MC Semester 2 Distance 2014

Question 1

Which of the following best describes the relationship between the mind and cognitive psychology?

a. Cognitive psychology is concerned with showing how the brain realises the mind.
b. The goal of cognitive psychology is to determine the properties and mechanisms of the mind.
c. The goal of cognitive psychology is to describe perception, attention, memory, language and other aspects of mental activity.
d. Cognitive psychology focuses on exploring behaviours related to cognition rather than the impossible task of studying the mind.

Answer 1

a

Question 2

According to Goldstein one of the important reasons for building cognitive models is

a. to make a complicated system easier to understand.
b. to show how information flows through different components of the mind.
c. to help suggest questions to ask about cognitive phenomena.
d. All of the above.

Answer 2

d

Question 3

Recording from single neurons in the brain has shown that neurons responding to specific types of stimuli are often clustered in specific areas. These results support the idea of

a. cortical association.
b. dissociation.
c. localisation of function.
d. the information processing approach.

Answer 3

c

Question 4

The _____ lobe of the cortex serves higher functions such as language, thought, and memory.

a. subcortical
b. frontal
c. occipital
d. parietal

Answer 4

b

Question 5

Brain-imaging techniques can determine all of the following EXCEPT

a. areas of the brain activated during cognitive tasks.
b. localisation of brain activity in response to a specific stimulus.
c. the structure of individual neurons.
d. patterns of blood flow in the brain.

Answer 5

c

Question 6

In ERP methodology, the number that follows the N or the P (N400 or P300, for example) stands for

a. the positivity or negativity of the response.
b. how likely the response is, with higher numbers indicating a more likely response.
c. how strong the response is in millimeters on the reading.
d. the time at which the response peaks in milliseconds.

Answer 6

d

Question 7

If kittens are raised in an environment that contains only verticals, you would predict that most of the neurons in their visual cortex would respond best to the visual presentation of a

a. brick wall.
b. chain link fence.
c. solid wall.
d. picket fence.

Answer 7

d

Question 8

In Simons and Chabris’s inattentional blindness experiment, participants watch a film of people playing basketball. Many participants failed to report that that a person dressed as a gorilla walked through because the

a. gorilla was in motion, just like the players.
b. the gorilla suit was the same colour as the floor.
c. participants were counting the number of ball passes.
d. participants were not asked if they saw anything unusual.

Answer 8

c

Question 9

Change blindness is our inability to notice changes to a scene when

a. we focus our attention on a secondary cognitive task.
b. we are under a high cognitive load.
c. our ability to redirect our attention is compromised.
d. when the changes occur rapidly.

Answer 9

c

Question 10

The cocktail party effect is

a. the ability to pay attention to one message and ignore others, yet hear distinctive features of the unattended messages.
b. the inability to pay attention to one message in the presence of competing messages.
c. the diminished awareness of information in a crowd.
d. the equal division of attention between competing messages.

Answer 10

a

Question 11

Selection of the attended message in the Broadbent model occurs based on the

a. meaning of the message.
b. physical characteristics of the message.
c. physical characteristics of the message plus the meaning, if necessary.
d. listener’s ability to mentally block the unattended message from getting in.

Answer 11

b

Question 12

Automatic processing occurs when

a. cognitive resources are high.
b. response times are long.
c. tasks are well-practiced.
d. attention is focused.

Answer 12

c

Question 13

Strayer and Johnston’s (2001) experiment involving simulated driving and the use of “hands-free” vs. “handheld” cell phones found that

a. talking on either kind of phone impairs driving performance significantly and to the same extent.
b. driving performance was impaired only with the hand held cell phones.
c. driving performance was impaired less with the hands-free phones than with the handheld phones.
d. divided attention (driving and talking on the phone) did not affect performance.

Answer 13

a

Question 14

Which statement below is most closely associated with the early history of the study of imagery?

a. Imagery is based on spatial mechanisms like those involved in perception.
b. Thought is always accompanied by imagery.
c. People can rotate images of objects in their heads.
d. Imagery is closely related to language.

Answer 14

b

Question 15

Shepard and Metzler’s “image rotation” experiment was so influential and important to the study of cognition because it demonstrated

a. how easy mental rotation is for humans.
b. that humans cannot successfully rotate mental images beyond 90 degrees.
c. that humans can only perform mental rotation on “real-world” objects.
d. imagery and perception may share the same mechanisms.

