Cog Final MCQs

Multiple choice

Regarding children's language development, Noam Chomsky noted that children generate many sentences they have never heard before. From this, he concluded that language development is driven largely by

Inborn programmingWhat year is usually cited as the "birthday" of cognitive science (pick the closest year)?

Regarding children's language development, Noam Chomsky noted that children generate many sentences they have never heard before. From this, he concluded that language development is driven largely by

Inborn programming

What year is usually cited as the "birthday" of cognitive science (pick the closest year)?

1954

The key structural components of neurons are

cell body, dendrites and axon

"Perceiving Machines" are used by the US Postal service to "read" the addresses on letters and sort them quickly to their correct destinations. Sometimes these machine cannot "read" an address, because the writing on the envelopes is not sufficiently clear for the machine to "match" the writing to an "example" it has stored in "memory". Human postal workers are much more successful at reading unclear addresses, most likely because

top-down processing

One of the conclusions of the Brelands' experiments, in which they used operant conditioning techniques on a raccoon, was that

behavior can't be explained solely on the basis of reinforcements because biologically programmed behavior is important as well.

The occipital lobe is

the first place in the cerebral cortex where visual information is received.

Which term below is most closely associated with transforming environmental energy like light (for vision) or chemical energy (for smell and taste) into neural information that is found in the nervous system?

transduction

The Recognition-by-Components approach proposes that there are a number of basic features such as

rectangular solids and cubes

John Watson believed that psychology should focus on the study of

observable behavior

Complex cells in the visual system respond best to

moving stimuli

The approach to perception called structuralism explained perception

as a collection of small elementary units called sensations

Helmholtz's theory that some of our perceptions are the result of unconscious assumptions that we make about the environment is referred to as the theory of unconscious

inference

The concept of distributed neural coding proposes that a specific object, like a face, is represented across a number of

neurons

Action potentials occur in the

axon

Label the neuron

Look at neuron diagram

Mental chronometry refers to:

measuring the time course of cognitive processes

The results of the physiological part of the Davachi and coworkers' "Memory for Words" experiment showed that

there was more activity in the perirhinal cortex for words that remembered than those forgotten

The sequence of steps that includes the image on the retina, changing the image into electrical signals, and neural processing is an example of

bottom-up processing

If the intensity of a stimulus that is presented to a touch receptor is increased, this tends to increase the ____ in the receptor's axon

rate of nerve firing

A synapse is

the space between neurons

A heuristic is a

"rule of thumb" that provides a best guess solution to a problem

The founder of the first laboratory of scientific psychology was

Wilhelm Wundt

The growing field of ___ refers to the study of the mind as carried out by researchers in many different disciplines

cognitive science

One difference between a heuristic and an algorithm is

heuristics do not result in a correct solution every time as algorithms do

Which of the following stimuli were used in Ebbinghaus' "Memory" experiment discussed in your text?

three-letter nonsense words

By comparing reaction times across different tasks, Donders was able to conclude how long the mind needs to perform a certain cognitive task. Donders interpreted the difference in reaction time between the simple and choice conditions of his experiment as indicating how long it took to

make a decision about the stimulus

Which of the following statements best describes how neurons communicated with one another?

A chemical process takes place at the synapse

According to Treisman's feature integration theory, the first stage of perception is called the _____ stage.

preattentive

According to your text, the behavioral approach to the study of the mind involves

measuring the relation between stimuli and behavior

A brain structure that is important for forming memories is the

hippocampus

Using behavior to infer mental processes is the basic principle of

Cognitive Psychology

The results of Gauthier's "Greeble" experiment illustrate

an effect of experience-dependents plasticity.

Which part of the brain is important for both touch and vision?

Parietal lobe

Shepard and Metzler's "Mental Rotation" experiment showed that is would take longer to compare two objects that were

separated by a large angle.

Shallow processing of a word is encouraged when attention is focused on:

the number of vowels in a word

Consider your knowledge of working memory. Let's say we conduct an experiment where participants see a number of target letters flashed briefly on a screen and are told to immediately write down the letters in the order they were presented. It is MOST LIKELY that the target letter "P" will be misidentified as

C

Information remains in sensory memory for

a second or a fraction of a second

The effective duration of short-term memory, when rehearsal is prevented, is

15-20 seconds

One function of ___ is controlling the suppression of irrelevant information

The central executive

Memory performance is enhanced if the type of task at encoding matches the type of task at retrieval. This is called

transfer-appropriate processing

The defining characteristic of implicit memory is that

we are not conscious we are using it

The principle that we learn information together with its context is known as

encoding specificity

Experiments that support the idea of early selection involve

high-load task

Change blindness experiments demonstrate

how attention can affect perception

Broadbent's model is called an early selection model because

the filtering step occurs before the meaning of the incoming information is analyzed.

If a person has a digit span of 2, this indicated that he has a

poor short-term memory

Two types of declarative memory are _____ and _____ memory.

episodic, semantic

When clearing her closet, Nadia finds her 20 year old wedding photo album. As she flips through the pictures, she starts to cry joyful tears. Seeing the photos and rekindling the emotions of her wedding day is most likely activated her

amygdala

Which type of memory is primarily responsible for our ability to understand that the following sentence is mainly about the brain, rather than music and dancing? "The brain is involved in everything we know about the important things in life, like music and dancing."

Short-term memory

\___ transforms new memories from a fragile state, in which they can be disrupted, to a more permanent state, in which they are resistant to disruption

Consolidation

The predominant type of coding in long-term memory is

semantic

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

the visuospatial sketch pad

The standard model of consolidation proposes that the hippocampus is

strongly active when memories are first formed and being consolidated but becomes less active when retrieving older memories that are already consolidated.

