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Cognitive Psychology D570 Test Bank
Exam Questions With Correct Answers
Newell and Simon created the General Problem Solver, which is?
One of the first computer programs designed to simulate human problem-solving.
Behaviorism focused solely on?
Observable behaviors and dismissed internal mental states (e.g., thoughts, memories, beliefs)
Ulric Neisser's Schema Theory is the concept of what?
mental frameworks that help people organize and interpret information.
Schemas influence how people perceive events, recall memories, and fill in gaps in incomplete information.
Flashbulb memories are? Whose Theory was this?
vivid memories of emotionally charged events (High level of confidence in these memories but not necessarily accurate)
Neisser
Atkinson and Shiffrin Model of memory is also called?
the multi-store model of memory
The multi-store model of memory consists of 3 types of memory, which are?
Sensory Memory, Short-Term Memory (STM), and Long-Term Memory (LTM)
How long does sensory memory last?
Less than 1 second (visual information) to a few seconds (auditory information).
Short term memory lasts how long? How many different items can your STM remember at once?
15 - 30 seconds without rehearsal. 7+- 2 (5-9)
Tulving memory consists of what 3 different types of memory?
Episodic Memory, Semantic Memory, and Procedural Memory
What is Episodic memory?
Memory for personal experiences and specific events that occur at a particular time and place.
· Episodic Memory: The most advanced and unique to humans, relying on self-awareness and the ability to mentally time-travel.
Colin Cherry introduced the concept of selective attention which is also known as?
cocktail party effect
What is the cocktail party effect
The ability to focus on one message while ignoring others in a noisy environment.
What is a Dichotic Listening Experiment?
Participants listened to different messages in each ear and were asked to shadow (repeat) one.
How does nurture vs nature shape behavior and development?
Nature: Traits are inherited through genes (e.g., intelligence, genetic disorders).
Nurture: Traits are shaped by environment, upbringing, and experiences (e.g., education, culture).
What is the Normative approach?
Identifying typical milestones or norms for behaviors and abilities at specific ages, such as when children typically begin walking or speaking.
Paiget created the what?
Cognitive Development Model
The Cognitive Development Model has how many stages? What is it?
4 Stages. This model outlines how children's thinking develops in stages as they grow.
What are the 4 stages of the Cognitive Development Model? Give a quick explanation of each.
Sensorimotor: 0-2, experiences worlds through senses and actions.
Preoperational: 2-6, uses words and images to represent things but lacks reasoning (egocentric, pretend play)
Concrete operational: 7-11, Understand events and analogies logically, preforms math
Formal operational: 12+, Formal operations, uses abstract thinking, moral reasoning.
What is Zone of Proximal Development? Who created this?
Emphasizes the role of social interaction in early development, where children learn best with guidance from more knowledgeable others.
Vygotsky
Explain Experience-dependent plasticity
The brain's ability to change and adapt based on specific experiences. Neural connections are strengthened, weakened, or formed depending on the activities and environments an individual is exposed to, shaping the brain's structure and function over time. Example: Learning to play a musical instrument alters brain regions involved in motor and auditory skills.
Name the brain areas (Lobes) that are specialized for specific cognitive functions, and what those functions are.
Occipital Lobe: Visual processing.
Temporal Lobe: Memory and language.
Parietal Lobe: Spatial and sensory processing.
Frontal Lobe: Decision-making and problem-solving.
Explain Localization of Function
Specific brain regions are specialized for certain functions, such as the occipital lobe for vision or Broca's area for speech production.
What is Prosopagnosia? Damage to "______" is often associated with it?
Inability to recognize faces, often caused by damage to the fusiform face area (FFA) of the temporal lobe.
What is Broca's Aphasia? Damage to "______" is associated with it?
Difficulty in speech production due to damage to Broca's area in the frontal lobe. Patients can understand language but struggle to form coherent sentences.
What is Wernicke's Aphasia? Damage to "______" is associated with it?
Difficulty in language comprehension due to damage to Wernicke's area in the temporal lobe. Patients produce fluent but nonsensical speech.
