Cognitive Psych Exam Review

Top-down mechanisms suggest that

processing can be driven by knowledge and expectations.

Birds of prey, such as eagles, have the most acute vision of any animal humans have been able to measure. They are able to see tiny mice far below them, and even able to see the traces of ultraviolet light that mice leave via their urine. Humans cannot see colors in the ultraviolet light spectrum. What can you conclude about the eyes of eagles?

Eagle eyes have no rods in the central fovea. Eagles have more types of photoreceptors than humans.

A person has suffered a stroke in their left temporal lobe and can no longer name common objects, like a table or a spoon. This provides evidence that language is located in the left hemisphere for most people. What kind of evidence is this?

neuroscience

Which of the following is not true regarding neuroimaging techniques?

Neuroimaging research is expensive and time-intensive, resulting in fewer participants for neuropsychological researcher

When a dentist takes x-rays, they must be careful to correctly interpret the results. In one study, it was found that dental students and new dentists were much more likely than experienced dentists to think the x-ray below showed a fracture in the tooth (pointed by the black arrow). But there is not really a fracture present. What illusion makes the 'fracture line' look darker and more serious to the less experienced dentists than it really is?

Mach bands

Working memory acts to

keep relevant information active for a short period of time.

Pupil dilation is affected by everything except:

Monocular depth cues

fMRIs depend on the BOLD response. Why?

The fMRI is measuring the rush of blood needed to bring oxygen and glucose to recently active neurons.

What is the dependent variable for measuring information processing?

reaction time

An information processing approach to understanding cognition does NOT

rely on behavioral principles to explain specific stimulus-response relationships.

Which is the most invasive brain imaging method?

PET scan

If the corpus callosum is cut, what will happen to the two hemispheres of the brain?

The two hemispheres will act independently

Which of the following statements is FALSE?

In the primary auditory projection area, cells that are adjacent to each other in the cortex tend to be sensitive to sounds that are similar to each other in frequency.

Researchers have used transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt portions of the healthy brain. When asking participants to search for a target, we expect TMS applied to the parietal lobe to

disrupt the search for a target defined by a single feature (e.g., "Find the red shape").

The iris of the eye is made of:

muscles

Anita the astronomer wants to know how big a black hole is. Unfortunately, no one can see a black hole. Instead she measures the speed of a star orbiting the black hole and the size of its orbit and comes up with a good estimate for the black hole that she cannot see.

Which of the following is a correct analogy to cognitive psychology:

The size and speed of the star's orbit are like response time or accuracy while the black hole is like "working memory" or "information processing"

The ______ describes why we are _______ to determine the letters in _______ than in ________.

word-superiority effect; faster; 'scrase'; 'jrzaav'

George has no trouble recognizing their family and friends. But they can't look at a teapot and say what it is. What brain system appears to be affected?

The occipital - temporal pathway

Leila has an uninjured brain and eyes. Leila is wearing an eyepatch over her left eye, so she cannot see anything out of that eye. Her right eye is open and can see clearly and is looking straight ahead. The experimenter flashes an image of a dog into her left visual field. Where does the visual signal containing the information about the dog go to from her eye?

It goes to her right hemisphere first. The information is "shared" with the left hemisphere via her corpus callosum.

A primary function of the thalamus is to

regulate the flow of sensory information.

When identifying nonword letter-strings that are presented very briefly, participants tend to make specific kinds of errors. How would these errors be best described?

They tend to misidentify uncommmon letter combinations as more common letter combinations.

Introspection is considered the first step toward cognitive psychology as a science because

it was the first systematic attempt to observe and record the content of mental processes.

A patient might elect to have split-brain surgery, which involves

severing the corpus callosum.

Gob has integrative agnosia. Which task is the hardest for him?

Saying "That's a lock" when shown a drawing of a combination lock

What is the order of cells on the retina, going from front back (light enters at the front of the eye)?

ganglion cells, bipolar cells, rods and cones

An individual suffering from Capgras syndrome would most likely show an inability to

detect the familiarity of an often-viewed face.

Aphantasia is associated with which component of working memory?

Visual-spatial sketchpad

1) Can you get some milk on your way home?

2) Would you grab some milk for breakfast?

3) We're out of milk. Can you fix that?

4) Need milk.

No matter which one of these phrases you hear, you'll know what to do: buy milk! Which of the following is the best explanation for how you know what to do, even given instructions you've never heard before.

Humans interpret meaning, not the physical stimulus of particular word combinations, to drive their behaviors.

Which of the following is true?

fMRI indirectly measures brain activity by showing the signal given by blood cells consumed by recently fired neurons

________ techniques allow us to scrutinize the precise structure and moment-by-moment pattern of activation in the brain.

Neuroimaging

It is very hard to correctly count the number of Fs in this sentence: FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS

Which of these is the most impactful explanation?

The word "of" doesn't have an f sound in English. It sounds more like a v.

A psychologist who adheres to the behaviorist school of thought would most likely attribute someone reaching for a slice of pie to:

a learned behavior in response to specific environmental triggers.