Answer 15

d

Question 16

Mental-scanning experiments found

a. a positive linear relationship between scanning time and distance on the image.
b. a negative linear relationship between scanning time and distance on the image.
c. a constant scanning time for all locations on an image.
d. that imagery does not represent spatial relations in the same way perceptual information does.

Answer 16

a

Question 17

Which of the following has been used as an argument AGAINST the idea that imagery is spatial in nature?

a. The results of scanning experiments
b. Depictive representations
c. The tacit-knowledge explanation
d. none of these (they all support the idea that imagery is spatial)

Answer 17

c

Question 18

Amedi and coworkers used fMRI to investigate the differences between brain activation for perception and imagery. Their findings showed that when participants were ____, some areas associated with non-visual sensation (such as hearing and touch) were ____.

a. creating images; activated
b. creating images; deactivated
c. perceiving stimuli; activated
d. perceiving stimuli; deactivated

Answer 18

b

Question 19

A property of control processes in the modal model of memory is that they

a. do not require attention.
b. may differ from one task to another.
c. are performed without conscious awareness.
d. are difficult to modify.

Answer 19

b

Question 20

Brief sensory memory for sound is known as

a. iconic memory.
b. primary auditory memory.
c. echoic memory.
d. pre-perceptual auditory memory.

Answer 20

c

Question 21

Peterson and Peterson studied how well participants can remember groups of three letters (like BRT, QSD) after various delays. They found that participants remembered an average of 80 percent of the groups after 3 seconds but only 10 percent after 18 seconds. They hypothesized that this decrease in performance was due to _____, but later research showed that it was actually due to _____.

a. interference; decay
b. priming; interference
c. decay; interference
d. decay; lack of rehearsal

Answer 21

c

Question 22

Which of the following represents the most effective chunking of the letter sequence NZUSAUKLOL?

a. NZU SAU KLOL
b. NZ US AU KL OL
c. N ZUS AUK LOL
d. NZ USA UK LOL

Answer 22

d

Question 23

Imagine yourself walking from your car, bus stop, or dorm to your first class. Your ability to form such a picture in your mind depends on

a. the STM recency effect.
b. delayed response coding.
c. the phonological loop.
d. the visuospatial sketchpad.

Answer 23

d

Question 24

Articulatory suppression causes a decrease in the word-length effect because

a. saying “the, the, the” fills up the phonological loop.
b. saying “la, la, la “forces participants to use visual encoding.
c. talking makes the longer words seem even longer.
d. elaborative rehearsal helps transfer information into LTM.

Answer 24

a

Question 25

Loss of memory for things that have happened in the past is known as

a. anterograde amnesia.
b. retrograde amnesia.
c. the primacy effect.
d. the serial effect.

Answer 25

b

Question 26

Murdoch’s “remembering a list” experiment described the serial position curve and found that memory is best for the ____ of a list.

a. first five words
b. middle five words
c. last five words
d. first five and the last five words

Answer 26

d

Question 27

An example of a dissociation is evidenced by a brain-injured patient who

a. shows a significantly reduced digit span.
b. cannot recognize either familiar faces or familiar voices.
c. exhibits a recency effect but no primacy effect.
d. shows evidence for deeper processing and shallow processing.

Answer 27

c

Question 28

We are conscious of _____ memories.

a. implicit
b. procedural
c. declarative
d. All of the above

Answer 28

c

Question 29

K.C., who was injured in a motorcycle accident, remembers facts like the
difference between a strike and a spare in bowling, but he is unaware of experiencing things like hearing about the circumstances of his brother’s death, which occurred two years before the accident. His memory behaviour suggests

a. intact semantic memory but defective episodic memory.
b. intact procedural memory but defective semantic memory.
c. intact episodic memory but defective semantic memory.
d. intact episodic memory but defective procedural memory.

Answer 29

a

Question 30

Memory enhancement due to repetition priming is a result of

a. the test stimulus being the same or resembling the priming stimulus.
b. the test stimulus being different from the priming stimulus.
c. the test stimulus being similar in meaning to the priming stimulus.
d. the test stimulus being different in meaning from the priming stimulus.

Answer 30

a

Question 31

Acquiring information and transforming it into memory is

a. state-dependent learning.
b. encoding.
c. memory consolidation.
d. transfer-appropriate processing.

