Cognitive Psychology Test Questions, Exam Questions, Quiz Questions

Which of the following provides the most serious obstacle to the use of introspection as a source of scientific evidence?
A. when facts are provided by introspection, we have no way to assess the facts thenmselves, independent of the reporter's particular perspective on the facts
B. introspection requires an alert, verbally expressive investigator; otherwise the evidence provided by introspection will be of poor quality
C. introspection provides evidence about some mental events but cannot provide evidence avout unconscious processes or ideas
D. the process of reporting on one's own mental events can take a lot of time, and can slow down the processes under investigation
The philospher Immanuel Kant based many of his arguments on transcendental inferences. A commonplace example of such an inference is:
A. a physicist inferring what the atributes of the electron must be based on visible effects caused by the electron
B. a computer scientist inferring what the attributes of a program must be based on her long-range goals for the program's functioning
C. a biologist inferring how an organism is likely to behave in the future based on assessment of past behaviours.
D. a behaviourist inferring how a behaviour was learned based on a deduction from well-established principles of learning.
Commissures, including the corpus callosum, are:
A. blood vessels that carry blood to all areas of the brain
B. brain areas associated with various types of sensory information
C. pockets of oxygen foundthroughout the brain
D. thick bundles of fibers that allow communication between the brain's hemispheres
The primary motor projection area is located:
A. in the cerebellum
B. in the occipital cortex
C. toward the rear of the frontal lobe
D. in the midbrain
The lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) is:
A. a way station between the eye and the occipital cortex, located in the thalamus
B. an important area in the inferior parietal cortex, associated with long-term memory
C. the section of the optic nerve closest to the eye
D. the location in the temporal cortex where auditory information is stored
A neuron's initial, internal response to an incoming signal can vary in size. The ultimate, external response of the cell, however, does not vary in size. If the signal is sent, it is always of the same magnitude. This effect is called:
A. the whole-firing potential
B. the all-or-none law
C. the uniform response law
D. the threshold potential
Patients who have suffered damage to the occipital-parietal pathway (the 'where' system) will have difficulties with which of the following tasks?
A. visually identifyiing a toothbrush on the counter in front of them
B. describing the function of the toothbrush without touching it
C. reaching in the correct direction to retrieve the toothbrush
D. knowing how to use the toothbrush once they have retrieved it
Which of the following is NOT true for feature-based models of pattern recognition?
A. Features, as general-purpose building blocks, can help explain how humans recognize variations on a form (e.g., a cat in different poistions, or a letter in different type fonts)
B. The visual system identifies small pieces of pattern first and then combines them to form more complex wholes
C. Search tasks are generally easier if a single feature distinguishes the target from other items in the field
D. While functional and computational models have made clear the advantages of a feature-based system, we have not yet located the mechanisms in the brain that might support sucha system.
Participants' recognition thresholds are:
A. lower for frequently seen words
B. higher for recently seen words
C. not affected by priming
D. lower for highly unusual words
In tachitoscopic recognition, participants often make over regularization errors. These are errors in which:
A. participants perceive a word as pertaining to their personal experiences even when the word is relatively neutral
B. participants perceive a word as being related to the previous word when in fact it is not
C. participants are shown a frequently used word but perceive it as an infrequently used word
D. participants are shown pattern such as 'MJLK' but perceive it as 'MILK'
In a feature-net model, knowledge of spelling patterns:
A. can influence the perception of whole words but not the perception of single letters or bigrams
B. in distributed across the model, and therefore the knowledge is only detectable in the overall functioning of the network
C. is locally represented, allowing the network to draw inferences about partially viewed stimuli
D. is overshadowed by the parallel processing employed by the net.
Speed reading:
A. involves collecting more information from a page of text than one does in normal reading
B. uses more stable, continuous eye movements to allow the eye to move across each line of text more smoothly
C. employs the same mechanisms as normal reading, only with less actual perception and more interference
D. is more useful than slower reading for picking up details in the text, because a speed-reader has less time to get bored.
If one interprets dichotic-listening results in terms of 'limited processing resources,' which of the following claims fits least well with the data?
