Quiz 2 Flashcards
Consider this sentence: “I know that the winters in Wisconsin are colder than the winters in New Jersey.” This sentence is an example of
semantic memory
What is one explanation that Craik and his colleagues propose for the reason why a deep level of processing leads to greater recall?
Deep levels make the stimulus different from other memory traces in the system; it’s more distinctive.
Suppose that you look at a new term in a foreign language, and this item is then stored in your memory. Cognitive psychologists call this process
Encoding
According to the research on implicit memory and explicit memory,
psychologists sometimes discover a dissociation; for example, a variable may have a large effect on an explicit task, but a small effect on an implicit task.
Imagine that a friend has just read a magazine article that discusses flashbulb memories, and your friend argues that people retain a very clear memory of certain emotional events. What would you respond?
No, the article overstates the case; these memories can be inaccurate and can fade with time.”
Suppose that some researchers would like to see whether memory is enhanced by using vivid imagery. They locate a large number of studies and use a statistical method to combine all the information to determine whether vivid imagery is effective. The method they use would be called as
Meta-analysis
Studies of speech perception show that
when the first phoneme of a word is being spoken, the mouth prepares to pronounce the next phoneme in the word.
Right now, the words in this sentence are being registered on the retina of your eye. This representation on your retina is called
The proximal stimulus
Suppose that a close friend is telling you about a very emotional experience she has just had. You are paying such close attention to her that you fail to notice that some strangers have just entered the room. This incident is an example of
Inattentional blindness
According to the discussion of object recognition
object recognition must involve both top-down and bottom-up processes.
If you favor the general mechanism approach to speech perception, you would argue that
people process speech sounds the same way that they process other kinds of sounds.
According to the general mechanism approach, speech perception can be explained by
the same kind of learning mechanisms that humans use in acquiring other cognitive skills.
Your textbook states that phonemic restoration is a kind of illusion. This statement is true because
we think that we hear a speech sound, even if it is not present in the distal stimulus.
Which of the following students provides the most accurate general summary of the research on cognitive maps?
Francine: “When people store spatial information, they tend to represent their cognitive maps as being more regular and orderly than they really are.”
The alignment heuristic and the rotation heuristic are different from each other because
the rotation heuristic involves turning a single figure in a clockwise or counterclockwise fashion.
Suppose that you are reading a book that describes how the inside of the U.S. Supreme Court looks from a lawyer’s point of view. Based on the discussion of neuroscience research and visual imagery, what would you predict about your visual system’s reaction to this description?
Your visual cortex would show increased blood flow.
The research on mental rotation has shown that
young people are typically faster than elderly people in the speed of their mental rotation.
The neuropsychology evidence on the imagery question shows that
during mental imagery, some portions of the visual-processing regions of the cortex seem to be activated.
Suppose you draw a map of Italy, and you show the “boot” located in a north–south direction, rather than slanted at an angle. This would be an example of the
Rotation heuristic
Those who argue that we store mental imagery information in terms of propositions would claim that
Storage is most like language
Suppose that you are an advertiser, and a television station has told you that you can select the TV program in which you want your advertisement to appear. According to the research on long-term memory, you want your ad to appear in a program that is
Emotionally neutral
Expertise is helpful in remembering material because experts
are likely to reorganize the material that they must recall.
Suppose that your cousin believes that he has a vivid memory for the details surrounding the death of a famous person. This phenomenon is often called
A flashbulb memory
Which of the following statements most accurately captures the point of view called the “falsememory perspective” with respect to childhood sexual abuse?
As adults, people construct an incorrect memory about abuse, and they believe that the abuse actually did occur.
Which of the following statements about episodic memory is correct?
Episodic memory stores information about events in our lives.
Which of the following is an example of an implicit memory task?
Completing a word for which the first and last letter have been supplied
The primary visual cortex is located in the _______ lobe of the brain.
Occipital
Imagine that you are looking at a geometric drawing. At first, one shape in this drawing seems to be in front of other shapes. The next moment, this same shape seems to be located behind a second shape. This phenomenon is called:
an ambiguous figure-ground relationship
According to the research on word boundaries in speech,
listeners are typically accurate in detecting word boundaries, even when there is no actual gap.
