Cognitive Psychology Test Answers, Exam Answers, Quiz Answers

1. Many people get the flu, but the form known as the Blue Flu is relatively rare, affecting less than one-tenth of one percent of the population, i.e., 1 in 1000. Nevertheless, a diagnostic test indicates that Jane has the Blue Flu, and this diagnostic test has, in the past, been accurate 90 percent of the time (in the sense that it says that someone has the blue flu 90% of the time when the person does have it, and 10% of the time when the person does not have it). Given this information, the likelihood of Jane having the Blue Flu:
A. is less than 1 percent
2. Heuristics are strategies that:
C. sometimes risk error in order to gain efficiency
3. Which of the following logically follows from "All A are B; all C are B"
D. none of the above
4. In the late 1800s the young science of psychology:
B. considered consciousness to be a central concern of the science.
5. One of the typical problems with automatic, unconscious processes is that they:
C. are inflexible
6. Some reasoning involves going beyond the specific information given to arrive at general principles. What is this reasoning called?
C. Inductive reasoning
7. Remember the phenomenon in which people with damage to the striate cortex, who behave as if they are blind, are significantly above chance when forced to "guess" whether they saw (e.g.) an X or an O. This phenomenon is called:
B. blindsight
8. What helps performance in the Wason 4-card task the most?
D. Being given the task in a concrete form that involves permission
9. A theorist might claim that people innately have certain rules for reasoning (e.g., they have a schema that says if "A and B" is true, then "A" is true). What general approach does this theorist follow?
B. Mental logic
10. Solomon thought to himself, 'I must stay away from the bank.' According to the text:
C. the ambiguity of this thought is resolved by the unconscious support structure that seems to provide a context for all thought.
11. Which of the following is the most justifiable conclusion from Gick & Holyoak's work on the role of analogies in the "tumor" problem?
A. analogies are of substantial value in solving the problem only if people's attention is somehow called to them
12. When reasoning with logic rules, we are likely to make errors when more or more different rules are applied. This is because______.
C. our capacity to use the rules we know is limited.
13. A mental model theorist explains why some syllogisms are hard and some are easy by claiming:
B. That the hard ones correspond to a greater number of possible mental models than the easy ones
14. Which decision heuristic or phenomenon is most like the "typicality effects"? (Hint: think about categorization and concepts)
C. The representativeness heuristic
15. Expert problem solvers:
B. tend to categorize problems in terms of their deep structure.
16. Of the following, the greatest concern associated with 'framing effects' is that:
B. changes in a decision's frame can lead participants to contradict themselves.
17. In the context of problem solving, hill-climbing is a(n)
D. heuristic
18. Some cognitive psychology research can increase our understanding of the nature of consciousness. Which area of research is meant by this?
D. all of these areas
19. The term 'covariation' refers to:
C. the tendency for one observation to be linked to another observation so that, for example, if one is strong, the other is weak.
20. What problem-solving heuristic identifies the difference(s) between the current state and the goal state and selects an operator to reduce these differences?
B. a means-end heuristic
21. The "gambler's fallacy" can best be understood in terms of:
A. The representativeness heuristic
22. Rigidly sticking to familiar uses of objects in defining a problem is often called:
A. functional fixedness
24. Researchers have tried to study the 'moment of illumination' in the laboratory. The evidence indicates that:
B. when participants report an illumination, they are at least as likely to be moving toward a dead end as they are to be moving toward the problem's solution.
25. What kind of college training (major) produces the greatest increase in the frequency with which statistical reasoning is used?
A. psychology and social science
26. Spelke, Hirst, and Neisser trained their participants to read a book while simultaneously taking dictation. Their data indicate that:
A. participants were unaware of what they had accomplished, so they did not realize that they had actually understood the dictated material.
27. In the linear order problem described in class, what is the "distance effect"?
D. people are faster to accept conclusions about things that were farther apart in the order
28. The Tower of Hanoi problem can be solved with a(n):
B. algorithm
29. The form of reasoning illustrated by the classic "All men are mortals; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal" is called a(n):
C. syllogism
30. According to an evolutionary psychological perspective, people will perform better on a reasoning problem if that problem can be related to:
D. detecting cheaters or betrayal.
31. Some psychologists describe problem solving as a process of 'search.' Which of the following is not part of this description?
D. the problem's 'path conflicts'
32. In general, the technique known as 'brainstorming':
C. increases the quantity, but not the quality, of ideas produced.
33. Heuristics like availability and representativeness are:
D. efficient and often useful
34. The fact that most people overestimate their chances of winning when they buy a lottery ticket can plausibly be attributed to:
A. availability heuristic
35. While cognitive processes are often unconscious, their products are generally conscious. One of the exceptions to this general rule (where the products of cognitive processes were also unconscious) is the case of:
C. subliminal perception
37. Bayes' rule may be presented as a way of:
C. taking base rates as well as diagnosticity into account in estimating conditional probabilities
38. One plan for solving a problem would be to consider every possible option, searching for the best solution. This broad plan:
B. is often ruled out by the sheer number of possible states within the problem space.
39. At the root of which of the following phenomena may confirmation bias and the availability heuristic be?
C. illusory correlation effects in judgment
40. The 'expected utility' associated with an action:
B. is calculated as the utility of the likely outcome of the action multiplied by the probability of reaching that outcome.

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