Explain Functional Connectivity.
Coordinated activity between brain regions during tasks or rest, revealing networks like the default mode network involved in introspection and memory.
What are the key parts of a neuron and what do they do?
Dendrites: Receive signals from other neurons.
Cell Body (Soma): Processes incoming signals and contains the nucleus.
Axon: Sends electrical signals to other neurons.
Axon Terminals: Release neurotransmitters to communicate with other neurons.
Name the and explain the 3 "things" dealing with communication between neurons.
Synapse: The small gap between neurons where communication happens.
Neurotransmitters:
o Chemicals (e.g., dopamine, serotonin) that transmit signals across the synapse.
o Bind to receptors on the receiving neuron to pass along the message.
Explain Paired Associate Learning. Give an example (Create your own)
A memory task where participants learn pairs of items (e.g., word pairs) and, during testing, recall the second item when presented with the first.
Learning "dog-table," then recalling "table" when prompted with "dog."
What does Conceptual Peg Hypothesis (Paivio) suggest?
That concrete words (e.g., "apple") create mental images that act as "pegs" to which other information can be linked, enhancing memory.
Mental Chronometry (Shepard and Metzler) is used to measure what? Explain their experiments.
The study of reaction times to infer cognitive processing.
In their experiments, participants judged whether two 3D objects were identical or rotated, and reaction time increased with the degree of rotation.
Significance: Provided evidence for mental rotation and demonstrated that mental imagery operates similarly to physical object manipulation.
What is Mental Scanning (Kosslyn)? Explain their experiment.
A cognitive process where individuals visualize an image in their mind and scan it for details.
In Kosslyn's experiments, participants imagined a map and took longer to mentally scan between distant landmarks, suggesting mental images preserve spatial relationships.
Significance: Supports the idea that mental imagery is spatial and analogous to real-world perception.
What is Epiphenomenon?
An epiphenomenon is like a side effect or extra result of something that happens but doesn't actually change or affect the main process.
In mental imagery, the idea is that when you "see" pictures in your mind, those pictures are just a byproduct of how your brain is working. They come from the brain's thinking processes but aren't necessary for how you make decisions or solve problems.
Explain the concept of Propositional Representations
Propositional representations are like mental descriptions or statements that use words or symbols to store information in your brain, rather than pictures or images.
For example: Instead of imagining a picture of a cat under a table, your brain might store the idea as a sentence, like "The cat is under the table." It's abstract and doesn't rely on visualizing the scene but still holds the meaning of the situation.
Think of it as your brain's way of writing notes about the world, using words or symbols instead of drawings.
Explain the concept of a Topographical Map
Multivoxel Pattern Analysis (MVPA) is a brain imaging technique that looks at patterns of activity across many small areas (voxels) in the brain to figure out what a person is thinking or experiencing.
It's like looking at a detailed "heatmap" of the brain. Instead of just checking if one part of the brain is active, MVPA studies the specific patterns of activity in multiple spots to see if they match something, like a specific thought or image.
Explain Transcranial Mental Stimulation-Perception or Imagery (Kosslyn)
When you look at an object (like a chair), certain areas of your brain become active.
When you imagine that chair, many of those same brain areas light up, even though you're not actually seeing it.
Kosslyn's work showed that perception (seeing) and imagery (imagining) share similar brain processes, meaning your brain treats imagining something almost like seeing it for real. This helps explain why mental imagery feels so vivid for some people.
Explain the method of Loci
A memory technique where information is associated with specific locations in a familiar environment (a mental "map").
Mentally place items to remember along a known route or within a familiar setting. During recall, "walk" through the route to retrieve the information.
What makes up the Hierarchical Nature of Language? explain each level.
Phonemes: Smallest units of sound (e.g., /b/ in "bat").
Morphemes: Smallest units of meaning (e.g., "un-" in "undo").
Words: Combined morphemes forming meaningful units (e.g., "book").
Phrases: Groups of words organized according to syntax (e.g., "the red book").
Sentences: Complete thoughts composed of phrases.
