mid sem

Question 1

What is the relationship between cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience?

Answer 1

Both focus on understanding cognitive processes.
Cognitive psychology is informed by neuroscientific knowledge and behavioural representations.
Cognitive neuroscience draws on models, paradigms and knowledge from cognitive psychology.

Question 2

Define convergent evidence

Answer 2

Different sources of evidence, often from different approaches, that arrive at the same conclusion

Question 3

Define divergent evidence

Answer 3

Evidence that indicates where the effects of different manipulations diverge, often eliminating alternate explanations for an observed effect

Question 4

Define subjective cognitive function

Answer 4

How a person experiences their cognitive function, typically assessed in relation to cognitive function in everyday life.

Question 5

What is the Cognitive Failure Questionnaire?

Answer 5

The most widely used measure of subjective cognitive function. Higher scores indicate greater cognitive failures/poorer subjective cognitive functioning

Question 6

What structural brain differences have been found to be associated with higher CFQ scores??

Answer 6

• Reduced activation in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) -> reduced error detection
• Reduced frontal and parietal white matter -> attention sensory integration and spatial awareness

Question 7

What are the disadvantages to subjective cognitive measures?

Answer 7

• Self-presentation biases
• Reporting biases
• Metacognitive insight
• Reference group bias

Question 8

What are some methods to measure internal psychological processes?

Answer 8

• Self-reports
• Peripheral physiological responses
• Neural activation in response to stimuli
• Behaviour measurement

Question 9

What are some examples of tests that measure internal psychological processes?

Answer 9

• Stroop test
• Posner cueing paradigm
• Mental imagery involved in rotation of objects

Question 10

What is synaesthesia?

Answer 10

Neurological condition where individuals experience certain sensory input in different sensory modalities

Question 11

How does the brain structure of a synaesthete differ from a normal human brain?

Answer 11

• Greater white matter connections.
• Greater connectivity within the inferior temporal cortex for projector type

Question 12

What is the difference between a construct and an operationalisation?

Answer 12

A construct is a theoretical psychological concept whereas operationalisations are the methods for manipulating or measuring constructs

Question 13

What are two key factors that contribute to a good theory?

Answer 13

• Falsifiability: conceivable set of evidence or outcomes that would disprove or refute the theory
• Explanatory rather than descriptive: identifies the mechanisms via which predicted changes occur

Question 14

What is the amygdala’s role in emotion processing?

Answer 14

• Fear conditioning
• Processing of fear-relevant stimuli, of fearful facial expressions
• Processing of negative and positive intense emotional stimuli

Question 15

What are the two approaches to conceptualising emotion?

Answer 15

Categorical approach: assumes a handful of discrete and basic human emotions that are universal
Dimensional approach: assumes emotions can be distilled down to values along key dimensions, usually valence and arousal

Question 16

What is the theoretical functional value of fear emotion?

Answer 16

Rapid identification of threats through expanded intake of sensory information and processing

Question 17

What is the theoretical functional value of disgust emotion?

Answer 17

Constriction of sensory information

Question 18

Describe a repeated-measures research design. What are the pros and cons, as well as the way to mitigate risk?

Answer 18

Every participant is in each condition or in each level of the independent variable
Pro: increased power, individual differences accounted for
Risk: potential order effects
Mitigation: counter balancing participants across positive and neutral conditions

Question 19

Describe a independent groups research design. What are the pros and cons, as well as the way to mitigate risk?

Answer 19

Different participants in each condition/level of the IV
Pro: no potential order effects
Risk: individual differences
Mitigation: random assignment and large enough sample size

Question 20

What is absolute performance in research interpretation?

Answer 20

The level of performance that would be expected on a particular task due to chance. Compared to relative performance.

Question 20

What is a ceiling effect?

Answer 20

When a considerable percentage of participants score the best or maximum score, indicating that the task is too easy and the DV cannot be measured

Question 21

What is a floor effect?

Answer 21

When a considerable percentage of participants score the worst or minimum score, indicating that the task is too difficult and the DV cannot be measured

Question 22

What is a double dissociation?

Answer 22

When one patient shows a disruption in one domain and preservation in another, and another patient shows the opposite, indicating that these domains are independent

Question 23

What is a single dissociation?

Answer 23

When a patient shows a disruption in one domain and preservation in another.

Question 24

What is an interaction effect in research?

Answer 24

A reflection of either: - where the effect of one variable changes in magnitude across levels of the other variable (quantitative changes) - where the effect of one variable changes in direction across levels of the other variable (qualitative changes)

Question 25

What does an interaction effect between variables look like on a graph?

Answer 25

Non-parallel lines

Question 26

What are the two ways human can regulate their spatial attention processing?

Answer 26

Shifts of attention and resizing of attentional breadth

Question 27

What is a covert shift of attention?

