Exam 8: Cognition and Language

Your visual processing becomes inactive during

When people are asked how many animals of each species Moses took on the ark, many people answer "two" instead of noting that Noah, not Moses, was the ark-maker. This error has been interpreted in terms of

When you think about a particular concept

The presentation of previous stimuli that facilitates one to think of a certain object or concept is called?

The "word superiority effect" is the observation that on the average,

A saccade is

Students are told that "2-4-6" is one example of a rule; they are asked to determine what the rule is. Many students assume the rule is "three consecutive even numbers" and fail to check whether 1-3-5 is also an example of the rule, or even 1-10-11. What mistake in reasoning have they made?

An expert chess player and a beginner both look at a picture of chess pieces arranged on a board in a random manner. Then they try to draw that position from memory. Which one (if either) will remember better, and why?

Some people believe Friday the 13th is unlucky because they can remember times when they had bad experiences on that day but tend to forget times when nothing bad happened. Their reasoning is an example of illusory correlations. It is also an example of the use of

According to the concept of prototypes, how do we decide whether an item belongs to a particular category?

You are listening to someone speak, and one of the words they say at the beginning of a sentence is muffled. The sounds you hear form a word that sounds halfway between "dent" and "tent." How will you interpret what you heard?

It is clear that children as young as 2 or 3 years old are

At least under certain circumstances, an expert chess player can memorize the positions of chess pieces on a board more rapidly and more accurately than a beginning chess player can. Why?

People can often decide whether something is a "vehicle" even though they cannot clearly define the category "vehicles". The fact that they do so tends to support the concept of

Compared with normal readers, speed readers

Research on reading indicates that we typically read short, familiar words

When we read, we generally are able to read the letter we are focused on, plus __________ characters to the left and __________ characters to the right.

If you strongly associate LION with TIGER, then hearing the word LION will temporarily increase your speed and accuracy of seeing or hearing the word TIGER. The type of "priming" is evidence in favor of the idea of

In one study experts made predictions of U.S. and world politics over the next several years. How accurate were their predictions, compared to the predictions the general public might make, and how confident were they in their predictions?

In an experiment subjects heard a tape-recorded sound that sounded halfway between "dent" and "tent." For which of the sentences below (if any) would the subjects be equally likely to report either "DENT" or "TENT"?