Deck 7: Memory

Question 1

Memory is defined as the capacity to

A) visualize.
B) feel and emote.
C) perceive events.
D) encode, store, and retrieve information.

Answer 1

encode, store, and retrieve information.

Question 2

Which of the following errors is most likely to be the result of production compilation?

A) When asked for the capitol of California, you mistakenly say "San Francisco."
B) You need to stop at the post office, but you forget as you drive your normal route home from school.
C) After taking a course in Chinese, you forget the rule for future perfect tense in Russian.
D) You find it difficult to learn your lines for an off-Broadway play.

Answer 2

You need to stop at the post office, but you forget as you drive your normal route home from school.

Question 3

Being able to use knowledge at some later time requires the operation of three mental processes. Which of the following is NOT considered to be one of these processes?

A) encoding
B) recoding
C) storage
D) retrieval

Answer 3

recoding

Question 4

In George Sperling's classic research on iconic memory, participants were presented with arrays of three rows of letters and numbers. In the ________ procedure, they tried to recall as many of the items in the display as possible. In the ________ procedure, they were required to report only one row.

A) mnemonic; savings
B) left-brain; right-brain
C) holistic; analytic
D) whole-report; partial-report

Question 5

A middle-aged relative claims that he has "photographic memory." Based on the research, you can tell him that

A) this type of memory ability is actually quite rare in adults.
B) he is more likely to have eidetic imagery.
C) this type of memory ability is actually not at all rare in adults.
D) if he has photographic memory, he probably lacks iconic memory.

Question 6

As part of a classroom demonstration, your teacher is reading you a list of digits to test your memory span. If you are like most individuals, you will probably recall somewhere in the range of ________ items.

A) one to two
B) three to five
C) five to nine
D) ten to twenty

Question 7

A student has taken a summer job answering telephone calls for sales orders. He quickly learns that it is pretty easy to remember a customer's five-digit ZIP code and seven-digit phone number, but it is much more difficult to keep track of a sixteen-digit credit card number. According to the conclusions of researcher George Miller, the student is having trouble with longer strings of numbers because

A) the capacity of iconic memory is quite limited.
B) memory span covers only five to nine items.
C) memory span does not exist.
D) the information is staying in his sensory memory.

Question 8

According to research discussed in your textbook, without rehearsal we may start losing information to which we have just been exposed after as few as ________ seconds, and we may have lost most of those same data by about ________ seconds after exposure.

A) 1; 5
B) 1; 12
C) 3; 18
D) 5; 25

Question 9

The textbook describes a famous research participant, S.F., who was able to memorize eighty-four digits, though his memory for letters was still about average. One lesson to be learned from this study is that

A) people like S.F. are unique, and the strategies used by S.F. are not applicable to the rest of us.
B) you, too, can structure information as S.F. did, but the structure must be similar to the one used by S.F.
C) information can only be structured only if it is linked to rules, meaning, or codes in long-term memory.
D) you, too, can structure information according to its personal meaning to you.

Question 10

Alan Baddeley and his colleagues have provided evidence that each of the following is a component of working memory EXCEPT for the

A) phonological loop.
B) navigational pilot.
C) visuospatial sketchpad.
D) central executive.

Question 11

If someone were to ask you how many windows there are in your house, you might form a mental picture of your house in order to answer the question. According to the view suggested by Alan Baddeley, the ________ component of working memory would be used to form the mental image.

A) central executive
B) navigational pilot
C) visuospatial sketchpad
D) phonological loop

Question 12

Deciding which portions of a psychology lecture to pay attention to is part of the ________ component of working memory.

A) phonological loop
B) navigational pilot
C) visuospatial sketchpad
D) central executive

Question 13

Endel Tulving first proposed the distinction in declarative memory between ________ memory.

A) episodic and semantic
B) iconic and echoic
C) implicit and explicit
D) semantic and procedural

Question 14

A student is taking a history test. One of the questions asks for the name of the founder of the American Red Cross. She is sure that she knows the name, but cannot retrieve it from memory. A useful strategy for her would be to

A) make an exhaustive list of all of the names that she knows.
B) try to remember the context in which she learned the name.
C) move on quickly to the next item on the test.
D) write the first name that she can think of, even if she is not sure it is correct.

Question 15

A student has a test coming up. Based on the principle of encoding specificity, it would be best for the student to study the classroom material

A) in as distinctive a setting as possible.
B) as he normally does, listening to music, eating snacks, and lying in bed.
C) under conditions that will be similar to those under which he will be tested.
D) by repeating the material in the same order during each study session.

Question 16

In a study that is mentioned in the textbook, scuba divers learned lists of words while they were either on a beach or under water. When tested for retention of those words, the divers did better recalling the words learned if they did so while they were

A) under water.
B) on the beach.
C) under water, when the words had been learned under water.
D) under water, even when the words had been learned on the beach.

Question 17

Memory theorists have suggested that primacy and recency effects are best explained in terms of

A) motivation.
B) distinctiveness.
C) attention.
D) proportionality.

Question 18

Based on what you know about the serial position effect and distinctiveness, in preparing for the test on this chapter, you should have spent

A) more time studying the beginning of the chapter, and tried to make it distinctive from other parts of the chapter.
B) more time studying the middle of the chapter, and tried to make it distinctive from other parts of the chapter.
C) more time studying the end of the chapter, and tried to make it distinctive from other parts of the chapter.
D) equal amounts of time on each part of the chapter, and tried to minimize the distinctiveness of each from the other parts of the chapter.