Answer 31

b

Question 32

According to the levels of processing theory, memory durability depends on how information is

a. encoded.
b. stored.
c. retrieved.
d. All of the above

Answer 32

a

Question 33

According to your text, imagery enhances memory because

a. research shows people like pictures better than words, so there is an enhanced emotional response.
b. the brain processes images more easily than the meanings of words.
c. imagery can be used to create connections between items to be remembered.
d. pictures fit better with our basic instincts because children learn pictures before reading words.

Answer 33

c

Question 34

Bransford and Johnson’s study had participants hear a passage which turned out to be about a man on the street serenading his girlfriend in a tall building. The wording of the passage made it difficult to understand, but looking at a picture made it easier to understand. The results of this study illustrated the importance of _______ in forming reliable long-term memories.

a. implicit memory during learning
b. an organisational context during learning
c. deep processing during retrieval
d. imagery

Answer 34

b

Question 35

Which example below best demonstrates state-dependent learning?

a. Last night, at the supermarket, Connor ran into a psychology lecturer he took a class with three semesters ago. He recognized her right away.
b. Even though Bill hasn’t been to the beach bach his parents owned since he was a child, he still has many fond memories of time spent there as a family.
c. Although Emily doesn’t very often think about her first love, Steve, she can’t help getting caught up in happy memories when “their song” (the first song they danced to) plays on the radio.
d. Alexis always suffers test anxiety in her classes. To combat this, she tries to relax when she studies. She thinks it’s best to study while lying in bed, reading by candlelight with soft music playing.

Answer 35

c

Question 36

The memory mechanism Hebb proposed is associated with

a. changes at the synapse.
b. long-term potentiation.
c. changes in specialised areas of the brain.
d. both changes at the synapse and long-term potentiation.

Answer 36

d

Question 37

The observation that older adults often become nostalgic for the “good old days” reflects the self-image hypothesis, which states that

a. life in a society gets more complicated and difficult as generations pass.
b. memory for life events is enhanced during the time we assume our life identities.
c. people tend to remember more of the positive events in their lives than negative ones.
d. our memories change as we live longer and have more “life time periods”to draw events from.

Answer 37

b

Question 38

A lesson to be learned from the research on flashbulb memories is that

a. rehearsal cannot account for them.
b. people’s confidence in a memory predicts its accuracy (high confidence= high accuracy).
c. extreme vividness of a memory does not mean it is accurate.
d. they are permanent and resist forgetting.

Answer 38

c

Question 39

According to the _____ approach to memory, what people report as memories is based on what actually happened plus additional factors such as other knowledge, experiences, and expectations.

a. event-specific
b. source
c. constructive
d. misinformation

Answer 39

c

Question 40

The experiment for which people were asked to make fame judgments for both famous and non-famous names (and for which Sebastian Weissdorf was one of the names to be remembered) illustrated the effect of _____ on memory.

a. repeated rehearsal of distinctive names
b. source misattributions
c. encoding specificity
d. schemas

Answer 40

b

Question 41

In the experiment in which participants sat in an office and then were asked to remember what they saw in the office, participants “remembered” some things, like books, that weren’t actually there. This experiment illustrates the effect of _____ on memory.

a. schemas
b. scripts
c. confabulation
d. bias

Answer 41

a

Question 42

Your text’s discussion of false memories leads to the conclusion that false memories

a. are a natural consequence of a largely adaptive memory system.
b. occur for details but not for entire events.
c. occur in laboratory settings but do not occur in real-world circumstances.
d. do not occur for all people but rather are experienced by suggestible or inattentive people.

Answer 42

a

Question 43

The principle illustrated when most people are able to recognize a variety of
examples of chairs even though no one category member may have all of the characteristic properties of “chairs” (e.g., most chairs have four legs but not all do) is

a. family resemblance.
b. prototypicality.
c. graded membership.
d. instance theory.

Answer 43

a

Question 44

A task for determining how prototypical an object is would be

a. a fill-in-the-blank task where participants generate paired members with in a category.
b. a task where participants rate the extent to which each member represents the category title.
c. a task where participants rate the extent to which category members resemble one another.
d. a fill-in-the-blank task where participants generate the category classification for a list of members.

Answer 44

b

Question 45

How is cognitive economy represented in the following example? The property _____ is stored at the _____ node.

a. can fly; bird
b. can fly; canary
c. has feathers; ostrich
d. bird; penguin

Answer 45

a

Question 46

Spreading activation

a. primes associated concepts.
b. inhibits unrelated concepts.
c. creates new links between associated concepts.
d. weakens the link between unrelated concepts.

