Cog Psych Exam 1 USE THIS ONE

An operational definition is most likely to

describe precisely how the researchers will measure a particular concept.

Chinese readers make saccadic eye movements when they are reading a book written in Chinese script. Compared to English readers, the Chinese readers

move their eyes only two–three characters in a saccade, because each Chinese character contains more information.

The series of little jumps made by your eyes as they move across a page during reading is called

saccadic eye movement.

The Stroop effect is related to selective attention because

people are required to pay selective attention to the color of the stimulus, rather than the name of the stimulus.

McCabe and colleagues note that the concept of the central executive in cognitive psychology is very similar to the concept of _______ in the cognitive neurosciences.

the prefrontal executive attention network

Christopher and MacDonald compared the working memory capacities of people with and without major depression. They found that, in general, depressed people performed

worse on tasks involving either the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, or central executive.

You are trying to retain—in your working memory—a mental picture of a stranger’s face. According to Baddeley, you are using your

visuospatial sketchpad.

A researcher wants to study how people’s attention shifts when they see a visual stimulus in an unexpected portion of a screen that they are viewing; this attention shift occurs in just a fraction of a second. Which of the following techniques is this researcher most likely to use?

The event-related potential technique (ERP)

Which of the following students provides the best understanding of the PET scan technique?

Jamie: “The PET scan creates an image based on a chemical that travels through the bloodstream.”

One component of your general knowledge focuses on semantic memory. Which of the following would be an example of semantic memory?

Your knowledge that the word “bear” is similar to the word “lion”

Which of the following is the best example of a schema?

Your understanding that the concept “dentist’s office” includes a waiting room and a receptionist, but not video games

Right now, you are moving your eyes as you read this question on your exam. The letters that you can see at any given moment—in between eye movements—would be called

the perceptual span.

Research on dichotic listening shows that

when people pay attention to one task, they typically notice little about other tasks.

Which of the following students provides the best summary of the research about using a cell phone and paying attention while driving?

María Luisa: “Talking on a hands-free cell phone can distract your attention.”

The neuroscience research on the executive attention network shows that this system

primarily activates the prefrontal part of the cortex.

Chapter 4 discussed research on the recency effect. How is this research related to short-term memory?

The final words in a list are recalled accurately because they are still in short-term memory.

Baddeley’s model of working memory had a different focus from the earlier approaches to short-term memory because

he emphasized that working memory is useful in holding related items in our memory simultaneously.

Neuroscientists who have examined the visuospatial sketchpad have discovered that

visual and spatial tasks typically activate the right hemisphere of the brain.

Your textbook discusses research about the relationship between depression and performance on tasks involving the phonological loop. This research showed that

people with depression performed significantly worse than people without depression.

How does the functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technique (fMRI) compare with other imaging techniques?

It is more effective than the PET scan in measuring brain activity that occurs rapidly.

With practice and reinforcement, a rat learns to navigate a maze. A behaviorist would operationalize the rat’s “learning” as

the decrease in the rate of errors, over time.

Imagine that you are attending a lecture by a guest speaker who describes a theory and then says, “Let’s now look at the empirical evidence.” Which of the following would most likely be the speaker’s next sentence?

“We conducted an experiment to test this hypothesis.”

Which of the following students provides the most accurate summary about phone use when someone is driving?

Charles: “When drivers are talking on the phone, they pay less attention to objects that appear in the middle of their visual field.”

Which of the following visual activities would be most likely to employ the orienting attention network?

 

You are searching for an empty seat in a crowded classroom.

Suppose that Elaine has been instructed to think freely about black cats for five minutes, whereas Kathleen has been ordered not to think about black cats for five minutes.  After the initial five-minute period has passed, both Elaine and Kathleen are allowed to think about black cats.  According to Wegner and his coauthors, during this second time period, what is most likely to happen?

Kathleen will spend more time thinking about black cats than Elaine will

Which of the following students provides the best summary of the research about using a cell phone and paying attention while driving?

María Luisa: “Talking on a hands-free cell phone can distract your attention.”

Your awareness about both the surrounding world and your cognitive processes is called

consciousness.

As we discussed in Chapter 3, attention

uses both top-down and bottom-up processing.

The chapter on working memory discussed several studies about individual differences in working memory. Which of the following students provides the best information about how working memory is related to academic skills?

Aroona: “People who are especially skilled on a task that uses the central executive are likely to score high in reading comprehension.”

Suppose that a professor asks the students in her class to say their names out loud (one at a time) on the first day of class. Then she asks them to write down as many of their classmates’ names as they can recall. Then she constructs a graph that shows “Number of correct responses” on the Y-axis and “Serial position of the name” on the X-axis. The shape of the graph

will be a U-shaped line, with the greatest accuracy on the first and last items.

According to the Atkinson–Shiffrin model,

memory can be represented as a series of stages in which information is passed between separate storage areas.

Imagine that you are tutoring high school students, and you have quickly presented 12 new terms to them. They are likely to recall the first few terms most accurately because of

the primacy effect.