sample mc - exam 2

The word length effect shows that it is more difficult to remember

d. a list of long words than a list of short words

Which of the following processes is NOT influenced by working memory span

a. reading ability

A task with the instructions "Read the following words while repeating 'the, the, the' out loud, look away, and then write down the words you remember" would most likely be studying

c. the phonological loop

Which of the following is NOT one of the suggested causes of interference according to McGeoch's interference theory of forgetting

c. decay

Which of the following is evidence in favor of the consolidation theory of forgetting

a. the finding that memory is better if we sleep (while being allowed to dream) between study and test relative to staying awake between study and test

b. the finding that memory is better if we sleep (while not being allowed to dream) during study and test relative to staying awake between study and test

c. the finding that individuals who recover from retrograde amnesia never remember anything that happened to them in the moments before their accident

d. all of the above

Answer: D

Perseveration is...

c. the consolidation of information to long-term memory

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.

d. an organizational context during learning

____ is an average representation of a category.

c. A prototype

In spreading activation models of memory, concepts are represented as

d. Nodes

Which of the following is a reason that distributed practice improves memory relative to massed practice?

a. Encoding variability: studying things in multiple new contexts leads to multiple retrieval paths

b. Information is more likely to be consolidated between multiple study sessions

c. Individuals are better able to attend to things in short bursts

d. All of the above - ANSWER

Which of the following statements is NOT true?

c. Distinctive information is more difficult to remember than organized information

Transfer-appropriate processing is likely to occur if

a. the type of encoding and type of retrieval match

For most adults over age 40, the reminiscence bump describes enhanced memory for

a. adolescence and early adulthood

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

d. extreme vividness of a memory does not mean it is accurate

John is participating in an experiment in which he watches a video of a car crash. In the video a car runs a stop sign and hits another car in the intersection. After he finishes watching the video, the experimenter asks John a series of questions about the video, including whether he saw the car run the yield sign. Later on, John now erroneously remembers having seen a yield sign in the video when it was actually a stop sign. This is an example of

a. Misinformation effect

If you were participating in an experiment in which you given a series of pictures of people to memorize, and midway through the experiment you were shown a picture of a nude individual (which you were not expecting), how would memory be affected

c. memory would be enhanced for the nude relative to all other pictures, and memory for the items immediately preceding/following the nude would be poor relative to all other pictures

Which of the following is a concern in determining whether implicit learning has occurred

a. the learning criterion

b. the sensitivity criterion

c. the information criterion

d. both b and c - ANSWER

The defining characteristic of implicit memory is that

a. we are not conscious we are using it

Is it possible to multi-task?

a. Absolutely, I do it all the time.

b. No, it's just a myth.

c. Multi-tasking is actually just switching attention back and forth rapidly.

d. Both b and c - ANSWER

What is a switch cost?

b. The difference in performance after a task switch compared to typical performance

Expert video game players have lower switch costs compared to non-video game players.

a. True