WorksheetsCOG PSY TEST
Total questions: 87
Worksheet time: 46mins
The student of mental activity and thinking, broadly conceived, is called _________.
a. cognitive science
b. mind science
c. cognitive studies
d. mind studies
When did the cognitive revolution occur?
a. early 1970s
b. late 1950s
c. late 1850s
d. mid-1940s
Memory does NOT involve __________.
a. a mental storage system
b. acquiring information
c. complex decision making
d. mental processing
The mental process of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval is __________.
a. cognition
b. memory
c. planning
d. forecasting
Cognition does NOT involve __________.
a. reflexes
b. mental activities
c. perceiving
d. understanding
The collection of mental processes and activities used in perceiving, remembering, thinking, and understanding is __________.
a. operations
b. mentalism
c. cognition
d. computational neuroscience
People first began wondering about how the mind worked __________.
a. after the cognitive revolution
b. after the Aristotle
c. after Descartes
d. before any of these people or events
Reductionism is __________.
a. the method in which observers are carefully trained to report on inner sensations and experiences.
b. the building blocks underlying the structure of the brain.
c. the branch of experimental psychology that deals with human participants as they learn verbal materials, e.g., items or stimuli composed of letters and/or words.
d. attempting to understand a complex event by breaking the event down into its components.
Ecological validity means __________.
a. the amount of experimental control the experimenter has over the important manipulations.
b. acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval.
c. attempting to break down complex events by breaking them down into their components.
d. representative of the real world.
If we hear a complaint that experimental psychology research lacks ecological validity, the person is complaining that __________.
a. the research is not representative of real-world situations.
b. the research lacks sufficient precision.
c. the research lacks an appropriate comparison group.
d. we are attempting to understand complex phenomena by breaking them down
into their components.
If something is generalizable to real-world situations, it __________.
a. is pragmatic
b. acquires an air of confidence
c. has ecological validity
d. no longer is basic science
A person trying to understand complex events by breaking them down into their components is using __________.
a. fragmentation
b. reductionism
c. a parsing approach
d. distillation
Who said, “I think, therefore I am”?
a. Rene Descartes
b. William James
c. Aristotle
d. Immanuel Kant
Empirical observations are those that __________.
a. rely on observation, experimentation, or measurement.
b. characterize an entire set of research data.
c. are conducted in a field setting outside the laboratory.
d. compare people of different ages at a given moment in time.
The philosophy that observation is to be the basis for much of science is __________.
a. empiricism
b. rationalism
c. structuralism
d. functionalism
Which of the following is NOT true?
a. Wundt established the first psychological laboratory.
b. Wundt’s student Titchner advocated the approach known as structuralism.
c. Wundt believed strongly that the proper topic for psychology was “conscious processes and immediate experience.”
d. Wundt advocated the approach known as functionalism.
Who is credited with being the first experimental psychologist?
a. Wilhelm Wundt
b. William James
c. Edward Titchener
d. John Watson
Radical empiricists believe that the mind starts out as a __________.
a. cogito blanco
b. tabula rasa
c. scientia est potestas
d. semper fideles
Many of the topics of Wundt’s research would fall under what we now label as ________ psychology.
a. clinical
b. counseling
c. industrial/organizational
d. cognitive
Titchener is most strongly associated with __________.
a. structuralism
b. functionalism
c. the cognitive revolution
d. Gestalt psychology
Hermann Ebbinghaus was the first person to systematically study __________.
a. perception
b. attention
c. problem solving
d. memory
Edward Titchener believed __________.
a. that nothing worthwhile would come of studying mental processes.
b. that mental illness, educational applications, and social psychology were “impure” because they could not be studied using introspection.
c. that the appropriate goal for psychology was the objective assessment of association formation.
d. that the functions of consciousness, rather than its structure, were of interest.
Which is true of Ebbinghaus?
a. He was interested in memory.
b. He was interested in perception.
c. He was interested in reasoning.
d. He was interested in studying introspection.
Most associated with the method of savings is __________.
a. Hermann von Ebbinghaus
b. William James
c. Wilhelm Wundt
d. B.F. Skinner
William James believed __________.
a. that nothing worthwhile would come of studying mental processes.
b. that mental illness, educational applications, and social psychology were “impure” because they could not be studied with introspective methods.
c. that the appropriate goal for psychology was the objective assessment of association formation.
d. that the functions of consciousness, rather than its structure, were of interest.