The main difference between early and late selection models of attention is that in late selection models, selection of stimuli for final processing doesn't occur until the information is analyzed for

meaning

Flanker compatibility experiments have been conducted using a variety of stimulus conditions. By definition, this procedure MUST include at least one target and one distractor. In ANY condition where we find that a distractor influenced reaction time, we can conclude that the distractor:

was processed

Suppose you are in your kitchen writing a grocery list, while your roommate is watching TV in the next room. A commercial for spaghetti sauce comes on TV. Although you are not paying attention to the TV, and your are not aware of what's on, you "suddenly" remember you need to pick up spaghetti sauce and you add it to the list. Your behavior is best predicted by which of the following models of attention?

Late selection

Articulatory suppression causes a decrease in the word length effect because

saying "the, the, the" fills up the phonological loop

Examples from your book describing real experiences of how memories, even ones from a long time ago, can be stimulated by locations, songs, and smells highlight the importance of ___ in long term memory

retrieval cues

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

a list of long words than a list of short words

The memory mechanism Hebb proposed is associated with

changes at the synapse and long term potentiation

Experimental evidence suggesting that the standard model of consolidation needs to be revised are data that show that the hippocampus was activated of ___ memories

recent and remote episodic

Which of the following is an experimental procedure used to study how attention affects the processing of competing stimuli

dichotic listening

Compared to the whole-report technique in Sperling's 1960 experiment, the partial- report procedure involves

a smaller response set

The ability to pay attention to, or carry out, two or more different tasks simultaneously is known as

divided attention

Elaborative rehearsal of a word will LEAST LIKELY be accomplished by

repeating it over and over

You have been studying for weeks for a nursing school entrance exam. You love the idea of becoming a nurse, and you have been enjoying learning about the material for your exam. Each night, you put on relaxing clothes and study in the quiet of your lovely home. Memory research suggests you should take your test with _____ mind set.

a calm

The conclusion from the experiment in which a chess master and a chess novice were asked to remember the positions of chess pieces on a chess board was that

chess masters use chunking to help them remember actual game arrangements

Imagine you are driving to a friend's new house. In your mind, you say the address repeatedly until you arrive. Once you arrive, you stop thinking about the address and start to think about buying a housewarming gift for your friend. To remember the address, you used ___ process in short-term memory

a control

The three structural components of the modal model of memory are

sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory

Acquiring information and transforming it into memory is

encoding

Which task should be EASIEST? Keep an image of a block letter AND

saying "yes" for each corner that is an inside corner and "no" for each corner that is an outside corner

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.

an organizational context during learning

Funahashi and coworkers recorded neurons in the PF cortex of monkeys during a delayed response task. These neurons showed the most intense firing during the

delay

Working memory differs from short-term memory in that

working memory is concerned with the manipulation of information

Priming occurs when presentation of one stimulus

facilitates the response to another stimulus

The semantic network model predicts that the time it takes for a person to retrieve information about a concept should be determined by

the distance that must be traveled through the network

Suppose we asked people to form simultaneous images of two or more animals such as a rabbit alongside an elephant. Then, we asked them basic questions about the animals. For example, we might ask people if the rabbit whiskers. Given our knowledge of imagery research, we would expect the FASTEST response to this questions when the rabbit is imagined alongside

a fly

Flashbulb memory is best represented by which of the following statement?

It is memory for the circumstances surrounding how a person heard about an emotional event that remains especially vivid but not necessarily accurate over time.

Good psychological theories must have all of the following properties EXCEPT being

too powerful to be refuted by empirical evidence.

Which of the following is MOST CLOSELY modeled on the way the nervous system operates?

parallel distributed processing theory/connectionist networks

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

are a natural consequence of a largely adaptive memory system

In the "false memory" laboratory exercise you completed, false memory occurs because of

constructive memory processes

Schrauf and Rubin's "two groups of immigrants" study found that the reminiscence bump coincided with periods of rapid change, occurring at a normal age for people emigrating early in life but shifting to 15 years later for those who emigrated later. These results support the

cognitive hypothesis

In explaining the paradox that imagery and perception exhibit a double dissociation, Behrmann and coworkers suggested that perception necessarily involves _____ processing and imagery starts as a _____ process.

bottom-up; top-down

In the semantic network model, a specific category is represented at a

node

One of Sarah's friends asks her to describe her new house by asking her how many windows are on the front of it. After a minute, Sarah answers 12. She has most likely used _____ in answering the question.

visual imagery

The repeated reproduction technique used in memory studies involves

the same participants remembering some information at longer and longer intervals after learning the information

Category-specific neurons respond to

mental images and perception of objects in a specific category

Items high on prototypicality have ____ family resemblances.

Strong

Research suggests that the ___ approach to categorization works best for small categories

exemplar

Research on eyewitness testimony reveals that

extreme vividness of a memory does not mean it is accurate

\___ is an average representation of a category

a prototype

Which of the following members would most likely be ranked highest (among the general public in North America) in prototypicality in the "birds" category?

a sparrow

Your friend has been sick for several days, so you go over to her home to make her some chicken soup. Searching for a spoon, you first reach in a top drawer beside the dishwasher. Then, you turn to the big cupboard beside the stove to search for a pan. In your search, you have relied on a kitchen

schema

Collins and Loftus modified the original semantic network theory of Collins and Quillian to satisfy some of the criticisms of the original model. In their modification, Collins and Loftus account for the typicality effect by

using shorter links to connect more closely related concepts

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

using shorter links to connect more closely related concepts

Spreading activation

primes associated concepts

When a participant is asked to list examples of the category vegetables, it is most likely that

carrot would be named before eggplant

Ganis and coworkers used fMRI to measure brain activation for perception and imagery of objects. This results showed that

perception and imagery activate the same areas of the frontal lobe, but perception activates more of the back of the brain than imagery does.