THE CORRECT ANSWERS ARE MARKED WITH ASTERISKS

Exam 3 Practice

1. Ebbinghaus’s use of nonsense syllables to study memory led to the discovery that:

*a. the amount remembered depends on the time spent learning.

b. what is learned in one mood is the most easily retrieved in that same mood.

c. information that is not automatically processed is quickly forgotten.

d. our capacity for storing long-term memories is essentially unlimited.

2. Chunking refers to:

a. getting information into memory through the use of visual imagery.

b. the effortless processing of familiar information to get it into long-term memory storage.

c. the combined use of automatic and effortful processing.

*d. the organization of information into meaningful units.

3. When Sperling visually displayed three rows of three letters each for only 1/20th of a second, experimental participants:

a. recalled only half the letters because they had insufficient time to see all of them.

b. recalled only about seven of the letters due to memory storage limitations.

*c. recalled all the letters in any particular row when given a special recall signal 1/5th of a

second after the display disappeared.

d. could not recall any of the letters because the display was flashed too rapidly.

4. Our immediate short-term memory for new material is limited to roughly ____ units of information.

a. 3

*b. 7

c. 12

d. 24

5. Which of the following provides CONVINCING evidence that memories are permanently and accurately stored in long term memory, as discussed in class and in the text?

a. the detailed reports of childhood experiences given by adults under hypnosis

b. the recovery of painful unconscious childhood memories when in therapy

c. Penfield’s discovery that electrical stimulation of the brain activates vivid recollections of the

distant past

d. all of the above

*e. none of the above

6. Memory of facts is to ____ as memory of skills is to ____ .

a. semantic; episodic

*b. declarative memory; procedural memory

c. automatic processing; effortful processing

d. short-term memory; long-term memory

7. When Loftus and Palmer asked observers of a filmed car accident how fast the vehicles were going when they "smashed" into each other, the observers developed memories of the accident that:

a. omitted some of the most painful aspects of the event.

b. were more accurate than the memories of the subjects who had not been immediately

questioned about what they saw.

c. were influenced by whether or not Loftus and Palmer identified themselves as police officers.

*d. portrayed the event as more serious than it actually had been.

8. Professor Maslova has so many vivid memories of former students that she has difficulty remembering the names of new students. The professor’s difficulty best illustrates:

a. retroactive interference.

b. mood-congruent memory.

*c. proactive interference.

d. the spacing effect.

e. repression.

9. Damage to which brain structure seems to be critical in causing amnesic syndromes?

a. parietal lobe

*b. hippocampus

c. hypothalamus

d. thalamus

10. The duration of memories in sensory memory is approximately:

*a. 1/2 to 1 second

b. 10 seconds

c. 5 minutes

d. 30 minutes

11. In the experiment by Loftus (1992) discussed in class, students wrote to their siblings asking them to describe in detail 5 events from their childhood, one of which did not actually happen. Loftus found that the siblings :

a. were easily able to detect the "false" event as something that never happened.

b. at first, did not recognize the "false" event, but did so when told that one event in the list had

not really happened.

*c. wrote detailed descriptions of the "false" event and resisted the idea that it never really

happened.

d. had few accurate memories for any of the events.

12. An increase in a synapse’s firing potential after brief, rapid stimulation is called:

a. priming

b. neural encoding

*c. long-term potentiation

d. implicit memory storage

e. neural modulatory memory

13. Because she believes that boys are naughtier than girls, Mrs. Hill, a second-grade teacher, watches boys more closely than girls for any signs of misbehavior. Mrs. Hill’s surveillance strategy best illustrates:

a. the availability heuristic.

*b. the confirmation bias.

c. functional fixedness.

d. the representative heuristic.

e. the framing effect.

14. The tendency to conclude that a person who likes to read poetry is more likely to be a college professor of classics than a construction worker illustrates the use of:

a. the availability heuristic.

b. the confirmation bias.

c. the framing effect.

*d. the representative heuristic.

e. belief perseverance.

15. Phonemes are:

a. the best examples of particular categories of objects.

*b. the smallest distinctive sound units of a language.

c. rules for combining words into grammatically correct sentences.

d. the smallest speech units that carry meaning.