An approach that asks the questions “What is it for?” and “How does it adapt?” is __________.
a. functionalism
b. structuralism
c. empiricism
d. reductionism
William James’s research output was __________.
a. high
b. low
c. skewed
d. artificial
Behaviorism had its strongest impact __________.
a. on the popular press
b. in clinical treatments
c. in America
d. with education
How do some psychologists describe the transition from behaviorism to cognitivism?
a. a revolution
b. a regression
c. a simple relabeling
d. a tragedy
Which is NOT a characteristic of behaviorism?
a. scientific study of behavior
b. focus on observable, quantifiable behavior
c. antimentalist
d. the first major school of thought in experimental psychology
The behaviorist manifesto is associated with __________.
a. Hull
b. Watson
c. Skinner
d. Tolman
__________ believed that observable, quantifiable behavior is the proper topic of psychology, not the fuzzy and unscientific concepts of thoughts, mind, and consciousness.
a. Wundt
b. Watson
c. Ebbinghaus
d. James
Neobehaviorism differs from behaviorism in __________.
a. allowing the scientific study of observable behavior.
b. allowing introspective methodologies.
c. incorporating psychophysiological measures.
d. allowing unobserved mediating variables.
Which was NOT a reason for the rise to dominance of behaviorism?
a. seemingly endless debates within structuralism regarding “appropriate” interpretation
b. physics envy
c. success in modeling learning
d. The tabula rasa position provided a superior account for species-specific behaviors.
Which was NOT a reason for the rise to dominance of behaviorism?
a. seemingly endless debates within structuralism regarding “appropriate” interpretation
b. physics envy
c. success in modeling learning
d. The tabula rasa position provided a superior account for species-specific behaviors.
According to behaviorists and neobehaviorists, the ultimate purpose of research on learning was to understand __________.
a. the building blocks of conscious experience
b. the acquisition of behavior by conditioning
c. performance, rather than learning
d. memory, rather than cognition
Which of the following was NOT a challenge to the behaviorist approach?
a. language
b. attention
c. vigilance
d. S-R learning
Which of the following does NOT challenge a pure behaviorist perspective?
a. demonstrated effects of attention
b. the role of vigilance in a skilled performance task
c. language
d. incorporating Pavlov’s work on classical conditioning
What was a problem with traditional behaviorism as revealed to experimental psychologists doing work during World War II?
a. Most of the Army and Navy had to deal with people, not rats.
b. Much longer retention periods of knowledge were involved.
c. It did not address practical concerns, such as vigilance.
d. The principles of behaviorism were all shown to be incorrect.
Which of the following was an outgrowth of Ebbinghaus’s work on memory?
a. B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism
b. verbal learning theorists
c. researchers studying operant conditioning
d. Gestalt psychology
One of the legacies of verbal learning was that __________.
a. it reinforced the dominant behaviorist ideals about mental activity.
b. it provided a way to study mental processes in an objective manner.
c. no one could find any theoretical basis for the work.
d. an effective counterweight to research on verbal behavior was found.
__________ wrote a review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior. This review clearly illustrated the shortcomings of the behaviorist account of language.
a. Descartes
b. James
c. Watson
d. Chomsky
The cognitive manifesto is associated with __________.
a. Thorndike
b. Chomsky
c. Sperling
d. Bartlett
The essence of Chomsky’s review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior book was that __________.
a. Skinner failed to supply an adequate computer model of verbal learning.
b. Skinner relied too heavily on animal models.
c. Skinner failed to consider the role of attention.
d. Skinner’s work was a mere terminological revision, in which terms borrowed from the laboratory were used in the full vagueness of their ordinary usage.
Which of the following is a common analogy used by cognitive psychologists to describe or characterize how people think?
a. attention
b. digital computer
c. context
d. structuralist perspective
Which of the following is a central analogy of cognitive psychology?
a. the flowchart
b. the building blocks underlying the structure of the brain
c. the whole is greater than the sum of the parts: the importance of context
h. the digital computer
In response to a difficult question, a person is likely to respond more slowly than if an easy question had been asked. In terms of the overall response times, the difficult question would yield __________.
a. response times with lower numbers
b. response times with higher numbers
c. response times would not differ
d. not enough information has been provided
In response to an easy question, a person is likely to answer quicker than if a hard question was asked. With a sufficiently powerful experiment, it is likely that a statistical analysis would reveal that __________.
a. response times would be lower for difficult questions than for easy questions.
b. response times would be higher for difficult questions than for easy questions.
c. response times would not differ for easy and difficult questions.
d. not enough information has been provided.