A. the detection of a message's semantic content relies on well-practiced activities, and therefore the detection places a minimal demand on our processing resources
B. Participants generally fail to perceive the unattended message simply because the have not devoted enough resources to the processing of this message
C. Participants occasionally perceive elements of the unattended message, and they tend to be elements that can be detected with minimal resources
D. Participants do not have the option of perceiving both the attended and unattended message, since this would require more resources than are available.
Priming based on specific expectations about the identity of the upcoming stimulus produces:
A. no benefit for processing if the expectations are correct but slows processing if the expectations are incorrect
B. a benefit for processing if the expectations are correct but slows processing if the expectations are incorrect
C. a benefit for processing if the expectations are correct but has no effect on processing if the expectations are incorrect
D. the same benefit as stimulus-based repetition priming.
Participants are asked to listen to a tape-recorded message and to shadow the message as they hear it. Which of the following task will be easiest to combine with this shadowing task?
A. viewing aseries of printed words, followed by a test measuring memory for the words
B. hearing a simultaneous tape-recorded message, followed by a test measuring memory for the gist of the second message
C. hearing a simulataneous tape-recorded list of words, followed by a test measuring memory for the word list
D. viewing a series of pictures, followed by a test measuring memory for the pictures
It has been hypothesized that some mental resources are unitary and therefore not divisible. If two tasks both require one of these unitary resources, divided attention between these two tasks:
A. will not be possible
B. will only be possible by means of time-sharing of the resource
C. will only be possible if the two task make different uses of the resource
D. will only be possible if the two tasks make matched demands of the resource
Participants are asked to search for a particular target amidst a set of stimuli. On some trials two stimuli are presented, and participants must determine if one of them is the target. On other trials, eight stimuli are presented, and participants again must search for the target within the set. If participants are able to use a parallel search in this task, we would predict that:
A. response times will be approximately four times slower in the trials with eight stimuli as compared with the trials with two stimuli
B. response times will be slower when searching through eight stimuli, but the information provided does not allow a prediction of how much slower they will be
C. response times will be faster when searching through the eight stimuli than when searching through the two stimuli
D. response times will be the same for searching through two stimuli and for searching through eight.
Participants are given practice in a search task with varied mapping between stimuli and responses. Under these circumstances, we would expect that after practice:
A. participants' response times will not depend on the number of stimuli shown in each trial
B. participants will have great difficulty if the categorization of targets and distractors is now reversed
C. searching for the target will become automatic
D. participants must still use a serial search to locate the target on each trial.
Crosstalk between two tasks is defined as:
A. leakage of information about one of the tasks into the processing of the other task
B. integration of the information received from more than one source
C. assimilation of information received in one contest into a new contest.
D. focus on the contrasts between two tasks.
One difference between working memory and long-term memory is that:
A. the contents of working memory tend to be in the form of visual images, whereas the contents of long-term memory are often verbal and symbolic
B. damage to the brain can disrupt working memory, but long-term memory seems not to be similarly vulnerable
C. the contents of working memory last only a half-second or so, whereas the contents oflong-term memory are much more durable
D. the contents of working memory depend on the content of one's current thinking; the contents of long-term memory do not
Participants read a series of letters and then, a moment later, are asked to write down the letters they have just seen. If the letter series contains 8 to 10 letters, some errors may occur. The errors are likely to involve:
A. letters that sound like the letters they have just seen (e.g., recalling S when F was shown)
B. letters that look like the letters they have just seen (e.g., recalling E when F was shown)
C. errors with letters from the middle of the alphabeet but fewer errors from the beginning and end of the alphabet
D. errors with no systematic pattern, probably reflecting each participant's own associations to the various letters
The strategy of maintenance rehearsal involves:
A. repetition of items to be remembered and simultaneous consideration of the items' meaning
B. a focus on the associations between the items to be remembered and other thoughts and ideas
C. paying attention to the sequence of items, independent of their meaning
D. repetition of the items to be remembered with little attention paid to what the items mean.
In a peg-word system, participants help themselves memorize a group of items by:
A. forming an elaborate sentence about each of the items to be remembered
B. associating each item with some part o an already memorized framework, or skeleton
C. naming the items to themselves over and over
D. placing each item in its appropriate semantic category.