Answer 46

a

Question 47

The word frequency effect refers to the fact that we respond more

a. slowly to low-frequency words than high-frequency words.
b. slowly to letters appearing in non words than letters appearing in words.
c. quickly to letters that appear multiple times in a word than just once in a word.
d. quickly to phonemes that appear multiple times in a word than just once in a word.

Answer 47

a

Question 48

Lexical ambiguity studies show that people initially access

a. only the meaning of an ambiguous word that is consistent with the context.
b. multiple meanings of an ambiguous word.
c. the appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word based on syntax.
d. the appropriate meaning of an ambiguous word based on the principle of late closure.

Answer 48

b

Question 49

Coherence refers to the

a. mental process by which readers create information during reading that is not explicitly stated in the text.
b. principle that we process information in isolation before we link it to its context.
c. mental process whereby ambiguity is resolved online during sentence reading.
d. representation of the text in a reader’s mind, so that information in one part of the text is related to information in another part of the text.

Answer 49

d

Question 50

According to the situation model of text processing,

a. people create a mental representation of what the text is about in terms of information about phrases, sentences, and paragraphs.
b. people create a mental representation of what the text is about in terms of people, objects, locations, and events.
c. it will take longer to understand a story that involves a complex series of situations.
d. people draw inferences about what is happening in a story by considering both local and global connections.

Answer 50

b

Question 51

Metcalfe and Wiebe gave participants problems to solve and asked them to make “warmth” judgments every 15 seconds to indicate how close they felt they were to a solution. The purpose of this experiment was to

a. demonstrate a difference between how people solve insight and non- insight problems.
b. show how people progress through the problem space as they solve a problem.
c. show that some problems are easier to solve than others.
d. measure the time-course of solving well-defined versus ill-defined problems.

Answer 51

a

Question 52

Which problem provides an example of how functional fixedness can hinder solution of a problem?

a. Tower of Hanoi problem.
b. Two-string problem.
c. Mutilated checkerboard problem.
d. The radiation problem.

Answer 52

b

Question 53

The information processing approach describes problem solving as a process involving

a. design fixation.
b. creative cognition.
c. insight.
d. search.

Answer 53

d

Question 54

Kaplan and Simon’s experiment presented different versions of the mutilated checkerboard problem. The main purpose of their experiment was to demonstrate that

a. people arrive at the solution to an insight problem suddenly, but proceed more methodically towards the solution of a non-insight problem.
b. a person’s mental set can hinder finding a solution to a problem.
c. people often have to backtrack within the problem space to arrive at an answer to a problem.
d. the way the problem is represented can influence the ease of problem solving.

Answer 54

d

Question 55

When the process of analogical problem solving was applied to the fortress and radiation problems, which of the following represented the mapping step of this process?

a. Likening the dangerous mines to the dangerous tumor.
b. Developing schemas for each individual problem.
c. Connecting the fortress with the tumor.
d. Generalising from groups of soldiers to using many rays to solve the problem.

Answer 55

c

Question 56

Making probable conclusions based on evidence involves _____ reasoning.

a. deductive
b. syllogistic
c. inductive
d. connective

Answer 56

c

Question 57

One reason that most people do not easily solve the original (abstract) version of
the Wason four-card problem is that they

a. ignore the falsification principle.
b. are influenced by the atmosphere effect.
c. confuse the ideas of validity and truth.
d. incorrectly apply the permission schema.

Answer 57

a

Question 58

Derrick purchased a new car, a Ford Focus, less than a month ago. While sitting in traffic, Derrick says to his girlfriend, “Focuses must be the best-selling car now. I can’t remember seeing as many on the road as I have recently.” Derrick’s judgment is most likely biased by a(n)

a. atmosphere effect.
b. availability heuristic.
c. focusing illusion.
d. permission schema.

Answer 58

b

Question 59

People tend to overestimate

a. what negative feelings will occur following a decision more so than positive feelings.
b. what positive feelings will occur following a decision more so than negative feelings.
c. what positive and negative feelings will occur following a decision to the same degree.
d. subjective utility values following a decision.

Answer 59

a

Question 60

Janine is in a supermarket considering which drink to buy. She recalls a commercial for BigFizz she saw on TV last night. BigFizz is running a promotion where you look under the bottle cap, and one in five bottles has a voucher for a free drink. If Janine decides to purchase a BigFizz based on this promotion, which is framed in terms of _____, she will use a _____ strategy.

a. losses; risk-taking
b. gains; risk-taking
c. losses; risk-aversion
d. gains; risk-aversion

Answer 60

d