Answer 27

When attention is applied to a location that is different to where the eyes are focused

Question 28

What is the Zoom-lens model of attentional breadth?

Answer 28

There is a trade-off between the size of an attended region and the magnitude of perceptual enhancement. Predicts that attentional resources are finite and that all perceptual processing is enhanced under narrow attentional breadth

Question 29

What is a direct replication in psychological research?

Answer 29

Where a study's method is repeated as closely as possible to the original

Question 30

What is a conceptual replication in psychological research?

Answer 30

Where different methods are used to test a single hypothesis targeting the same features/variables

Question 31

What are likely causes of failures to replicate psychological studies?

Answer 31

- Unidentified context and individual-level effects: the original effect is real but not for all individuals or under all conditions - Type 1 error: either by chance or poor research

Question 32

What is statistical power?

Answer 32

The probability of correctly detecting an effect in a sample if it is there in the population

Question 33

What are the discussed practices that contribute to a good research design?

Answer 33

- Power analysis for participant recruitment: stopping rule - Transparency - Preregistration: commitment to predictions, stopping rules

Question 34

What are the covered types of reliability?

Answer 34

- Test-retest: over time, repeated tests - Internal consistency: across items - Inter-rater reliability: across different researchers

Question 35

Define affective empathy

Answer 35

Feeling what someone else is feeling, with awareness of the source of the emotion

Question 36

Define cognitive empathy

Answer 36

Being able to take someone else's perspective to understand their thoughts, beliefs and feelings

Question 37

What is the double dissociation evidence for the independence of cognitive and affective empathy?

Answer 37

Damage to inferior frontal gyrus: intact cognitive, impaired affective Damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex: intact affective, impaired cognitive

Question 38

Define experimental control

Answer 38

The methodological choices in a study that are designed to minimise the effect of extraneous variables

Question 39

Define ecological validity

Answer 39

The extent to which the conclusions of the study can be generalised to situations in the real world where the psychological process would naturally occur

Question 40

What is the difference between basic and applied research?

Answer 40

Basic: scientific research that aims to increase knowledge and improve understanding of mechanisms or processes of interest Applied: research conducted with the aim of solving a specific real-world, practical problem

Question 41

What is the executive decline hypothesis?

Answer 41

The notion that executive functions decline with age, meaning goal directed actions decline

Question 42

What is the inhibition hypothesis of aging?

Answer 42

The notion that inhibitory processes are impaired as people age

Question 43

What is the dynamic integration theory of aging?

Answer 43

Older adults have reduced executive function abilities, meaning that negative stimuli is more difficult to process, leading a positivity bias under high cognitive load

Question 44

What is the socioemotional selectivity theory?

Answer 44

Older adults are susceptible to positivity bias due to changes in goals to savour meaningful/positive experiences

Question 45

What are the characteristics of magnocellular neurons?

Answer 45

Large receptive fields, faster conduction speed, poor spatial resolution, greater temporal resolution Promote rapid processing at the expense of details

Question 46

What are the characteristics of parvocellular neurons?

Answer 46

Small receptive fields, slower conduction speed, greater spatial resolution, poor temporal resolution

Question 47

Bocanegra and Zeelenberg found that fearful faces (compared to neutral) elicited a bias towards preferential processing by which visual neuron type?

Answer 47

Magnocellular neurons

Question 48

What cellular bias does better performance on a spatial gap task indicate?

Answer 48

Parvocellular neuron bias

Question 49

What cellular bias does better performance on a temporal gap task indicate?

Answer 49

Magnocellular neuron bias

Question 50

What did Gozli et al. (2012) find in their analysis of the effect of where an individual's hands are in space on spatial and temporal tasks?

Answer 50

Hands near increases temporal task performance -> magnocellular Hands far increases spatial task performance -> parvocellular

Question 51

What did Pessoa et al. (2002) find in their study on the effect of attention on amygdala activation?

Answer 51

The amygdala was activated in the attended conditions, but not the unattended condition, indicating that stronger attentional manipulation can trump the amygdala's emotional response. -> Attention modulates amygdala activation to emotional stimuli

Question 52

What was the issue with Gable and Harman-Jones' research conclusions?

Answer 52

They claimed that motivational intensity in regard to a stimuli influenced attentional breadth, but failed to account for the valence of that stimuli

Question 53

What evidence is consistent with the premotor theory of attention?

Answer 53

Covert shifts of attention involve weaker activation of the same neural circuits involved in saccadic eye movements. Stimulating the frontal eye fields causes a covert shift of attention without overt eye movement.

Question 54

What did Verissimo et al. find about executive function and age in their attention network task study?

Answer 54

Increased orienting processes Reduced alerting efficiency Non-linear executive function efficiency