16. A European visitor to the United States asked a taxi driver, "Can you please a ride to the airport give me?" This visitor has apparently not yet mastered the ____ of the English language.

a. semantics

b. phonemes

*c. syntax

d. morphemes

17. As noted in the class lecture, children begin to show an understanding of syntax during the ____ stage of language acquisition.

a. babbling.

*b. two-word

c. three-word

d. full grammatical competence

18. Research on the language capabilities of apes indicates that they CANNOT:

a. learn the meanings of signs in a sign language.

b. acquire a vocabulary of more than a dozen signs.

c. use signs to communicate with their own species.

*d. grammatically order language symbols as well as most 3-year-old human children.

e. do any of the above.

19. Which of the following is NOT a property of ape language, as discussed in class?

*a. compositional

b. two-level system

c. finite number of possible utterances

d. all of the above are properties of ape language

20. According to the class lecture, children typically move beyond the two-word stage and begin to produce full-fledged sentences around ____ months of age.

a. 12

*b. 24

c. 40

d. 48

21. After suffering a stroke, John speaks very slowly, with great effort, and uses mostly nouns and verbs. John is most likely suffering from:

a. hysteria

b. retrograde amnesia

c. Wernicke’s aphasia

*d. Broca’s aphasia

e. alexia

22. Fixed patterns of behavior characteristic of a species and developed without practice are called:

a. intrinsic motives

b. drives

*c. instincts

d. extrinsic motives

e. incentives

23. According to Maslow, our need for ____ must be met before we are prompted to satisfy our need for ____ .

*a. food; love

b. self-esteem; economic security

c. self-actualization; economic security

d. political freedom; economic security

e. religious freedom; adequate housing

24. Dr. Miles electrically stimulates the ventromedial hypothalamus of a well-fed rat. This procedure is most likely to:

a. cause the rat to begin eating.

b. decrease the rat’s rate of metabolism.

c. facilitate conversion of the rat’s blood glucose to fat.

d. permanently lower the rat’s set point.

*e. cause the rat to stop eating.

25. If Mary Ann is a typical female college student, it is most probable that she:

a. thinks she weighs less than she would like to.

b. thinks she weighs less than what men actually prefer her to weigh.

c. would like to weigh more than what men actually prefer her to weigh.

*d. thinks men prefer her to weigh less than they really do.

e. thinks men prefer her to weigh less than she would like to weigh.

26. Research on sex hormones and human sexual behavior indicates that:

a. the sexual desire of human females is much higher at the time of ovulation than at other times

in the menstrual cycle.

*b. adult males who suffer castration experience a gradual decline in their ability to perform

sexually.

c. male sex offenders typically have lower-than-normal testosterone levels.

d. all of the above are true.

27. The brain structure that detects sex hormone levels and activates sexual arousal is the:

a. cerebellum.

b. amygdala.

*c. hypothalamus.

d. medulla.

e. thalamus.

28. As discussed in class, a female rat who has had its ovaries removed that receives an injection of testosterone will most likely exhibit:

a. no sexual behavior.

*b. male sexual behavior.

c. female sexual behavior.

d. both male and female sexual behavior.

29. People who are high in achievement motivation prefer ____ tasks; people who are low in achievement motivation prefer ____ tasks.

NOT ON THE EXAM

a. very difficult; very easy

b. moderately difficult; moderately easy

c. very easy or moderately difficult; very difficult

d. very difficult or very easy; moderately difficult

30. As discussed in class, studies of identical twins who were adopted at birth and reared in different environments indicate that:

a. the twin’s weight most closely correlates with the weights or his/her adopted family members.

*b. the twin’s weight most closely correlates with the weights of his/her biological family

members.

c. there are only small correlations between the weight of the twin and both the adopted and

biological family members.

31. Which of the following was NOT listed in the lecture as a typical symptom of anorexia nervosa?

a. avoidance of sexual activity

*b. decrease in activity level

c. weight loss

d. decrease in sleep

e. cessation of menstruation

32. What type of disorder is characterized by an acquired problem in reading?

a. aphasia

b. agraphia

*c. alexia

d. apraxia

33. Which of the following is NOT one of the inherited factors determining a person’s weight, as discussed in class?

a. level of thermogenesis

b. number of fat cells you are born with

*c. activity level of the lateral hypothalamus

d. amount of lipoprotein lipase (LPL) that converts circulating fat into stored fat