Deck 8: Cognitive Processes

Question 1

A child is practicing scales on his piano. His mother can't wait until he learns some chords so that she can hear several notes together, rather than one note at a time. In psychological terms, the scales are comparable to ________ processes and the chords are comparable to ________ processes.

A) serial; parallel
B) parallel; serial
C) stimulus categorization; response selection
D) response selection; stimulus categorization

Answer 1

serial; parallel

Question 2

Normally, a person who is driving a car has no difficulty listening to music and simultaneously carrying on a conversation. If bad weather hits, however, the driver may turn off the music and ask passengers to be quiet in order to concentrate. It is most likely that the poor driving conditions

A) bring about a decrease in reaction time.
B) place additional demands on mental resources.
C) eliminate the use of controlled processes.
D) eliminate the need for response selection.

Answer 2

place additional demands on mental resources.

Question 3

A key assumption made by researchers who are studying mental processes is that

A) serial processing is a type of parallel processing.
B) the absolute time that mental processing takes is independent of the details of different tasks.
C) requiring additional mental tasks effectively reduces total reaction time.
D) individuals have limited resources that must be spread over different mental tasks.

Answer 3

individuals have limited resources that must be spread over different mental tasks.

Question 4

In a demonstration that is described in the textbook, people are asked to determine whether pairs of numbers are physically different. It is typically more difficult for people to make these judgments when the numbers are conceptually ________ because of ________ processes that interfere.

A) far apart; automatic
B) far apart; controlled
C) close together; controlled
D) close together; automatic

Question 5

The person next to you asks you a question that can have two different meanings. Psychologists who study language would say that in order to respond, you need more information about the

A) sentence meaning.
B) speaker's meaning.
C) audience design and sentence meaning.
D) person who is asking you the question.

Question 6

Sharing common ground with a conversational partner

A) tends to increase the occurrence of spoonerisms.
B) violates the cooperative principle.
C) facilitates communication.
D) typically results in miscommunication.

Question 7

When you enter the classroom, you notice the teacher has written the words "quantity," "quality," "relation," and "manner" on the blackboard. You should realize that the lecture topic is most likely

A) spoonerisms.
B) Grice's maxims.
C) spatial mental models.
D) functional fixedness.

Question 8

You know someone who likes to impress others with her knowledge of everything, although she has confessed to you that many times she makes up "facts" to win an argument. Now you should be aware that she violates Grice's maxim of

A) quantity.
B) manner.
C) relation.
D) quality.

Question 9

Studies of speech errors in the laboratory have led researchers to the conclusion that

A) the planning process in language production tends to stay one word ahead of the spoken utterance.
B) there may be mental processes that detect and edit potential speech errors.
C) errors involving blends of words are unlikely to occur.
D) spoonerisms are less likely when the error will result in a real word.

Question 10

A reader comes across the ambiguous word "bark" when reading a sentence, yet she has absolutely no difficulty understanding its intended meaning. Based on the research on lexical ambiguity, her ability to disambiguate the word most likely resulted from

A) the degree of emotional reactivity she experienced when she heard the word.
B) the frequency with which she has used the word in the past week.
C) contextual information, which is used to determine which definition is appropriate.
D) the pattern of eye movements that she makes.

Question 11

One of the findings from Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work with the apes Kanzi and Mulika is that they

A) can communicate through spoken language.
B) acquire the meaning for certain symbols spontaneously by observing others.
C) communicate only with each other and exclude other apes and humans.
D) cannot acquire the meaning of spoken words.

Question 12

A woman attends a lecture on the relationship between language and thought given by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. She would most likely hear them express the hypothesis that

A) there are cross-linguistic differences in thought.
B) language and thought are not related.
C) language processes are primarily learned, while thought processes are primarily inborn.
D) each member of a language community thinks very differently from every other member of that same community.

Question 13

A study that reviewed literature on the content of lies reported that, when compared to people who tell the truth, liars

A) provide fewer details in their accounts.
B) provide exact details in their accounts.
C) provide more details in their accounts.
D) resort to confabulation.

Question 14

In problem solving, the ________ refers to the incomplete information or unsatisfactory conditions you start with, and the ________ refers to the information or state of the world you hope to obtain.

A) set of operations; goal state
B) initial state; goal state
C) goal state; set of operations
D) set of operations; initial state

Question 15

Problems in which the initial state, the goal state, and the operations are all clearly specified are technically referred to as

A) well defined.
B) frames.
C) mental sets.
D) lower level.

Question 16

Social problems such as homelessness, poverty, lack of education, and violence are best described as

A) inductive.
B) deductive.
C) well defined.
D) ill defined.

Question 17

Suppose you are learning a complex dance routine but find all of the details overwhelming. If you want to use research on problem solving to improve your performance, you should

A) ignore the technical instruction and respond instinctively.
B) only practice what is easiest to perform.
C) practice each behavior separately until each component of the routine requires fewer resources.
D) use think-aloud protocols to give yourself insight into the task demands.