How many milliseconds in a second?
a. 1/100
b. 10
c. 100
d. 1000
What is a good means of assessing how much a person remembers from something they read earlier?
a. response time
b. accuracy
c. verbal reports
d. content analysis
What type of information is useful in identifying instances in which a person has distorted memory?
a. intrusions rather than accuracy
b. strictly accuracy
c. skewed response times
d. formative interference
The Atkinson & Shiffrin model provides a useful summary of overall cognitive function. Their model is normally referred to as __________.
a. the standard model
b. a connectionist model
c. a process model
d. a channel capacity model
Which of the following is NOT part of the “standard theory”?
a. long-term memory
b. sensory register
c. STM/working memory
d. explicit memory
In cognition, STM almost always refers to __________.
a. sensory terminal memory
b. short-term memory
c. salience to me
d. standard theory of memory
The act of taking in information and converting it to a usable mental form is __________.
a. STM
b. connectionism
c. retrieval
d. encoding
What is a way of making a theory more explicit about how cognition proceeds during a task?
a. a process model
b. a connectionist model
c. a word decision task
d. a priming task
The word frequency effect illustrates __________.
a. serial exhaustive processing of the memory set
b. congruency effects
c. the fact that common words produce larger response times
d. the fact that common words produce smaller response times
Accounts positing independent nonoverlapping stages of processing are referred to as __________.
a. protocol models
b. stage models
c. parallel processing models
d. conceptually driven processing models
Which of the following is NOT an assumption of a strict serial processing approach?
a. independent and nonoverlapping stages
b. sequential stages of processing
c. Response times indicate processing duration.
d. parallel processing
The sentence “I do not have to attend to what the cat will eat tomorrow” includes ten occurrences of the letter T. The Radvansky and Ashcraft text argues that people’s difficulties in finding all of the Ts reflects __________.
a. channel capacity
b. a failure to read the book
c. top-down processing
d. connectionist modeling
How can context influence processing?
a. It can guide the flow of action.
b. There are no clear influences.
c. By situating the information.
d. Through a process of content restriction.
In terms of the flow of information processing, ___________ is an influence of environmental factors on thought, whereas ____________ is an influence of prior conceptions or expectations on thought.
a. bottom-up processing; top-down processing
b. top-down processing; bottom-up processing
c. reality-based processing; imagination-based processing
d. imagination-based processing; reality-based processing
What of the following is NOT a discipline in cognitive science?
a. computer science
b. anthropology
c. architecture
d. philosophy
What is the name for the larger discipline that cognitive psychology is a part of, and that also includes disciplines like computer science, anthropology, and philosophy?
a. mind science
b. cognitive science
c. mental matters
d. arts and science
What is the term used for the regulation of cognitive resources?
a. systemization
b. mental management
c. cerebral guidance
d. attention
What theme of the textbook takes the assumption that cognition functions in a way to capture the ways in which people interact with the world?
a. embodiment
b. metacognition
c. representation
d. conceptually driven processing
Our awareness of our own cognition and knowledge and insight into its workings is __________.
a. response time
b. attention
c. self-actualization
d. metacognition
A cognitive revolution is part of our day-to-day existence (e.g., whenever we change our minds).
TRUE
FALSE
Wundt established the first psychological laboratory.
TRUE
FALSE
Wundt believed strongly that the proper topic for psychology was “conscious processes and immediate
experience.”
TRUE
FALSE
Reductionism was the first major psychological approach
TRUE
FALSE
Overall, behaviorism contributed in a positive manner to the development of many tools we use when
investigating topics in cognitive psychology.
TRUE
FALSE
The study of aggression was a major contributor to the paradigm shift away from behaviorism.
TRUE
FALSE
The information-processing approach is a general model of human memory and cognitive systems.
TRUE
FALSE
The concept of channel capacity, while important for information processing, is not as relevant for
cognitive psychology.
TRUE
FALSE
The basic idea behinds Donder’s use of response times is that response time reflects the difficulty of mental processes.
TRUE
FALSE
The “standard model of memory” refers to an information-processing model of human cognition
TRUE
FALSE
The Atkinson & Shiffrin model (1968, 1971) provides a useful summary of overall cognitive function.
TRUE
FALSE
Low-frequency words produce faster RTs than high-frequency words.
TRUE
FALSE
The study of cognition is more fruitful when considered in the context of an understanding of neuroscience.
TRUE
FALSE
A course in cognitive psychology is more likely to tell you about common performance limitations than is a
course in psychopathology of children or with a specialization in abnormal psychology.
TRUE
FALSE
The interdisciplinary development of cognitive psychology is called (a) .
(a) is the mental processes of acquiring and retaining information for later retrieval and the mental
storage system that enables the processes of encoding, storage, and retrieval.
(a) is the scientific study of human memory and mental processes, including such activities as
perceiving, remembering, using language, reasoning, and problem solving.
Identify a key assumption of the analysis of response time data.
(a)
What are the areas, other than psychology, that fall under the rubric of cognitive science?
a. Linguistics, Anthropology, and Philosophy
b. Computer Science
c. Neuroscience
d. All of the Above
What are the three main memory stores in the standard model of memory?
(a)
