurred from trial to trial
B. the target letters were searched serially both when the same target letters occurred trial after trial and when different target letters occurred from trial to trial
C. the target letters were searched in parallel when the same target letters occurred trial after trial but were searched serially when different target letters occurred from trial to trial
D. the target letters were searched in parallel both when the same target letters occurred trial after trial and when different target letters occurred from trial to trial
If asked to perform two activities at the same time, performance will be improved if:
A. the two activities are highly dissimilar, drawing on different task-specific resources.
B. the two activities are highly similar, drawing on the same task-specific resources.
C. both activities require large amounts of task-general resources.
D. neither activity involves verbal processing.
There are some basic problems with the modal model of memory. Which of the following is one of them?
A. Maintenance in STS is actually sufficient for LTS encoding.
B. Maintenance in STS is actually not necessary for LTS encoding.
C. LTS may actually keep information longer than STS.
D. Information actually stored in LTS is meaningful.
In a free recall test, subjects listen to 20 words and then recall them. Which of the following words is most likely to enter Long Term Storage (LTS)?
A. The first one.
B. The seventh one.
C. The last one.
D. All of the words.
Providing a "title" for a confusing passage may help later recall because:
A. it permits clever guessing
B. it is a good organizing device
C. it leads to intentional learning
D. none of the above
Putting a 30 sec filled delay between presentation of a free recall list and test of that list affects:
A. primacy
B. medial performance
C. long-term memory
D. recency
One reason why organization facilitates memory is that organization facilitates:
A. retrieval
B. maintenance rehearsal
C. recency
D. the visuospatial scratchpad
A student wishes to memorize an essay so that she will be able to recall the essay's content later on. Which of the following is likely to be least helpful to the student?
A. making certain that she understands the argument contained within the essay
B. thinking about why the essay is organized in the way that it is
C. reading the essay aloud over and over
D. trying to construct a paraphrase of the essay's content
Within working memory, the "lower level assistants":
A. can take over some of the lower-level analyses ordinarily performed by the central executive.
B. can provide verbal, but not visual, analysis of the memory items.
C. provide short-term storage of items likely to be needed shortly by the central executive.
D. preserve the items to be remembered in their initial sensory form (e.g., visual stimuli are preserved as visual images).
Three of these terms denote essentially the same thing. One refers to something very different, Which one is the one that refers to something different?
A. explicit memory
B. procedural memory
C. unconscious memory
D. skill
Typically, patients with severe anterograde amnesia seem to have intact ____________ but disrupted ______________ memory.
A. long-term....short-term
B. visual....spatial
C. implicit...explicit
D. episodic....semantic
Which of the following seems the best illustration of encoding specificity?
A. Susan is terrible in learning general arguments, although she is excellent in learning more specific claims.
B. Susan has learned the principles covered in her psychology class, but she has difficulty remembering the principles in the context of her day-to-day life.
C. Susan easily learns material that is meaningful but cannot learn material that is abstract.
D. Susan quickly masters new material if she knows some related information, but she has trouble learning things if the domain is new to her.
A researcher hypothesizes that high doses of caffeine can produce state-dependent learning. To confirm this hypothesis, the researcher would need to show that:
A. participants learn more effectively if they drink several cups of coffee before studying the material to be learned
B. participants recall performance is improved if they are tested soon after drinking several cups of coffee
C. participants who drink a lot of coffee are, in general, likely to do better on memory tests
D. if participants studied the material after drinking a great deal of coffee, they will have an easier time remembering the material if they drink a great deal of coffee just before taking the memory test
In tachistoscopic testing, implicit memory seems to be maximized by:
A. a previous experience of thinking about the meaning of the words being tested
B. a recent experience of actually seeing the words being tested
C. state-dependent learning for the words being tested
D. deep processing
In part 1 of an experiment, a participant is given a series of definitions, and for each definition the participant's task is to say out loud the word being defined. One of the definitions is "soft metal of a yellowish color often used for electric wires." The participant responds, "copper." This experience will have the greatest influence on which of the following tasks?
A. a tachistoscopic recognition test that includes "copper" as one of the test items
B. a general knowledge task that includes the item, "What element makes up 10 percent of so-called yellow gold?"
C. a word fragment completion task that includes the item, "_o_p_r."
D. a tachistoscopic recognition test that includes the nonword "cupper" as one of the stimuli.
If you identify a patient with intact short term memory but damaged long term memory, and a second patient with damaged short term memory but intact long term memory, you have an instance of:
A. double dissociation
B. single dissociation
C. Korsakoff syndrome
D. encoding specificity
The musician Clive Wearing was suffering from:
A. anterograde amnesia
B. proactive inhibition
C. loss of implicit memory
D. inability to enjoy music
____ words are recognized better than they are recalled, but _____ words are recalled better than they are recognized.
A. short....long
B. concrete....abstract
C. rare....common
D. English....French
In the Brown-Peterson experiment, a set of three words is forgotten within 30 seconds of counting backwards by 3's in what circumstances?
A. after enough word sets have been tested to build up proactive inhinbition
B. if people are not very good at counting backwards by 3's
C. in all circumstances
D. if the set of three words belongs to a semantic category that wasn't previously tested
The main point of Schachter's claims about the "7 sins of memory" was:
A. our memories are terribly fallible
B. our memories are actually quite well adapted to most of our needs
C. our memories need constant care and attention
D. our memories are a great mystery, to be solved only by studying the workings of the brain
Which point did the "Lost in the mall" study make?
A. it is possible to induce false memories
B. people can usually distinguish false memories from true ones
C. psychologists can distinguish false memories from true ones even if the people recalling them can't
D. hypnosis is a useful way of distinguishing false memories from true ones
Think of an experiment in which people were supposed to remember what they saw in an experimenter's office. The results of this experiment are best understood in terms of:
A. recency
B. implicit memory
C. processing fluency
D. a schema
Flashbulb memories of an event are not always accurate. Which of the following factors has been shown to increase their accuracy?
A. having the opportunity to remember the event repeatedly
B. being personally affected by or involved in the remembered event
C. having a schema into which the event can fit
D. being calm and unemotional when witnessing the event
Misleading questions asked after participants have witnessed an event:
A. influence participants' immediate reports of the event, as well as their recall of the event if they try to remember it sometime later
B. influence participants' immediate reports of the event but have little impact on longer-term retention
C. influence participants' longer-term retention of the event, but not their reports of the event immediately after witnessing it
D. influence participants' reports of an event only if the questions plant false ideas that are compatible with the participants' perceptions