Test A
1
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY, PSYCH 3120
FINAL EXAM
1. According to Paivio’s dual-coding hypothesis
a. Concepts can be represented either visually or verbally
b. Concrete concepts can be represented either visually or verbally, but abstract concepts
can only be represent ed verbally
c. In order for a concept to be remembered visually, it must be encoded on at least two
different occasions
d. In order for a concept to be remembered verbally, it must be encoded on at least two
different occasions
2. When participants make same/different judgments about two objects that are rotated in space,
the amount of time it takes them to verify that two objects are the same is a function of
a. The distance between the two objects, which indicates that people perform
transformations on images
b. The distance between the two objects, which indicates that images are static
c. The amount of rotation between the two objects, which indicates that people perform
transformations on images
d. The amount of rotation between the two objects, which indicates that images are static
and cannot be transformed
3. One classic imagery study had people focus on a particular part of an imaged object and then
asked them questions about parts of that object. The study found that
a. People had problems remembering parts of the objects
b. Time to answer the questions was a U-shaped function based on the distance of the
part from the focus point
c. Scanning a longer distance takes a longer time only if the experimenters expect it to
d. Scanning a longer distance takes a longer time
4. Which of the fo llowing results suggest that images are represented in a spatial medium?
a. Participants are faster to answer the question “ Does a rabbit have a pink nose?” than
they are to answer the questions “Does an elephant have gray skin?
b. Participants are faster to answer the question “Does a rabbit have a pink nose?” if they
imagine multiple rabbits than if they just imagine one rabbit.
c. Participants are faster to answer the question “ Does a rabbit have a pink nose?” if they
imagine the rabbit next to a large elephant rather than a small fly.
d. Participants are faster to answer the question “ Does a rabbit have a pink nose?” if they
imagine the rabbit next to a small fly rather than a large elephant.
5. True or false? An imagery study that required people to imagine a capital letter in a grid
showed that images are created by generating one part of the object at a time.
a. True
b. False
6. True or false? Expected value theory says that people maximize financial gain when making
decisions.
a. True
b. False
Test A
2
7. Say you are stuck in downtown Chicago with no money. You need $5 for the cab fare home.
Someone asks you to play a game of chance in which you have either a .75 chance of winning
$5 or a .25 chance of winning $40. You chose the .75 chance of winning $5. Your choice is
driven by
a. Expected utility
b. Expected value
c. Sunk costs
d. Psychic budgets
8. When participants hear that Linda (a fictitious character) is single, outspoken and very bright,
they say that she is more likely to be a bank teller and a feminist than just a bank teller. They
are using which heuristic?
a. Availability
b. Representativeness
c. Modus tollens
d. None of the above
9. Participants say that there is an 80% chance that a green cab was involved in an accident when
told that the eye-witness had an 80% chance of correctly identifying the cab as green, even
though only 15% of the cabs in the city are green. What are participants doing in this
situation?
a. Ignoring the base rate
b. Ignoring the sample size
c. Using the availability heuristic
d. Using the representativeness heuristic
10. If you are considering breaking off a relationship with a significant other who now really
drives you nuts, but are hesitating because the two of you had so many years together (even
though those years may have been miserable too), you are letting _________ influence your
decision.
a. Availability
b. Expected utility
c. Psychic budgets
d. Sunk costs
11. Which of the following is a valid deduction from the premise: If a person has dirty fingernails,
then they are a gardener.
a. This person is a gardener. Therefore, he kneels a lot.
b. This person has dirty fingernails. Therefore, he is a gardener.
c. This person is a gardener. Therefore, he has dirty fingernails.
d. This person is does not have dirty fingernails. Therefore, he is not a gardener.