You are now reading a sentence on an examination. The actual stimulus (the words on the piece of paper) is called
the distal stimulus.
Coarticulation is the tendency
for phoneme pronunciation to vary slightly, depending on the surrounding phonemes
What can we conclude about the two major explanations for speech perception?
Humans show categorical perception for nonspeech sounds, which argues against a phonetic module approach.
Which of the following students provides the best, most complete definition of the term “perception”?
Sarah: “Perception uses our previous knowledge to collect and interpret sensory stimuli.”
Your textbook discusses research showing that people have better acuity for mental images that are visualized in the center of the retina, rather than in the periphery of the retina. The reason that this research is significant is that
the research is similar to the results obtained when people perceive actual visual stimuli.
Researchers have conducted studies on a variety of vision-like processes that are unfamiliar to the general public. This research demonstrates that a mental image has roughly the same effect that an actual visual stimulus has, for example, in producing the masking effect. On the basis of this research, we can conclude that
demand characteristics probably cannot explain the results.
If you were to draw a map of the town or city in which your college is located
you would tend to make the streets intersect at 90° angles.
Suppose you draw a map of a familiar street in your neighborhood. You draw all the houses an equal distance from the street, even though some houses are clearly closer to the street than others. Your error is an example of
the alignment heuristic
The research on cognitive maps suggests that
people create cognitive maps from several successive views, if the area is very large.
Freyd proposed that the concept of betrayal trauma can explain why people may forget about their own experience with sexual abuse during childhood. Which of the following statements would be most consistent with this perspective?
When a child is sexually abused by a trusted adult, the child may not be able to recall the abuse at a later time.”
Which of the following is the most accurate summary statement about the research on autobiographical memory?
Most memory errors concern relatively trivial information, rather than central, important information.
Consider this sentence: “I know that winters in Wisconsin are colder than winters in South Carolina.” The knowledge expressed in this sentence is probably coded
semantically, by its meaning.
Hruska and colleagues had expert and novice doctors read clinical cases and reason about the appropriate treatment while undergoing fMRI neuroimaging. Their results suggested that
expert doctors possessed more sophisticated long-term memory knowledge that reduced the burden on their working memory systems.
Eyewitness testimony is most likely accurate accurate when
the witnesses do not experience social pressure.
Chapter 5 discusses several variables that can influence the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. According to this discussion, eyewitness testimony is most likely to beaccurate when
there is no social pressure for the witness to supply information.
Suppose that you are looking at a simple geometric design. If you were to perceive it holistically you would
recognize it in terms of its overall structure and shape.
There is a great deal of controversy in neuroscience over
the idea that the processing of faces is localized to a specific brain region.
According to the gestalt psychology approach to visual perception
we tend to see well-organized patterns, rather than random-looking stimuli.
The term “phoneme” refers to
the basic unit of spoken language.
According to the discussion of phoneme perception,
this task is challenging because of the variability in speakers’ pronunciation of phonemes.
You are now reading a sentence on an examination. The actual stimulus (the words on the piece of paper) is called
The distal stimulus
According to the discussion of the history of research on mental imagery
the popularity of mental imagery increased as cognitive psychology became more influential.
Which of the following provides the best example of auditory imagery?
Creating a mental image of the chorus of your favorite song
How does mental imagery compare with perception?
Mental imagery relies exclusively on top-down processing.
If your mental image of your aunt’s face is stored in an analog code,
the representation would resemble the specific features and facial arrangement found on your aunt’s face.
Which of the following students’ statements best describes the spatial framework model proposed by Franklin and Tversky?
Nadia: “The vertical dimension seems to have special significance when we try to create representations of our environment.”
According to the research on the post-event misinformation effect,
a question containing incorrect information can alter people’s recall of the original event.
Several students are discussing the controversy about recovered memory and false memory. Which of the following students provides the best summary of the “recoveredmemory perspective”?