Question 18

An executive's chair has begun to wobble because a screw has gotten a little loose, so he calls the maintenance department. His inability to realize that a dime from his pocket could also be used as a screwdriver is an example of

A) the availability heuristic.
B) functional fixedness.
C) inductive reasoning.
D) the belief-bias effect.

Question 19

The "hiker puzzle," which is presented in the textbook, illustrates the point that

A) functional fixedness adversely affects problem solving.
B) the way a problem is represented will affect its difficulty.
C) people tend to judge as valid those conclusions with which they agree.
D) a mental set can increase the speed of problem solving.

Question 20

You enter the classroom just as the prior class is leaving. You notice several sentences on the blackboard: "All teachers work hard. I am a teacher. I work hard." You immediately recognize this as

A) inductive reasoning.
B) a heuristic.
C) a syllogism.
D) linguistic copresence.

Question 21

Suppose you are working on the Wason selection task. You are shown four cards and are testing a rule. Research suggests that you will do much better on this task if you

A) choose the cards that are the least obvious.
B) try to make your mind as blank as possible.
C) can apply your real-world knowledge.
D) are given a rule with which you are not familiar.

Question 22

Imagine driving on the Fourth of July to a city that you have never visited. There is no place to park and the traffic seems very heavy. As you look for a parking place, you see streams of people heading toward the main street and you see that it has been blocked off to traffic. Not certain of what to make of all this, you think a few seconds and determine that a parade is imminent. The process that you are using to come to your conclusion sounds most like

A) analogical problem solving.
B) the availability heuristic.
C) deductive reasoning.
D) inductive reasoning.

Question 23

Your teacher is trying to get the class to use analogical problem solving. When he gives you a problem to solve by analogical reasoning, you will increase your chances of being successful by

A) ignoring hints or clues that might have been provided.
B) using past experiences with similar problems.
C) making any analogies as abstract as possible.
D) not being distracted by the common underlying structure in problems.

Question 24

The process by which you form opinions, reach conclusions, and make critical evaluations of events and people is known as ________; the process of selecting and rejecting options is known as ________.

A) problem solving; framing
B) framing; problem solving
C) decision making; judgment
D) judgment; decision making

Question 25

After the opera, your companion asks you about your response to the performance. According to Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, if you are like most people, you will

A) develop a mental chart listing the pros and cons of the performance.
B) rely on heuristics to derive an opinion about the performance.
C) ask your friend what he thought before you make a judgment.
D) use a formal deductive reasoning procedure.

Question 26

A description of the nature of heuristics is LEAST likely to say that they

A) use informal rules of thumb.
B) provide shortcuts to solving problems.
C) reduce the complexity of making judgments.
D) eliminate the possibility of making errors.

Question 27

Since they began watching the news nightly on television, a couple has developed a fear of flying. They are convinced that many more people die in plane crashes than in automobile accidents. Their beliefs are most consistent with what would be predicted by

A) the representativeness heuristic.
B) an anchoring bias.
C) the availability heuristic.
D) functional fixedness.

Question 28

Which of the following could be attributed to the availability heuristic?

A) People overestimate the wealth of a person after hearing a ridiculously high estimate.
B) People are more likely to overestimate the age of males who have beards.
C) Whales are falsely thought to be fish because they look like fish.
D) Students who live on college campuses underestimate the average age of the general population.

Question 29

The availability heuristic tells us that if we wanted to impress people with the seriousness of the problem of homelessness in the world, we should

A) use metaphors to illustrate the number of homeless people.
B) dramatize the plight of a single family.
C) show pictures of shelters where the homeless go for help.
D) ask people to imagine themselves in the situation of a homeless person.

Question 30

A problem one faces when one uses the representativeness heuristic is that

A) it is counter to the use of inductive reasoning.
B) one is not using past information that may be useful.
C) judgments along the lines of similarity are generally unreasonable.
D) it may cause one to ignore other types of relevant information.

Question 31

Two students are taking a physics test. The optimistic student expects to get an A, while the pessimistic student would be happy with a C. When the test results are determined, it happens that they both received Bs. It is most likely that

A) the optimistic student will be happy with her grade.
B) the pessimistic student will be happy with her grade.
C) both students will be equally happy with their grades.
D) the pessimistic student will be disappointed because she will feel as though she could have received an A.

Question 32

When decisions turn out badly, one is likely to experience regret. Studies suggest that the categories in which people express the greatest regrets involve their decisions with respect to their ________ and ________.

A) dating life; marriage
B) vacations; restaurant choices
C) home life; routine chores
D) education; career

Question 33

One Saturday night, you and a friend go to the video store to rent a DVD. You browse the DVDs until you find one that strikes you as interesting. Your friend browses all the DVDs until she has convinced herself that she has found exactly the best one. In terms of decision making, you are a _____________and she is a(n) ______________.

A) satisficer; maximizer
B) decision-maker; procrastinator
C) maximizer; satisficer
D) decisive person; indecisive person

Question 34

If you are trying to decide which person to ask to go to see a movie with you, and you opt for the person who is "cute enough" for your own preferences, you would be described as a satisficer.

Question 35

The domain of ________ occupies the intersection of several different areas of focus in psychology, including perception, attention, language, and intelligence, among others.