Psychology Midterm 1
Based on the ideas presented in this ZAPS lab, under which of the following conditions do you think participants would be able to most quickly name the color in which the stimuli are written or drawn?
Colored Blobs
Imagine you are a web designer working on an interactive website. You need a symbol to indicate to users that they will start a timed task. Based on the ideas presented in this ZAPS lab, which of the following symbols would be most effective for this purpose?
GO (circle, green)
What does the Stroop effect demonstrate?
the automaticity of language
In the Reference Results, what do the data show?
a difference in reaction times in which congruent trials are faster than incongruent trials
Based on what you’ve learned about congruency, which of the following would be an example of an incongruency that might interfere with automaticity?
While giving your friend directions to the library, you point left but tell them to take a right
The word “banana” appears on the left side of the screen, and the split-brain patient is told to use her left hand to grab the object. Will she be able to grab the banana?
yes
The word “flamingo” appears on the left side of the screen, and the split-brain patient is told to use her right hand to select the object. Will she be able to fetch the flamingo?
no
The word “trumpet” appears on the left side of the screen. Will the split-brain patient be able to name the word she saw?
no
The word “car” appears on the right side of the screen. Will the split-brain patient be able to name the word she saw?
yes
A split-brain patient is presented with two words simultaneously: “saw” on the right and “hammer” on the left. If you give the patient a pen and paper and ask her to draw what she saw with her left hand, what will she draw?
a hammer
Which of the following statements most accurately describes the deficits of someone with prosopagnosia?
" I see faces, but I can never be sure of the identity of a person based on his or her face."
A region of the ________________ in the right hemisphere is specialized for recognition of faces.
fusiform gyrus
Why do we find it more difficult to recognize inverted faces than other inverted objects?
Inversion disrupts the relationships between facial features
What factor contributes to difficulty recognizing both inverted faces and other inverted objects?
Experience: it is hard to identify objects that are in unusual orientations
In what way is face processing “holistic”?
The relationship or configuration of features is important for recognition
A researcher asks participants in a study to indicate whether the green line at the front corner of the wall pictured here is longer than, shorter than, or equal in length to the green line at the back corner of the wall. Participants regularly say that the front line is shorter than the back line (even though the two are perfectly equal in length). What are the participants’ brains using to guide perception?
context clues about distance
When an object is moving toward you, what does it do?
It takes up more of your visual field, but your mind adjusts for the size based on distance cues
The Ponzo and Müller-Lyer illusions are not universally experienced: Some cultures do not appear to display the same distortion of line length. Why might this be?
Some environemnts or cultures lack objects we see in urban environments, like buildings that have many right angles
We have constancy for size and other things we perceive. Which of the following is an example of perceptual constancy?
hearing the same word in many different people's voices
In the Ponzo illusion, the primary finding is that people tend to do what?
overestimate the size of the line that is framed to appear closer
Whether or not a person detects a stimulus depends only upon that person’s absolute threshold.
False
A person with a conservative criterion for detecting a signal will generate a greater number of misses and what?
correct rejections
Suppose that in a signal detection experiment, researchers pay participants $15 for each response that is a hit and $2 for each response that is a correct rejection. How might this affect a typical participant’s response criterion?
The participants response criterion will be more liberal
Radiologists are trained to detect abnormalities in scans that have lots of noise. Which two things do radiologists need to be close to 100%
hits and correct rejections
You are looking for a friend Sanjay at a crowded party but cannot find him. Unbeknowst to you, he is calling out your name amidst the many voices and music. You even brush by one another at one point without noticing. According to signal detection theory, this is an example of what?
miss
A girl arrives home from school to find a delicious cupcake sitting on the counter. As she eats it, a mouse scurries across the floor and triggers intense fear in her. Now, years later, the girl can’t stand the taste of cupcakes. She has developed a taste aversion.
Which of the following is the unconditioned stimulus?
mouse
A girl arrives home from school to find a delicious cupcake sitting on the counter. As she eats it, a mouse scurries across the floor and triggers intense fear in her. Now, years later, the girl can’t stand the taste of cupcakes. She has developed a taste aversion.
Which of the following is the unconditioned response?
fear
A girl arrives home from school to find a delicious cupcake sitting on the counter. As she eats it, a mouse scurries across the floor and triggers intense fear in her. Now, years later, the girl can’t stand the taste of cupcakes. She has developed a taste aversion.
Which of the following is the conditioned stimulus?
cupcake
A girl arrives home from school to find a delicious cupcake sitting on the counter. As she eats it, a mouse scurries across the floor and triggers intense fear in her. Now, years later, the girl can’t stand the taste of cupcakes. She has developed a taste aversion.