The tarsier has eyes packed with rod photoreceptors. What can you infer about tarsiers from this?

Tarsiers are nocturnal.

The auditory cortex follows the principle of contralateral control. Thus, the

right temporal lobe receives most of its input from the left ear.

Which statement about feature nets is FALSE?

The input layer is particularly sensitive to the overall configuration of a pattern

H.M. was famous for his changes in memory after going under an operation in the mid 20th century. What did studying his memory help us to learn?

Memory is not a unitary process - it has several sub-processes that are independent. For example, working memory can exist without long term memory

The technical term for talking to yourself when rehearsing verbal material is

subvocalization.

The "cognitive revolution" is named as such because

the focus changed from behaviors to the processes underlying those behaviors.

Some neurological conditions result in a person unable to open their hand for many years. What is a likely outcome of living with a clenched hand for many years?

Absence of tactile experience lessens the cortical area devoted to that hand.

Which of the following was the result of Massaro's study that resulted in the Fuzzy Logic Model of Perception?

Observed frequencies for naming a letter e increase as it has more e features, but also as the context demands an e.

A synapse is:

The space between the dendrites of one neuron and the axon terminals of another neuron

The primary motor projection area forms a "map" of the body. The amount of cortical tissue dedicated to different parts of the body correlates with

the precision of movement for the body part.

The "all-or-none" law states that:

the signal traveling down a neuron's axon does not vary in strength of firing, only in rate of firing

Who proposed the concept of a "cognitive map"?

E.C. Tolman

Which of the following statements is true regarding the anatomy of the primary projection areas?

Areas of the body that are more sensitive have more cortical space devoted to their sensations or movement

These monsters are the same size, but look different sizes because of several depth perception cues. Choose the cue that is NOT responsible for the illusion.

Retinal disparity

Which of the following is true regarding the human iris?

It contains visible muscles not covered by skin

Which of the following is characteristic of apperceptive visual agnosia?

Inability to identify simple objects and drawings

Which of the following is most due to top-down processing?

Seeing the letters "BOOX" flashed quickly on a screen and mistakenly thinking you saw "BOOK"

The inability to voluntarily mentally visualize is known as

Aphantasia

Sternberg's contribution to the idea of cognition as information processing was important because:

Sternberg provided a method for measuring individual processing steps by breaking down total response time .

The year 1879 might be thought of as the beginning of psychology as a science because that is the year

Wilhelm Wundt developed and opened the first psychology laboratory.

The center character could be a number OR a letter - depending on which way you look at it. Which is the best explanation for this ambiguity?

The feature detectors for straight vertical lines and horizontal lines curved to the right are firing equally. The cognitive detectors for a B and 13 are firing equally. The decision detectors have to choose between perceiving a B or 13 and they are primed to choose one or the other based on the context around the stimuli

A neuron's initial, internal response to an incoming signal can vary in size. The ultimate, external response of the cell, however, does not vary in size. If the signal is sent, it is always of the same magnitude. This effect is called the

all-or-none law.

Understanding the following sentence depends mostly on what?

Betsy wanted to bring Jacob a present. She shook her piggy bank. It made no sound. She went to look for her mother.

top-down processing

Within working memory, "helpers" like the visuospatial buffer and the articulatory rehearsal loop

provide short-term storage of items likely to be needed soon by the central executive.

Which symptom associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) reflects problems with orienting systems?

failing to pay close attention

The expected value of an option is dependent on

the product of the probability of an outcome and the utility of the outcome.

If Tabitha believes that detective shows are more dramatic than hospital shows, then confirmation bias would lead her to do all of the following EXCEPT be more likely to

have memory schemata that include more examples of dramatic hospital shows than dramatic detective shows

Ira is asked to remember the order of a previously presented list of words; the experimenter asks him to recall the words immediately after hearing them. Devon is asked to remember the same list, but his recall is delayed by 20 seconds after the list presentation; during that time, Devon is given no other task to form. We would expect

that Devon would have poor memory for words at the end of the list.

For most recall tests, the transfer of items into long-term storage is best facilitated by ________ rehearsal.

maintenance

In a peg-word system, participants help themselves memorize a group of items by

associating each item with some part of an already memorized framework, or skeleton.

Which of the following approaches is LEAST likely to facilitate retention of academic material?

rereading lecture notes the day before an exam

According to utility theory, people should NOT

allow the framing of a choice to affect expected value

In 2017 a man named Edgar Welch walked into a D.C. restaurant with an assault rifle because he believed in a (thoroughly debunked) conspiracy theory that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile operation in the back room of the restaurant. Aside from showing that passing around fake theories is dangerous and has real consequences, what else can you probably assume about the incident?

Welch probably also believes in many other "conspiracy theories"

Current theory suggests that the central executive may be

the set of processes that govern the selection and timing of other mental steps.

Participants are shown pictures of two alternating scenes that are separated by a brief blank interval. The scenes are identical except for one small detail. In this case, participants find it hard to detect the change. Which of the following statements is most likely to be true?

A similar effect can also be found with movies and in actual live events (where participants fail to detect changes that have been made).

