Chapters 1-7 | Student Practice Quizzes

Instructions: For each question, click on the radio button beside your answer. When you have completed the entire quiz, click the Submit my answers button at the bottom of the page to receive your results.

Question 1:

Which of the following is the most accurate description of cognition?
a) Cognition is about awareness.
b) Cognition includes a wide range of mental activities and psychological processes.
c) Intelligence is the main focus of cognition.
d) Cognition is primarily about intuitive processes.

Question 2:

Broadbent’s general filter model of attention was constructed based upon auditory experiments in the laboratory. This approach is not consistent with ________.
a) an ecological approach to perception
b) how we process information to give it meaning
c) the cognitive ethology approach to research
d) Both a and c.

Question 3:

In a cognitive psychology experiment, participants are required to respond to five equally probable alternatives. If the number of alternatives is increased to eight, the reaction time will ________.
a) increase
b) decrease
c) stay the same

Question 4:

________ theory emphasizes that learning means becoming progressively more attuned to what the environment affords us.
a) Ecological approach
b) Cognitive ethology
c) Broadbent’s filter theory
d) Information pickup

Question 5:

Metacognition is best described as ________.
a) thinking about thinking
b) advanced cognitive theory
c) information metaprocessing
d) thoughts of a surreal nature

Question 6:

Typical symptoms of a patient with Broca’s aphasia involve the inability to ________.
a) produce speech
b) comprehend speech
c) repeat speech
d) read aloud

Question 7:

Using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) is preferable to measuring event-related potentials (ERP) when ________.
a) locating a specific neural structure within the brain
b) identifying increased activity within a specific brain structure during a cognitive task
c) performing phrenological studies on brain function
d) working with animal brains instead of human brains

Question 8:

Which of the following theories of the mind/brain relation is least likely to encourage the study of mental activity in order to provide insights regarding brain activity?
a) Epiphenomenalism
b) Parallelism
c) Isomorphism
d) Interactionism

Question 9:

Which of the following would you expect to have had the largest influence on the development of connectionist models?
a) The advent of the telephone and radio helped theorists conceptualize cognition as the transfer of information through a system.
b) The advent of the computer helped theorists conceptualize cognition as the flow of information through a series of processing structures.
c) The advent of neuroscience techniques helped theorists conceptualize cognition as the patterns of activity in a complex, interconnected network of neurons.
d) The advent of brain injury studies helped theorists conceptualize cognition as the product of specialized regions of the brain.

Question 10:

Which of the following methods in cognitive neuroscience provides the greatest spatial resolution for measuring brain activity?
a) Lesions
b) fMRI
c) Multi-unit recording
d) ERP

Question 11:

The assumption that cognitive processing is restricted to only one connection at a time is known as ________.
a) parallel processing
b) parallel distributed processing
c) serial processing
d) information processing

Question 12:

Bottom-up processing in object recognition refers to the ________.
a) construction of the visual image from the base to the peak.
b) illusion that objects possess more perceptual data than they actually do.
c) contribution of previous knowledge to object recognition.
d) contribution of the visual features of a stimulus to object recognition.

Question 13:

The process by which an emerging percept makes contact with a prior memory trace is known as ________.
a) perceptual synapse
b) Höffding function
c) memory probe
d) trace detection

Question 14:

The word superiority effect would not be expected to aid your letter recognition if ________.
a) the word is very long.
b) the letter is difficult to see
c) if the word is from a foreign language you do not understand.
d) the word is a noun.

Question 15:

Which of the following is not a principle of grouping proposed by the Gestalt psychologists?
a) Prägnanz
b) Similarity
c) Proximity
d) Constancy

Question 16:

Which of the following is consistent with Gibson’s ecological approach to perception?
a) Information comes from the senses helps to create an internal representation of the environment.
b) Past experiences and prior knowledge help to create an internal representation of the environment.
c) The way we actively organize information into wholes helps us create an internal representation of the environment
d) The way we apprehend information directly from the environment helps guide our actions in the world.

Question 17:

Which of the following is an example of using divided attention?
a) Reading a sentence, then writing notes on it.
b) Picking up where you left off on your essay after going to the store.
c) Driving a car while talking on a cell phone.
d) Alternating between listening to your professor lecture and taking notes.