Which of the following is the conditioned response?
fear
Long after a nasty encounter with a cat, Sonja discovered that she no longer feared cats as she had previously. While out on a walk, Sonja met a stray cat and she discovered that she felt some anxiety about the confrontation. Sonja’s anxiety is an example of what phenomenon?
spontaneous recovery
Memory errors in the Deese–Roediger–McDermott procedure occur because
the word activates a schema that creates a memory illusion
What kind of “critical lure” is most likely to elicit a false recall?
a word very strongly related to the other words on the list
The Loftus and Palmer (1974) experiment showed that eyewitness memory of an event could be biased by
how questions about the event were phrased
A cross-country driver decides to eat at a local restaurant she has never heard of. She walks in and sees a counter that contains cash register machines; a menu hangs above the counter. Behind the counter, employees wearing headsets and paper hats hustle to and fro, pulling food from a service window and placing it onto trays. These images will most likely trigger a ________ that will lead the traveler to believe she should ________.
schema; order at the counter and then seat herself
Which of the following is a key finding from research using memory tests like the one in this ZAPS activity?
people believe the lure word was present in the list about as frequently as words that actually did appear in the list
What is a retrieval cue?
contextual information that helps you recall information that was learned in the same context
How can mood congruence effects contribute to depression?
negative mood primes negative thoughts and memories, which in turn make mood more negative
What is the mood congruency effect?
the tendency to recall information that matches your current mood
This ZAPS lab activity used “music and ideation” for what?
mood induction
It’s a rainy night on campus in the middle of finals week. You have a Statistics exam the next day, and you study for it while listening to a playlist of sad music. The combination of the weather, finals, and the playlist put you in a gloomy mood.
You wake up the next morning feeling much more upbeat, but you can’t seem to remember everything you studied last night. According to the principle of mood dependency, what would jog your memory?
read through your notes while listening to the playlist from last night
What is the duration of iconic memory?
200-500 miliseconds
What was the difference between Sperling’s Full Report and Partial Report tasks?
in full report task participants had to recall the full set of lettersl in the partial report taks participants only had to recall one row of letters
What’s the difference between echoic memory and iconic memory?
echoic memory lasts longer than iconic memory; about 4 seconds
How did Sperling’s Partial Report task reveal the duration of iconic memory?
poorer recall when there was a longer delay between the presentation of the letters and the cue for recall
Which of these tasks is particularly supported by sensory memory?
continuing to process a stimulus after it has disappeared
When you remember the first few items from a list better than items in the middle of the list, this effect takes place because the first items were still present in your working memory upon recall.
False
Which of the following best describes the serial position curve for an experiment conducted with a delay between the presentation of a list and participants’ recall of that list?
high percentage of recall for the first few positions in the list and low recollection for all other items in the list
Suppose a friend calls and tells you the seven-digit passcode to enter her home so that you can watch her cat while she’s out of town. What xan you do to maintain that information in working memory until you find a pen to write it down?
rehearse it by repeating the passcode to yourself
Recall of which items in a list would be most strongly affected by difficulty forming long-term memories, as in anterograde amnesia?
the first few items
On the first day of psychology class, the instructor asks all 15 students to introduce themselves. After class, you try to remember your classmates’ names and you realize you only remember the first person who introduced themself. What is the name of this phenomenon?
primacy effect
What is meant by the term “chunk” in the context of working memory and memory span?
a chunk is a unit of information that is grouped in a meaningful way
Why might memory span for digits and letters (like “2” or “T”) be better than for unfamiliar nonsense syllables (like “gorb” or “trep”)?
because of nonsense syllables are difficult to store as "chunks" since they're unfamiliar
What would be the best way to remember the following sequence by chunking?
24-7-314-911
In this memory span task, most people’s memory span for letters with different sounds is better than their memory span for letters that sound the same. Why might this be?
most people repeat the letters to themselves to remember them so when the letters sound the same it is easier to mix them up
According to George Miller’s classic analysis, how many items can be stored in working memory?
7 +/- 2
“Encoding specificity” refers to
memories are encoded specifically with their context
Imagine (or maybe you don’t have to imagine) that your psychology class takes place in an old room with uncomfortable desks. For the final exam in your class, you are scheduled to take the exam in a different room in a new building with comfortable chairs. Based on what you have learned about encoding specificity, what might you expect?
it will be more difficult to recall information in the new location
In this activity, which aspect of recall was facilitated by using the same cue word?
faster old/new recognition
Which of these is an example of state-dependent memory?
billinguals recall more memories in which the language matches the language of the interview
Which memory strategy might be effective for reducing the effect of encoding specificity?
distributed practice; praciting at different times and in different contexts could reduce the specificity of the learned material
This operation span task measures working memory by...
testing how well you can remember words while solving math problems
The difference between short-term memory and working memory is that...
short-term memory describes a temporary information store, while working memory also involves processing or manipulating information
Why is working memory important for language comprehension?
the comprehender needs to hold the message in memory and update it with new words as they are heard or read