Greg: “According to this perspective, childhood sexual abuse is so traumatic that people may forget those memories for a while, but may retrieve them during adulthood.”
Which of the following students has the best understanding about the inconsistent research results on encoding specificity?
Mary Lou: “Encoding specificity works especially well for events that happened long ago.”
In general, what is the relationship between emotional tone and recall accuracy in long-term memory?
Recall is generally most accurate for pleasant items.
Suppose that you are watching a television talk show. The picture on your TV set is clear, but the sound is somewhat muffled. If the visual information helps you interpret some of the words that the talk-show host is saying, you are demonstrating
The McGurk effect
The identification of a complex arrangement of visual stimuli is known as
Object recognition
The discussion about face recognition points out that we perceive a face in terms of a “gestalt.” You can therefore conclude that
we perceive faces in terms of their overall structure.
Which of the following examples would be most comparable to the word superiority effect if we were to apply this phenomenon to hearing?
You can identify a particular phoneme more readily if it is embedded in a word than if you hear that same phoneme in isolation.
Research on context and speech perception has demonstrated that
people often do not notice a missing sound when it occurs within the context of a sentence.
The “general mechanism approach” to speech perception argues that
we use similar processes for both speech perception and other auditory perception tasks.
The template model of object recognition would have the most difficulty explaining
how people recognize letters of the alphabet if you turned the letters upside-down.
Research on auditory imagery and pitch suggests that
there are similar “distance” effects in auditory imagery as there are in visual imagery.
Suppose that you are listening to your professor’s description of the layout of several buildings in a city. If the discussion of mental maps can be applied to your representation of this city, it is most likely that
you will construct a cognitive map to represent the arrangement of buildings.
According to the introductory discussion of cognitive maps,
compared to the research on the nature of mental images, the research on cognitive maps is more likely to emphasize geographical representations.
Suppose that you are driving to an unfamiliar city. To reach your destination with the smallest number of navigational errors, how should your map be oriented?
The map should be oriented so that the top is in the same direction that you are traveling.
The introductory discussion of cognitive maps in Chapter 7 points out that
most errors in mental maps can be traced to a rational strategy.
Your textbook described a study in which people saw an ambiguous figure, for instance, a sketch that could represent either a rabbit or a duck. When the figure was removed, the people were asked to create a mental image of the figure. The results showed that
people created the mental image but could not reinterpret the mental image.
Chapter 5 describes a study by Marian and Fausey, who studied English–Spanish bilinguals. They presented two stories in English and two stories in Spanish. Then the researchers asked questions about the stories, sometimes in English and sometimes in Spanish. The results showed that
people were more accurate when the language of the stories matched the language of the questions.
Chapter 5 discusses a study by Foley and her colleagues, in which participants listened to a list of concrete nouns. Students in one group were told to visualize each object; students in another group were told to imagine themselves using the object. One important finding was that
people often imagined themselves using the object, even if they were in the “visualize” condition.
Your memory for the issues and events that are related to your own life is called
autobiographical memory.
Chapter 5 discussed the relationship between the violence of a TV program and people’s recall of commercials shown during that program. According to this research, people recall a commercial more accurately
when the program is nonviolent
A person with anterograde amnesia
has difficulty forming memories of things that happened after the brain damage.
According to the discussion of phonemic restoration,
phonemic restoration makes use of top-down processing.
Which of the following students best summarizes the information about visual cues and speech perception?
Dawan: “Adults who have normal hearing often fail to appreciate the visual cues, even though these cues are helpful.”
Heather notes that it is always easier to understand her sister’s speech when they converse on Skype as compared to conversing on the telephone. Her sister believes that the sound quality on Skype may be better than on her smart phone. However, Heather thinks about her Cognitive Psychology class and reasons that the phenomenon may be an illustration of
the importance of visual cues in speech processing.
In your textbook, Chapter 7 discusses meta-analyses that focus on gender comparisons in cognitive abilities. Which of the following is the area in which gender differences are typically the largest?
Spatial abilities such as mental rotation
An analog code means that
a representation is very similar to the physical object.
