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Psych 201 PAST Papers
Perception and Cognition (University of Auckland)
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SECTION A
2020
1.
What is the doctrine of isomorphism that was proposed by the Gestalt Psychologists? What evidence was
there to support the concept?
2. What is the horopter and what is its significance?
3. What are the three characteristics that distinguish between figure and ground?
4. Explain the primary difference between the manipulation of information in the Ames room illusion and in the
Ponzo illusion.
5. Language comprehension can be either auditory or visual (reading). What are five main differences between
these two forms of language comprehension?
6. With or without visual cues speech perception is not easy. What are the five problems we need to overcome?
7. Language production can be either spoken or written (typed). What are five main differences between these
two forms of language production?
8. The garden path model is based on five assumptions. What are those five assumptions?
9. Describe the structure of working memory.
10. List five reasons why thinking may occur in a language distinct from natural languages.
11. Problems come in many forms. Luckily, we have many cognitive options when it comes to solving problems.
Explain, using examples.
12. Describe the details of one psychological approach to understanding creativity
2019
1.
2.
3.
4.
What are the two Gestalt Laws proposed by Rock and Palmer? Provide an example of each.
What are the three characteristics that distinguish between Figure and Ground?
What is the function of the red/green opponent process, and how does this process work?
Briefly describe the logic underlying Donders’ subtractive technique and identify two assumptions that one
must make when adopting this approach.
5. The SCUBA study shows that when we encode semantic information into long term memory, incidental
information appears to also be encoded and serves as additional memory cues. What type of long-term
memory system would you suggest might be involved over and above semantic memory? Briefly describe why
this finding might at least partially explain the increased learning that results when people attend lectures in
person compared to primarily listening to recorded lectures.
6. Briefly describe two ways in which risk of capture is thought to influence offenders’ choices with regards to
where they choose to commit offenses. How are these notions incorporated into geographical profiling
routines like Rigel?
7. When comprehending language five assumptions have been made about how we use inferences. What are the
five assumptions?
8. What evidence is there that readers use phonological processing (even when reading silently)?
9. Briefly explain cognitive neuropsychology and how this is used in language processing research.
10. The Wason selection task reveals some curious features of human reasoning with conditionals. Explain.
11. Heuristics and biases feature in many models of decision-making. Explain what they are and offer examples.
12. Well-defined problems differ from ill-defined problems in several ways. Using examples, explain these
differences.
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SECTION B
2020
A) Clearly explain the synthesis by Hurvich of Young-Helmholtz theory (also known as trichromatic theory) and
opponent process theory.
OR
B) Provide details of the relationship between binocular disparity and stereopsis.
LEARNING
A. Discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the dual-route cascade model (DRC) of reading. Give examples as
necessary to illustrate your answer.
OR
B.
Using any model of language production discuss the verbal output of someone with fluent anomic aphasia.
Provide examples as necessary to illustrate your answer.
A) What happens in semantic memory if you were to read the following headline? New Zealand to
return to Alert Level 3 on Thursday?
OR
B) Our intuition frequently leads to our making inaccurate, irrational, or unwise decisions. Overcoming
this reliance on intuition is difficult. Explain, using at least five examples
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2019
BARRY HUGHES
A. The auditory system uses cues to localise auditory objects in space. Describe in detail the cues used to localise
objects in the following two spatial dimensions: azimuth and elevation. Include discussion of the accuracy of
humans in localizing sounds, and common perceptual errors in auditory localization.
OR
B.
Detail the perceptual effects that occur when a sound is presented twice, either without delay or with delays
of different durations.
JEFF HAM
A)
Describe how one interprets response time data using Additive Factors Logic, and give an example of how
doing so can lead us to consider explanations we might otherwise have overlooked.
OR
B)
You have read one paper that claims that endogenous attention in the auditory modality is the same
endogenous attention as in the visual modality, and another paper that claims each modality has a separate
and independent endogenous attention system. Briefly sketch out how you would design a Posner cuing study
using a choice discrimination task and the letters B, C, D, and E as stimuli in which you present two of these on
every trial. What would you measure and how would you analyse your results to determine which paper is
correct?
LANGUAGE
A. Outline the ways in which Frazier and Rayner’s (1982) garden path model explains language comprehension.
OR
B.
The Cohort model and Revised Cohort Model provide a theory of spoken word recognition. Discuss these
models and their strengths and weaknesses.
LANGUAGE
A) There are reasons for believing that a strong version of the Whorf hypothesis –that language determines
thought—cannot be true and that there must be a (non-natural) language of thought. Provide details of five of
them.
OR
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B) Describe how psychologists have investigated human creativity, using experimental and nonexperimental
methods.
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