What are some examples that could confirm The Universal Need to Use Language
· Language Exists Across All Cultures
· Children's Language Acquisition
· Sign Language in Deaf Communities
· Neurobiological Evidence
What is Psycholinguistics?
The study of how humans acquire, understand, produce, and use language.
What is a Lexicon?
The mental dictionary of words a person knows, including their meanings, pronunciations, and relationships to other words.
Explain the concept of Speech Segmentation
The process by which listeners perceive distinct words within the continuous flow of speech, despite the lack of Silence Between Words.
In natural speech, words are often spoken without pauses or silences, making segmentation challenging. (Easy for languages you speak, but why when you hear a language you don't it just sounds like one long noise)
Explain and give an example of Lexical Ambiguity
Occurs when a word has multiple meanings.
The word "bank" could mean Wellsfargo or the side of a river.
Explain and give an example of Lexical Priming
Refers to how exposure to one word influences the processing of a related word.
Seeing the word "doctor" makes the word "nurse" easier and faster to recognize due to their association.
Explain the Concept of meaning dominance (there are 2 types).
Biased Dominance: Occurs when one meaning of a word is much more common than others.
(e.g for gay the "homosexual" meaning is more dominant than "happy")
Balanced Dominance: Occurs when multiple meanings of a word are used with roughly equal frequency.
(e.g. For "cast," meanings like "actors in a play" and "a medical cast" are similarly common.)
What is Syntax?
Refers to the set of rules governing the structure and arrangement of words in sentences to convey meaning.
"The cat chased the mouse" follows proper syntax, whereas "Cat the mouse chased" does not.
Explain parsing
The mental process of analyzing a sentence's syntax to determine its grammatical structure and meaning.
When reading "The old man the boat," parsing helps resolve ambiguity to understand "The old man is in the boat."
Explain the Garden Path Model of parsing
Proposes that readers/listeners initially use simple syntactic rules (heuristics) to interpret a sentence, which can lead to errors and reanalysis when the sentence takes an unexpected turn.
For example: When you read a sentence, your brain guesses its meaning based on the easiest and most straightforward interpretation. Sometimes, this guess is wrong if the sentence takes an unexpected twist, and you have to go back and rethink what it means.
It's called a "garden path" because it's like being led down a path that suddenly doesn't go where you thought, so you have to backtrack and figure out the right way.
Explain Casual Inferences
Establishing cause-and-effect relationships between events.
o Example: "She forgot her umbrella. She got wet." (Inferring the rain caused her to get wet.)
Why is common ground important?
important for effective communication, ensuring messages are interpreted as intended. Engaging conversations.
What is Syntactic Coordination
The tendency for conversational partners to align their sentence structures during communication, making the conversation flow more smoothly.
What is Syntactic Priming?
The phenomenon where exposure to a specific sentence structure increases the likelihood of using that same structure in subsequent speech or writing.
You're on a meeting, they are going around the room. The first person they call on says "Nothing from me sir" Most others will say the exact same thing.
Attendance in school first person says "Here" most others will say the same thing
Explain the concept of The Persistence of vision
Persistence of vision is the idea that when you see something, your eyes and brain hold onto the image for a tiny moment, even after it's gone.
For example: If you wave a sparkler in the dark, you see a trail of light. That trail isn't really there—it's just your brain holding onto each flash of light for a split second, making it look like a continuous streak.
This is why movies and animations work. They show a series of still images very quickly, and because of persistence of vision, your brain blends them together into smooth motion.
Explain Sperlings experiment on iconic memory
He flashed a grid of 12 letters (3 rows of 4) on a screen briefly.
People couldn't remember all the letters—only 4 or 5—when asked to recall everything (because the memory faded too fast).
When he played a tone to tell them which row to focus on, they could remember almost all the letters in that row.
Takeaway: Your brain briefly stores much visual information, but most of it fades quickly unless you focus on it.
What is chunking? Give an example
Grouping individual pieces of information into more significant, meaningful units to remember them more easily.
Example: Instead of remembering "1, 9, 7, 6," you chunk it into "1976" (a year). Go from remembering 4 items to 1