Which of the following students’ statements provides the best summary of the section on visual imagery and interference?
Sarah: “Interference is greater if the mental image and the physical stimulus are in the same mode (e.g., both visual) rather than in different modes.”
According to the research on mental imagery and interference, which of the following tasks would be most difficult?
Trying to think about the sound of a particular word in French, while listening to a favorite song.
The spatial framework model emphasizes that people are typically most accurate when judging
the above-below dimension
Which of the following is the best example of timbre?
The difference between the sound made by a flute and the sound made by a violin
According to your textbook, which of the following is one likely explanation for the self-reference effect?
When people think about whether words apply to themselves, they consider how their personal characteristics are interrelated.
Your knowledge of how to program your DVR to record your favorite television show is an example of
Procedural memory
Suppose that you are trying to recall a friend’s phone number, so you repeat it over and over to yourself without analyzing it or giving it a meaning. According to the levels-of-processing approach, this activity would be categorized as
Shallow processing
Suppose that you hear about a man who has retrograde amnesia. What kind of memory task will he find most difficult?
Remembering events that happened before his brain injury
Compared to control-group participants, people with anterograde amnesia are likely to
perform similarly on implicit memory tasks, but poorer on explicit memory tasks
The term autobiographical memory generally refers to
memory for issues and events from your own life.
In object recognition, an important problem with the feature-analysis approach is that
it cannot explain how we perceive an object from different viewpoints.
Individuals with prosopagnosia
cannot recognize faces of even their own spouses or children.
The feature-analysis approach to object recognition argues that
recognition involves detecting specific characteristics of the stimulus.
Studies in which trained musicians rated the similarity of perceived and imagined musical instruments show that
auditory imagery for timbre is quite similar to the actual perception of timbre.
The alignment heuristic and the rotation heuristic are different from each other because
the rotation heuristic involves turning a single figure in a clockwise or counterclockwise fashion.
Suppose that you and a group of other students want to conduct a study on mental rotation, using photographs of human faces. You find that people take longer to rotate a mental image, as the size of the rotation increases. Which approach do your data support?
The analog approach
When people look at a 3-dimensional figure and mentally rotate this figure,
they make judgments more quickly when rotating the mental image only a small distance, rather than a large distance.
Suppose that Peter is an expert in gymnastics. You would expect to find that
he practices gymnastics very conscientiously, typically at least an hour every day.
Suppose that you hear about a man who has retrograde amnesia. What kind of memory task will he find most difficult?
Remembering events that happened before his brain injury
Stephanie is trying to decide whether she told Sid that the history test had been postponed—or whether she had only imagined telling him this. Stephanie is currently engaging in
Realitymonitoring
The encoding-specificity principle suggests that
we recall something better if we are in the same context in which we originally learned the material.
Chapter 5 discussed research about anxiety disorders and memory accuracy for words related to anxiety. According to this research,
high-anxious and low-anxious people differ significantly, when memory is measured on a recall test.
The feature-analysis approach to object recognition argues that
recognition involves detecting specific characteristics of the stimulus.
Chapter 2 discusses a study by Burton and his colleagues on people’s ability to identify a face that is shown in a video security system. According to the results of this study,
people are especially likely to be confident that they correctly identified a person’s face if they are familiar with this person.
According to the word superiority effect,
we can recognize a letter faster and more accurately when it is part of a word, rather than when this letter appears by itself.
Which of the following students provides the most accurate statement about the research on mental imagery?
Shirin: “When people make judgments about the shapes of U.S. states, their judgments for mental images are similar to their judgments for physical stimuli.”
According to the research on mental imagery and shape, people take longer to make a judgment when two mental images have similar shapes than when they have different shapes. This finding tends to support
the analog-code approach.
When most people draw a map of the coastline of the United States, they show Miami about due south of Boston, when Miami is actually fairly far to the west. This error is an example of
the rotation heuristic.
Which of the following students provides the most accurate information about gender comparisons in cognitive skills?
Eladj: “The only large gender differences are in spatial ability, where males often earn higher scores.”
