Cognitive Psychology Test Questions, Exam Questions, Quiz Questions

The textbook's discussion of 'mutilated lemons' and 'perfect counterfeits' implies all of the following except that:
A. the history of an object is sometimes crucial in determining the object's category membership.
B. an object can be in a category even if the object has no resemblance to the category's prototype.
C. participants are unable to separate their judgments about category membership from their judgments about typicality.
D. an object can be excluded from a category even if the object has a strong resemblance to the category's prototype.
Participants are better able to remember material learned earlier if they are in the same state at the time of recall that they were in at the time of learning. In network terms, this reflects the fact that nodes for the target materials:
A. probably have a low degree of fan
B. are receiving activation from both the nodes representing the retrieval cues and the nodes representing the participants' state
C. are associated only indirectly with the nodes representing the retrieval cues
D. have higher response thresholds in some states than in others
The existence of "illusory correlations" (e.g., Chapman & Chapman's work) provides support for ___________ theories of concepts.
A. Prototype
B. Exemplar
C. Classical
D. Theory-based
An 'image file' refers to:
A. the memory representation of a basic element of visual appearance, such as the representation for 'red' or 'circular'
B. the information that can be derived from a close inspection of a mental image
C. descriptive information in long-term memory used as the basis for creating an active image
D. the portion of long-term storage that contains all of one's knowledge about visual appearances
Judgments according to typicality work well as an identification heuristic. Which of the following does not contribute to the success of this heuristic?
A. Judgments based on typicality can lead to error, since typicality is not the same as category membership.
B. Objects that resemble a typical category member are likely to be members of that category.
C. Judgments about typicality usually draw on only part of our conceptual knowledge and thus provide a streamlined basis for making judgments.
D. Typicality is often determined by relatively superficial features, and these features can be judged quickly.
A connectionist model has all but which of the following:
A. a homunculus
B. nodes
C. connections
D. activation functions
Connectionist (or PDP) models differ from classic associative networks in the fact that connectionism:
A. relies on a central executive to coordinate processing
B. uses local representations rather than distributed representations
C. draws mostly on serial processing
D. employs distributed processes
If you have a dog named "Rover," your knowledge of Rover could be represented as an associative network. In this network, the node for Rover that is connected to the node for dog by an isa relation is a(n)
A. activated node
B. token node
C. threshold node
D. type node
If your understanding of what I say is affected by what you think I think you know, psycholinguists say this shows the operation of
A. Species-specificity
B. Common ground
C. Parsing
D. Immediacy
In ordinary speech production, the boundaries between syllables or between words are:
A. usually marked by slight loudness changes.
B. usually not marked, so they must be determined by the perceiver.
C. usually marked by momentary pauses.
D. usually marked by slight changes in pitch.
The rules governing the sequence of words in forming phrases and sentences are rules of:
A. pragmatics
B. syntax
C. semantics
D. phonology
In memorizing new material, it is consistently helpful if one imagines the items:
A. one by one so that the items do not blur together
B. close to each other, but separated so that each is easily visible
C. interacting with each other in some way
D. in a bizarre relationship
Evidence from aphasia and neuroimaging indicates:
A. people differ as a result of childhood experiences in what parts of the brain play which roles in language
B. speech perception is localized but speech production is not localized
C. language is processed by the whole brain, not by distinct parts of the brain
D. different areas of the brain are specialized for different language functions
It seems unlikely that our conceptual knowledge is represented by 'mental definitions' because:
A. many of our abstract concepts ('justice,' 'love,' 'God') are difficult to define
B. most of our concepts are difficult to express in words
C. each person has his or her own idea about how concepts should be defined
D. it is easy to find exceptions to any definition proposed
If asked to name as many birds as they can, participants are most likely to name:
A. birds associated with other familiar concepts (e.g., turkey, bald eagle)
B. birds resembling the prototype (e.g., robin, sparrow)
C. distinctive birds (e.g., vulture, penguin)
D. larger birds (e.g., hawk, owl)
People are more likely to detect that an unfamiliar object changed in a picture between training and test than they are to detect that a familiar object changed (e.g. they are more likely to recognize that a fireplace disappeared from a kitchen than that a toaster disappeared. This indicates
A. images are like pictures in the brain
C. memory for pictures is inaccurate
B. verbal memory for picture descriptions
D. a schema effect in visual memory
The term 'categorical perception' refers to the fact that:
A. we are better at hearing the difference between sounds from different categories than we are at distinguishing sounds from the same category
B. we are highly sensitive to variations within a category but are less sensitive to the contrast between categories
C. we are skillful at identifying sounds but are less skillful at hearing the physical characteristics of those sounds
D. we are better at hearing some categories of sounds than we are at hearing other categories
In a lexical-decision task, participants:
A. are shown letter strings and must decide whether or not each is a word
B. are shown sequences of numbers and must decide whether or not each conforms to a specific pattern
C. are shown word pairs and must decide whether or not the words in the pair are related
D. are shown simple sentences and must decide whether each is true or false
Which of the following is a criticism of examplar theories of concepts?
A. Their dependence on the unsolved problem of how similarity between two objects should be computed
B. The memory-demanding and artificial nature of the experiments that have been used to support them
C. Their inability to explain how people can form and even describe abstract concepts
D. All the above
Studies of image scanning indicate that:
A. points close together on the imaged object are functionally close in the mental image
B. points close together on the imaged object are apparently physically close in the mental image itself
C. mental images are literally pictures in the brain
D. mental images preserve some spatial relations (e.g., proximity) but not others (e.g., alignment or the relationship of one point being between two others)
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. garden-pathing
B. linguistic universals
C. phoneme restoration
D. trace detection
The fan effect is taken to support:
A. encoding specificity
B. spreading activation network theories
C. state-dependent learning
D. depth of processing
The term 'basic-level category' refers to:
A. the most specific level of categorization participants can think of
B. the most natural level of categorization, neither too specific nor too general
C. the most general level of categorization participants can think of
D. the level of categorization regarded by most participants as indisputable
What is the term for the minimal meaningful unit of language?
A. Constituent
B. Formant
C. Phoneme
D. Morpheme
According to Collins and Quillian's classic sentence verification experiment, which kinds of sentences are verified faster?
A. The sentence whose key nodes have no connection in the network,
B. The sentence whose key nodes are separated in the network by the fewest links.
C. The sentence whose key nodes in network are connected with more steps but there are more pathways.
D. The sentence whose key nodes are separated in the network by the most links.
Evidence suggests that preschool children seem to believe that:
A. it is the combination of behavior and appearance that matters for category identity, so both attributes would have to be changed to turn one organism into another
B. it is appearance that matters for category identity, so if a skunk were altered to look like a raccoon, it would count as a genuine raccoon
C. no matter how you changed a skunk's behavior or appearance, it would still be a skunk and not a raccoon
D. it is behavior that matters for category identity, so if a skunk learned to act like a raccoon, it would count as a genuine raccoon
A young child's ability to correctly answer a question like 'When did the boy say how he hurt himself' means that:
A. The parents instructed the child about such sentences
B. The child innately knows some constraints on possible sentence structures
C. The child is imitating its parents
D. The child was rewarded for answering these questions correctly