12. Given the first premise “If P, then Q”, which of the following forms of deductive conclusions
are valid?
a. “Given Q, then P” and “Given not P, then not Q”
b. “Given Q, then P” and “Given not Q, then not P”
c. “Given P, then Q” and “Given not P, then not Q”
d. “Given P, then Q” and “Given not Q, then not P”
Test A
3
13. True or false? Heuristics apply to decision making, but do not apply to problem solving.
a. True
b. False
14. Syllogisms are different from conditional reasoning problems because in syllogisms
a. There are fewer premises than in deductive reasoning
b. Venn-diagrams are not helpful in disproving the consclusion
c. The conclusion is not an “if-then” statement
d. People make hardly any errors
15. True or false? Initial studies with the Wason card selection task demonstrated that people’s
choices conform to the rules of logic.
a. True
b. False
16. Which of the following is a disadvantage of brute force search?
a. Hill climbing
b. Combinatorial explosion
c. It is complicated to apply
d. It is a heuristic
17. In the classroom example of how one determines how to get to Albany, the steps that allow
one to move from one stage of knowledge to another stage of knowledge in the problem space
are known as
a. reductions
b. solutions
c. operators
d. propositions
18. In the water jug problem, you are provided with 3 measuring jars, a water tap, and drain for
pouring off water and are asked to measure out a particular amount of water. This task
demonstrates functional fixedness because
a. People who solve a series of problems requiring 3 water jars continue to use 3 water
jars for problems in which it would be simpler to use 2 water jars
b. People who solve a series of problems requiring 3 water jars spontaneously apply the
simpler strategy of using 2 water jars to appropriate problems
c. People have problems working backwards; they are reluctant to pour water out of the
jugs
d. None of the above
19. True or False? Means-ends analysis allows you to move away from the goal state when it is in
service of a subgoal.
a. True
b. False
Test A
4
20. Which of the following is true regarding participants’ use of analogy in solving problems?
a. Most participants did not use the solution to the fortress problem to help solve the
radiation problem, unless they were explicitly told it might be helpful
b. Most participants did not use the solution to the fortress problem to help solve the
radiation problem, even when they were explicitly told it might be helpful
c. Participants spontaneously applied the solution to the fortress problem in solving the
radiation problem
d. Participants spontaneously applied the fortress problems solution to solving the
radiation problem, but only after a delay.
21. People are more likely to spontaneously apply an analogy when two problems share _____
than when they share _____ .
a. Goal states: initial states
b. Initial states: goal states
c. Surface similarities: structural similarities
d. Structural similarities: surface similarities
22. Hearing the lyrics “…there’s a bathroom on the right…” when what was sung was “… there’s
a bad moon on the rise…” demonstrates that
a. People can make errors when segmenting phonemes into words
b. People can make errors when retrieving words from their lexicon
c. People usually make errors in phoneme perception
d. None of the above
23. The McGurk effect is when
a. Seeing a person’s lips move results in an inability to properly localize sound
b. Seeing a person’s lips move results in the perception of sound, even if there was no
auditory utterance
c. Seeing a person’s lips move in a manner inconsistent with the sound that is being
heard results in the perception of a sound that is somewhere between the visual and
auditory utterance
d. Seeing a person’s lips move in a manner inconsistent with the sound that is being
heard results in the perception of a sound that is consistent with the visual, rather than
the auditory percept
24. You are holding a conversation with another person. As the other person is talking, you cough
so loudly that one of the phonemes the other person uttered is drowned out. How would you
perceive the other person’s speech?
a. You would not be able to understand the speech because of the interruption of the
speech stream.
b. You would be able to understand the speech because of the phoneme restoration effect,
but you would recognize that you missed a phoneme.
c. You would be able to understand the speech because of the phoneme restoration effect
and you would not recognize that you had missed a phoneme.