Question 18:

What pattern of eye movement would most likely be seen when reading a relatively easy text?
a) Longer fixation durations, more regressions, and less saccades
b) Shorter fixation durations, more regressions, and less saccades
c) Shorter fixation durations, less regressions, and more saccades
d) Longer fixation durations, less regressions, and more saccades

Question 19:

As you watch a movie with subtitles, you realize that even while watching the movie you are reading the lines of text without any difficulty. This is an example of ________. At some point you decide to check the subtitles for spelling errors. This is an example of ________.
a) automatic processing; controlled processing
b) controlled processing; automatic processing
c) attention capture; inattentional blindness
d) inattentional blindness; attention capture

Question 20:

Carl drops his contact lens on the floor and begins to carefully search for it. While searching for his lens, he will rely on ________.
a) attentional blink
b) subliminal perception
c) covert attention
d) overt attention

Question 21:

Adjusting the position of the eye so that a stationary object falls directly onto the fovea and remains there is called ________.
a) fixation
b) saccade
c) smooth pursuit movement
d) coincidence

Question 22:

Prior to the emergence of schema theories, the typical conception of a memory trace was that of it being similar to a ________.
a) pencil and paper
b) recording device
c) computer
d) None of the above.

Question 23:

Consolidation of memory is thought to occur in which brain structure?
a) The frontal cortex
b) The hippocampus
c) The cerebellum
d) The thalamus

Question 24:

According to Nader and Bartlett, the recollection of a memory is ________ the original experience.
a) a faithful snapshot of
b) like travelling back in time to
c) a dynamic reconstruction of
d) a low quality recording of

Question 25:

In the War of Ghosts study, people tended to select some material and omit other material. These omissions reflected a process of ________.
a) selection
b) interpretation
c) rationalization
d) plasticity

Question 26:

Life scripts are ________ and not ________.
a) descriptive; predetermined
b) prescriptive; descriptive
c) predetermined; selected
d) None of the above.

Question 27:

Which of the following is not a subcomponent of Baddeley‘s working memory model?
a) The semantic buffer
b) The phonological loop
c) The episodic buffer
d) The visuo-spatial sketchpad
e) The central executive

Question 28:

When Georgina hears the word ‘test’, she immediately thinks of the words ‘study’, ‘stress’, and ‘grades’. This is an example of ________.
a) involuntary semantic memory
b) spreading activation
c) the fan effect
d) primacy bias

Question 29:

Jenna goes to a party and meets a few new people. She learns these facts about some of the people she meets: - Andre studies civil engineering. - Allison is dating Julian. - Kimmy studies psychology. - Kimmy dated Andre a few months ago. After the party she remembers rather quickly that Allison is dating Julian, but she takes a longer time to remember who Kimmy used to date. This is most likely due to ________.
a) the fan effect
b) the ceiling effect
c) the butcher-on-the-bus phenomenon
d) implicit memory

Question 30:

Which of the following memory phenomena is thought to commonly affect older persons and is characteristic of the forgetfulness of names and their associated faces?
a) Korsakoff’s syndrome
b) Encoding specificity
c) The associative deficit
d) The disconnection syndrome

Question 31:

Bob is walking home when he starts humming ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ and does not know why this particular song has popped into his mind. A few hours later, he recalls that he passed by a newly opened canoe store on the way home. This is an example of ________.
a) visuo-spatial sketchpad
b) an episodic buffer
c) the fan effect
d) involuntary semantic memory

Question 32:

Imagens operate ________, while logogens operate ________.
a) non-verbally; verbally
b) synchronously; sequentially
c) verbally; synchronously
d) sequentially; synchronously
e) synchronously; asynchronously

Question 33:

Which of the following words would be most likely to illicit a mental image?
a) Love
b) Purpose
c) Car
d) Justice
e) A, b, and d

Question 34:

In Pavio’s (1965) study, learning is poorest in which of the following conditions?
a) When abstract words are paired with concrete words
b) When both paired words are concrete
c) When both paired words are abstract
d) All of the above pairings proved to show similar results.

Question 35:

The vividness of mental imagery ________.
a) is not an index of the accuracy of memory
b) is an index of richness
c) can be measured by the VVIQ
d) All of the above.
e) None of the above.

Question 36:

Kosslyn et al. (1978) demonstrated that ________ is preserved in our mental images of perceived scenes.
a) objective distance
b) actual distance
c) imaginary distance
d) location distance

Higher Education

Cognition, Fourth Edition - Practice Quiz (Chapters 1–7)