Question 19

A researcher is doing a study of memory. When it comes time for assessing what has been remembered, the researcher should keep in mind that

A) the depth of processing will depend on the type of judgments participants are asked to make about experimental materials.
B) any level of processing will give approximately the same results.
C) implicit memory cannot be measured.
D) tests for implicit and explicit memory tend to obtain similar results.

Question 20

Imagine that you are participating in a study of implicit memory. If the researcher is using a word ________ task in order to determine whether you will respond with the word "missile," then you will be shown the letters ________ as the proper stimulus.

A) stem completion; "leismsi"
B) identification; "mis____"
C) fragment completion; "__ss__e"
D) stem completion; "mis___"

Question 21

Which of the following is an example of proactive interference?

A) You call your new boyfriend by your old boyfriend's name.
B) You call your old girlfriend by your new girlfriend's name.
C) After learning Spanish, you find it difficult to remember your previously-learned Italian verbs.
D) After learning how to play racquetball, you find your old squash stroke is ruined.

Question 22

Which of the following is an example of retroactive interference?

A) Your teacher finds it harder each year to learn and remember student names.
B) Your ability to play the piano makes it difficult to learn and remember how to strike the keys on a harpsichord.
C) Now that you have learned your new locker combination, you can't remember the old one.
D) Since you have moved, it has been difficult to remember your new ZIP code.

Question 23

Imagine that you are fourth in line to give a short speech in your class this morning. If the "next-in-line" effect is present, you can predict that you will

A) remember very little about the first speech.
B) remember very little about the speech that precedes your speech.
C) remember very little about the speeches that follow your speech.
D) have equal recollection of the three speeches given while in line that morning.

Question 24

Metamemory research has shown that an individual's "feelings-of-knowing"

A) are not related to familiarity with the retrieval cue.
B) can be fairly accurate.
C) are no more accurate than would be expected by chance.
D) are an example of intuition and a relatively unreliable sensation.

Question 25

Suppose you were asked to name the composer of the "Maple Leaf Rag." You have prior familiarity with the "Maple Leaf Rag" so you think that you will be able to recognize the correct alternative when given multiple choices. This can be explained on the basis of

A) accessibility hypothesis.
B) linguistic relativity hypothesis.
C) judgment of learning.
D) peg-word method.

Question 26

A child thinks of a restaurant as a place where you go when you are hungry, where you order your food at a counter, Mommy pays for it before you get it, and where you play in the playground after eating. This child's mental representation of a restaurant, which is likely to change as she gets older, is an example of a(n)

A) schema.
B) engram.
C) prototype.
D) memory hierarchy.

Question 27

Imagine that you and a friend have witnessed an accident. Afterwards, while discussing what was seen, your friend introduces some inaccurate information into his description of the events. If you are like many of the participants in research on eyewitness memory, when questioned at some future date,

A) both you and your friend will have little memory of the accident.
B) your memory is likely to be accurate and your friend's memory will be inaccurate.
C) your friend's memory is likely to be more accurate than your memory.
D) your memory is likely to be affected by your friend's inaccurate observations.

Question 28

According to the research discussed in your textbook, which of the following strategies would be most effective at helping you learn important information?

A) studying the material and then immediately taking some sort of test
B) studying the material repeatedly over time, and then taking a test at a future date
C) taking a test, then studying the incorrect answers, and then taking a test again
D) studying in a group with classmates and then doing a presentation on the material to be retained

Question 29

Lashley's inability to determine where the memory trace is located may be due to the fact that

A) he did not search deeply enough into the brain, looking instead at the cortex.
B) even simple situations involve a variety of types of memory.
C) he was using rats as participants rather than humans.
D) he chose too simple a measure of learning.

Question 30

Neuroscientists now believe that memory for complex sets of information is found in ________ parts of the neural system, and memory for particular types of knowledge is localized in ________ regions of the brain.

A) many; many
B) limited; specific
C) many; specific
D) limited; many

Question 31

As part of a classroom presentation, a student is giving a true-false test to your class on the topic of Alzheimer's disease. Which of the following do you know to be FALSE?

A) The disease affects more than 50 percent of those over 55 years of age.
B) In the early stages, the only observable symptom may be memory impairment.
C) The symptoms of Alzheimer's disease were first described in 1906.
D) The brains of those who have died with Alzheimer's disease had unusual tangles called plaques in them.

Question 32

In a study of how memory processes unfold over time, as described in the textbook, a team of researchers asked participants to retrieve autobiographical memories while undergoing fMRI scans. Researchers found that

A) the same brain areas that are most active during encoding are most active during retrieval.
B) as elaboration takes place, areas responsible for encoding become more and more active than those for retrieval.
C) early in the process, before participants elaborated their memories, structures like the hippocampus were active.
D) psychological models of encoding and retrieval apparently are unrelated to processes in the brain.

Question 33

Word stem completion tasks are used to assess implicit memory.

Question 34

Trying to memorize a list of all of the presidents of the United States is an example of an implicit use of memory.

Question 35

The phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, the central executive, and the episodic buffer are four components of ________.