d. You would be able to understand the speech only if you could fill in the break using
visual information
Test A
5
25. The lexicon is a mental dictionary containing
a. The meaning of spoken words
b. The pronunciation, spelling, and part of speech of words
c. The pronunciation and meaning of words
d. The etymology of words
26. Which of the following is NOT one of the levels of representation in text processing?
a. Surface code
b. Situation model
c. Phonemes
d. Textbase
27. True or false? The dual route model of reading claims that we have two mechanisms for
reading: direct lexicon lookup based on the spelling of a word and letter-to-phoneme rules for
converting letters to sounds.
a. True
b. False
28. Which of the following experimental results supported the notion that the cognitive sentence
parser uses key words to produce the correct phrase structure?
a. People are faster at determining the meaning of a sentence when it is in the active
rather than the passive voice
b. People are faster at determining the meaning of a sentence when it is in the passive
rather than the active voice
c. People are faster at paraphrasing a sentence when relative pronouns are present in the
sentence than when they are missing
d. People are faster at paraphrasing a sentence when relative pronouns are missing from
the sentence than when they are present
29. The weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the one usually tested by researchers. It
states that
a. The language you speak determines how you will perceive colors
b. The language you speak makes it impossible for you to have certain thoughts that
would be easily expressible in another language
c. The language you speak biases you to think in certain ways
d. The language you speak may prevent you from making distinctions between concepts
that you do not have a word for.
30. The word "e- mail" has entered common English language in the last ten years. What feature of
language is this an example of?
a. Generative
b. Structured
c. Dynamic
d. Arbitrary
Test A
6
31. True or false? When the principal of minimal attachment if violated, it takes people longer to
read sentences, and they spend more time looking at the parts of the sentence that violate
minimal attachment.
a. True
b. False
32. When viewing a stimulus, the image on your retina is called the ______ and the object in the
environment is called the ________.
a. perception; light
b. distal stimulus; proximal stimulus
c. proximal stimulus; distal stimulus
d. distal stimulus; target
33. Which is NOT a pictorial cue for depth?
a. Linear perspective
b. Convergence
c. Texture gradient
d. Occlusion
34. All of these are examples of perceiving structure from motion EXCEPT
a. Perceiving a person from moving lights
b. Perceiving a 3-dimensional object from a rotating 2-dimensional form
c. Perceiving a chameleon against a background only when it moves
d. Perceiving a 3-dimensional form when it pops out of a “magic eye” picture
35. According to early filter theories of selective attention,
a. The sensory or physical characteristics of all stimuli are processed, but only stimuli
that are attended to are processed further
b. The semantic characteristics of all stimuli are processed, but only stimuli that are
attended to enter awareness
c. All stimuli enter awareness
d. Only the sensory or physical characteristics of all stimuli enter awareness
36. Which of the following is true regarding the status of prototypes in the exemplar model of
categorization?
a. people do not use anything like a prototype
b. the prototype is abstracted at retrieval, if it is needed
c. the prototype is formed at encoding and is the only representation that is stored
d. while formed at encoding, the prototype does not help in the identification of new
category members
37. Words that receive _____ are remembered better than words that receive _____.
a. Deep processing: shallow processing
b. 10 exposure trials: 5 exposure trials
c. Non-emotional processing: emotional processing
d. More processing time: less processing time
Test A
7
38. Which of the fo llowing best characterizes the classical view of categorization?
a. A concept is a list of necessary and sufficient conditions to which objects are
compared in order to determine category membership
b. All examples of the concept are stored in memory and new exa mples are compared to
old examples to determine category membership
c. There is no feature or group of features that is essential for category membership
d. The likelihood of the distribution of features is assessed to determine category
membership
39. The finding that words that sound alike are harder to remember than words that do not sound
alike, is evidence for what type of representation in primary memory?
a. Semantic
b. Acoustic
c. Spatial
d. All of the above
40. Which of the following is an example of deep processing of the word cat?
a. Counting the number of letters in the word
b. Deciding whether the word cat fits into the following sentence, “The ______ barked at
the squirrel.”
c. Generating a rhyme for the word, for example “splat”
d. Determining the font in which the word “cat” is printed
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