The intention to learn new material

leads participants to approach the material in the fashion they think best for memorization.

In an experiment, people were asked to memorize words in a way that focused either on meaning (deep-processing condition) or sound of the words (shallow-processing condition). Then they were asked to recall the words, cued with hints that either matched their learning (e.g., cued with sound hints if sound was focused on during learning) or did not match (e.g., cued with meaning hints if they focused on sound during learning) . The results showed that recall was best for participants in the:

deep processing, matched cues condition.

Which of the following is FALSE with regard to the confirmation bias?

People tend to take disconfirming evidence at face value.

A participant is asked to memorize a series of word pairs, including the pair "heavy-light." The participant is asked later if any of the following words had been included in the list memorized earlier: "lamp," "candle," "spark," and "light." The participant denies having seen any of these words recently. This is probably because

the learning context led the participant to think in terms of opposites, while the test context led the participant to think in terms of semantic associates.

Recordings from neurons in area V4 of the visual cortex show that the neurons are

more responsive to attended inputs than unattended inputs.

Select the inaccurate claim.

If a node has been partially activated recently, it is unlikely to reach threshold due to spreading inhibition of return.

Movements of attention are:

faster than eye movements.

Which of the following is MOST like an example of the influence of implicit memory?

Not only did Dave remember the answer, he also remembered where the answer appeared on the textbook page.

The availability heuristic is a strategy in which

people base their estimates of frequency on how easily they can think of examples of the relevant category.

Participants tend NOT to use base-rate information if they are also given

diagnostic information

A helpful analogy for the encoding and retrieval process in long-term memory is

cataloguing, the way librarians catalogue new books.

Which of the following is correct regarding dual-process models of judgment?

System 2 is more likely to be used if people are given training or cued by the situation to use effortfull processing, suppressing the System 1 response

Read the abstract below and identify the Independent and Dependent variables.

The current study investigated the potential impact of exposure to anti-vaccine conspiracy theories on vaccination intentions. Participants were divided into three groups and shown either: 1) information that either supported anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, 2) refuted anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, or 3) a control condition that received no information. Results revealed that participants who were exposed to material supporting anti-vaccine conspiracy theories rated themselves as having a lower intent to vaccinate than those in the anti-conspiracy condition or controls. These findings point to the potentially detrimental consequences of anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, and highlight their potential role in shaping health-related behaviors.

IV1: Type of material read: anti-vaccine conspiracy text, refutation of anti-vaccine conspiracy text, neutral. DV: self-rated intention to vaccinate.

Researchers have used fMRI to evaluate the neural areas that are correlated with successful memory functioning. They measured brain activity during encoding, gave participants a memory test, and then

measured neural activity during retrieval.

Explicit memories are revealed by _______ memory tests, such as _______, whereas implicit memories are revealed by _______ memory tests, such as _______.

direct, recall; indirect, priming

Which of the following statements is FALSE about automatic tasks?

They require executive control.

The term "illusory covariation" refers to an error in which

participants perceive two variables as being somehow linked to each other when in fact they are not.

If a participant is asked to perform two activities at the same time, performance will be improved if

the two activities are plainly different from each other, drawing on different task-specific resources.

Who is most likely to score poorly on a test of reasoning ability?

Ben proudly states "Once I make up my mind, it's over. I don't change it."

As a general rule, the intention to learn

has no direct effect on learning.

Change blindness demonstrates that

people routinely fail to see things directly in front of their eyes.

Before reading about someone suffering from depression, people are told that the case is not at all typical. This instruction will"

not affect participants' spontaneous use of the representativeness heuristic

Which of the following is NOT necessary for attribute substitution to occur? (from Kahneman & Frederick)

The person is aware of the underlying similarity between the target attribute and substitute attribute due to analogy.

Kahneman and Tversky (1973) asked participants to make judgments about the likelihood that people with certain characteristics were lawyers or engineers. These participants were also told the proportion of people in the overall population who were lawyers or engineers. In this situation,

participants ignored base rate and relied only on diagnostic information.

Ada recently joined a running club and completed her first 5-mile run. After the run, she has no recall of what she read in her cognition textbook earlier because she is thinking about how sore her legs are. This is a real-world example of

inattentional blindness.

You are reading a political blog and come across the following sentiment: "Politicians are liars. John Doe is a politician. Therefore, John Doe is a liar." You are most likely to judge this as logical if you

dislike politicians.

Studies indicate that training in statistics

improves participants' performance in a variety of judgment problems

When asked to judge covariation, participants

can provide reasonably accurate estimates if they have no prior beliefs about the data.

Evidence for context-dependent learning has been found in all of the following situations EXCEPT

a class lecture in a very cold or hot room.

Heuristics are strategies that:

sometimes risk error in order to gain efficiency

When people are explicitly told that a particular instance is NOT representative of the larger group, they

often continue to reason as if the instance IS representative of the larger group.

An inductive judgment is one in which a person

begins with specific facts or observations and seeks to draw a general conclusion from them.

Familiarity (as opposed to source memory)

provides one of the important sources for recognition.