Cognitive Psychology Revision 1

Prospective memory refers to:

• Remembering to carry out some intended action in the absence of any explicit reminder to do so

• Remembering to do something in the future

• Both A and B

• Only B

Dismukes and Nowinski (2006) demonstrated that in airline pilots:

• 74/75 incidents due to retrospective memory failures

• 74/75 incidents due to prospective memory failure

• 54/75 incidents due to retrospective memory failure

• 54/75 incidents due to prospective memory failure

Time based prospective memory refers to:

• Remembering to perform an action in appropriate circumstances

• Remembering to perform an action at a particular time

• Remembering to perform an action at a particular place

• None of the above

Dismukes and Nowinski (2006) found that pilots were most likely to have prospective memory failure:

• During takeoff

• During landing

• When preparing for flight

• When interrupted

In his famous experiment investigating free will, what did Libet (1985) use the Readiness Potential in the ERP to measure?

• Objective timing of the intention to act

• Subjective timing of the will to act

• Subjective timing of the action

• Objective timing of the action

Libet (1985) found that electrical activity in the motor cortex precedes the will to act by around half a second. How did he interpret this observation?

• Humans can make free choices because the entire decision-making process is played out in the brain

• Humans only feel like their choices are free, but the brain makes all the decisions before the feeling to act

• Brain activity can tell us nothing about the freedom of the will

• The motor cortex is responsible for planning actions as well as performing them

According to Libet (1985), a possible barrier to participants making free choices in his experiment was that recording the Readiness Potential requires averaging the data from the EEG over many trials. Why was this a barrier to freedom?

• Most participants do not understand how EEG works, so their decisions might have been biased by being connected to the hardware

• Some of the recordings might not have worked properly, so the average might have been wrong

• The task is very repetitive, so participants might end up performing it in an automatic way rather than freely deciding to act on every trial

• Nobody really knows what the Readiness Potential is a mesure of, so it is very difficult to interpret correctly

Is inhibition of an action always a conscious act of free will?

• Yes, inhibition training helps people to make better use of this ability

• Yes, inhibition is a cognitive control process performed by the frontal lobes

• No, inhibition is always performed unconsciously

• No, sometimes inhibition can be performed automatically/unconsciously

A bus driver says something that you don't quite catch. As you walk up the aisle, you realise they asked to to go back and re-scan your card. You were assisted by:

• Echoic memory

• Working memory

• Iconic memory

• Phonological memory

Which of these tasks involves only simple storage of information, with no manipulation?

• Reading span

• Backwards digit span

• Operation span

• Digit span