In light of the research presented in your textbook regarding the analog and propositional viewpoints,
most mental imagery tasks seem to use an analog code, but some mental imagery tasks seem to use a propositional code.
The chapter on long-term memory discussed the research by Talarico and Rubin, about students’ memory for how they learned about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. According to this research,
the students were overconfident that their recall of the event was accurate.
Which of the following statements would be most consistent with the constructivist approach to memory?
Our memory for an event sometimes changes over time, depending on our current beliefs.”
Research on expertise in memory indicates that
experts are usually accurate in reconstructing missing parts of information from material that they partially remember.
Chapter 5 discussed a study by Waring and Kensinger (2011), in which people looked at stimuli that were either very positive, very negative, or neutral; each stimulus was shown together with a neutral background, such as a river. The results of this study showed that people were least likely to recognize this neutral background
when the stimulus was very negative
According to the research on the own-ethnicity bias,
people may not show the own-ethnicity bias if they have frequent contact with people from another ethnic group.
Suppose that you walk past the home of your friend, John. Standing in front of the house is someone who somewhat resembles your friend, so you shout, “Hi, John!” To your embarrassment, it is not John but his younger brother—substantially shorter and with darker hair. This error can be traced to
top-down processing.
Suppose that a psychologist loans you an art book and says that the book includes some interesting ambiguous figure-ground pictures. You should expect to see
a picture in which a specific region is the central figure one moment, but this region becomes the background the next moment.
Chapter 2 discussed two related topics, called change blindness and inattentional blindness. According to this discussion,
in reality, these cognitive errors can be traced to strategy that makes sense in the real world.
The face-inversion effect indicates that
faces are processed holistically rather than through their isolated parts.
Which of the following is the best example of object recognition?
Seeing a particular visual stimulus and identifying it as the letter M
The term “change blindness” refers to the observation that
people often fail to see that an object in a scene has changed.
Psychologists have studied how deaf individuals perform on mental rotation tasks when they are fluent in American Sign Language. The research shows that these individuals:
make fewer errors than other people, because they are accustomed to viewing a scene from a different perspective.
Imagine that you read about research in which students study a map of an imaginary college campus. Then they are instructed to mentally travel between two points on this map. According to their results, the mental travel time increases as the distance increases between the two points. These results seem to support
The analog code
A general conclusion about cognitive maps is that
they are fairly accurate, and the errors that they show tend to be rational
Suppose that you have a mental image of your favorite male actor. If that image is stored in a propositional code, the representation would emphasize
A language like description
Suppose that you are drawing a map, from memory, of the streets and buildings in a city you know well. If you were to show a bias in your recall of the buildings, you would be likely to
Place building with similar functions near each other
Suppose that when you hear a new acquaintance’s name, Chris Money, you think about the meaning of the name Money, including both coins and dollar bills, and the importance of money in our culture. The kind of processing you would be using is called
Elaboration
People are more likely to make errors in eyewitness testimony
If there was believable post-event misinformations
Which of the following students’ statements is the best summary of the consistency bias?
Nimian: “We sometimes exaggerate the extent to which our past ideas are consistent with our present ideas.”
Over time, unpleasant memories
Fade more than pleasant memories
The boundaries between words in spoken language
are often missing, so that two words are not separated by an actual pause.
Change blindness and inattentional blindness are similar because both of these phenomena
demonstrate the importance of top-down processing.
Which of the following favors a special mechanism approach to speech perception?
Early research on categorical perception of speech sound
Bottom-up processing
focuses on the contribution of the stimulus to object recognition.
Which of the following students provides the most accurate summary about phoneme pronunciation, as discussed in the section on speech perception?
Galit: “Each phoneme is pronounced in a consistent fashion, so that speech perception is remarkably accurate.”
Alex lives in the United States, 20 miles due south of the boundary between the U.S. and Canada. His friend Shawn lives 30 miles due south of Alex. However, Alex thinks he lives closer to Shawn, rather than to the Canadian border. This is an example of
border bias.
One of the most difficult problems in conducting research on imagery is that
it is difficult to examine such an inaccessible mental process.
