Deck 6: Section 4: Memory

Question 1

During a test of his short-term memory, Tommy was given lists of items to remember. He found the task to be much easier if he grouped the items according to whether they were animals, plants, minerals, and so on. Tommy is using a memory aid called:

A)clustering.
B)the self-referencing technique.
C)chunking.
D)massed practice.

Answer 1

chunking.

Question 2

According to Table 6.3 (Factors Contributing to False Memories) in your textbook, which of the following is NOT one of the factors that contributes to false memories?

A)adolescent egocentrism
B)the misinformation effect
C)source confusion
D)imagination inflation

Answer 2

adolescent egocentrism

Question 3

Professor Sheehan spent most of the class session lecturing on different aspects of memory and ended by reminding her students of the test at the next class session. After her students had shuffled out of the classroom, Professor Sheehan noticed a student's cellphone on a desk toward the back of the classroom. The student forgetting his cellphone is an everyday example of _____ that is most probably due to _____.

A)inattentional blindness; source amnesia
B)source amnesia; retrieval cue failure
C)prospective memory; retrieval cue failure
D)absentmindedness; encoding failure

Answer 3

absentmindedness; encoding failure

Question 4

Blane vividly remembers the day he attended Game 6 of the World Series. He remembers what he was wearing, where he parked, what he ate, how many hits each team had, and the celebration that ensued after his favorite team won. Blane's memory of this event is stored in his _____ memory.

A)conscious
B)working
C)long-term
D)sensory

Question 5

Why did Karl Lashley fail to uncover the area of the rat's brain in which the memory trace of the maze was stored or located?

A)Memory could not be studied with the relatively crude and simplistic methods that Lashley used in the early 1900s.
B)A rat's memory for maze running is a classically conditioned response and is not localized in one area of the brain, such as the cortex or cerebellum.
C)Lashley was looking in the cerebral cortex for the memory trace, when he should have been looking in the cerebellum.
D)A rat's memory for maze running is not a single memory but a complex set of interrelated memories involving information from multiple senses and is distributed throughout the brain and not localized in the cortex.

Question 6

The process of transforming information that enters and is retained by the memory system is called:

A)encoding.
B)retrieval.
C)storage.
D)prospective remembering.

Question 7

According to George Miller, the capacity of short-term memory:

A)is about four items of information, plus or minus one.
B)can be increased by clustering.
C)can be increased by maintenance rehearsal of the information.
D)is about seven items of information, plus or minus two.

Question 8

The famous Ebbinghaus forgetting curve:

A)showed that long-term potentiation failure is the primary cause of forgetting.
B)demonstrated that much of what we forget is lost relatively soon after we originally learn the information.
C)demonstrated that encoding failure is the primary reason we forget most information.
D)showed that the "magical number" of items that can be held in short-term memory is four plus or minus one and not seven plus or minus two, as had been believed.

Question 9

When seven-year-old Grace had to recite the Girl Scout Pledge in front of the other members of her Brownie troop, she had trouble remembering some of the lines in the middle of the pledge. This illustrates:

A)the serial position effect.
B)state-dependent retrieval.
C)source confusion.
D)mood congruence.

Question 10

In Baddeley's model of working memory, one component called the _____ is specialized for verbal material, such as lists of numbers or words.

A)visuospatial sketchpad
B)semantic network
C)phonological loop
D)central executive

Question 11

_____ is the process of accessing information stored in long-term memory.

A)Retrieval
B)Encoding
C)Integration
D)Consolidation

Question 12

A classic experiment by psychologist George Sperling demonstrated that:

A)the capacity of short-term memory is virtually limitless.
B)the schemas that people hold in a particular situation can erroneously influence the details they later remember about the situation.
C)distributed practice is superior to massed practice.
D)information is held in visual sensory memory for about half a second.

Question 13

The _____ model describes the way in which information is organized in long-term memory.

A)interference
B)serial position
C)pragmatic
D)semantic network

Question 14

You can keep information in short-term memory beyond the usual 20-second duration by:

A)engaging in maintenance rehearsal.
B)using clustering.
C)engaging in chunking.
D)using imagination inflation.

Question 15

When you are in a positive mood, you are more likely to recall positive memories. This phenomenon is referred to as _____, and it is one form that _____ can take.

A)source amnesia; source monitoring
B)mood congruence; the encoding specificity principle
C)inattentional blindness; encoding failure
D)mood congruence; long-term potentiation

Question 16

Perceiving a picture activates areas of the _____, while perceiving a sound activates areas of the _____.

A)left prefrontal cortex; right prefrontal cortex
B)visual cortex; auditory cortex
C)cerebellum; hippocampus
D)hypothalamus; cerebellum

Question 17

Repeating information over and over involves:

A)clustering.
B)chunking.
C)elaborative rehearsal.
D)maintenance rehearsal.

Question 18

In the study in which participants sat briefly in a psychology professor's office:

A)most participants were unable to remember significant details of the office when tested later.
B)most participants were able to accurately remember significant details of the objects that were present in the office when tested later.
C)memory for details of the office was easily distorted by the later use of misinformation during the recall test.
D)many participants erroneously remembered items that were not actually present in the room but were consistent with the schema of a professor's office.

Question 19

The basic premise of repressed memory therapy or recovered memory therapy is that:

A)adult psychological problems are often due to sexual abuse in childhood, and memories of the childhood abuse have been repressed.
B)memories can be changed through hypnosis and suggestion.
C)people can be trained or taught to actively suppress traumatic memories, which will result in improved psychological functioning.
D)adult psychological problems are usually due to clear and vivid memories of childhood sexual abuse that are difficult to actively suppress.

Question 20

Of the different types of memory, _____ memory has the SHORTEST duration.

A)working
B)sensory
C)short-term
D)long-term

Question 21

The Psych for Your Life section provides several techniques and suggestions to enhance your memory of information. Which of the following is one of those suggestions?

A)Use maintenance rehearsal to help encode information for meaning.
B)Minimize interference by using massed practice.
C)Counteract the serial position effect by spending more time learning material at the beginning and end of a sequence.
D)Take the distributed practice approach to learning new information.

Question 22

Research conducted with the sea snail Aplysia suggests that _____ is the neural basis for memories that are acquired through classical conditioning.

A)short-term potentiation
B)short-term oscillation
C)long-term potentiation
D)long-term oscillation

Question 23

The famous case of the man known as H. M. illustrates the important role played by _____ in the formation of new memories.

A)the amygdala
B)beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles
C)the hippocampus
D)the cerebellum

Question 24

Brain scans of Alzheimer's patients over the course of two years indicates that the disease first attacks the:

A)brain stem.
B)temporal lobes.
C)limbic system.
D)hypothalamus.

Question 25

Your _____ is/are the brain region(s) that is/are responsible for retrieving and organizing information that is associated with episodic and autobiographical memories.

A)frontal lobes
B)cerebellum
C)amygdala
D)hypothalamus

Question 26

_____ is the gradual, physical process of converting new long-term memories into stable, enduring memory codes.

A)Memory consolidation
B)Short-term to working memory transfer
C)Clustering
D)Memory activation

Question 27

Years after H. M.'s surgery, doctors were surprised that he had acquired:

A)atypical Parkinson's symptoms.
B)a full range of episodic memories.
C)some new semantic knowledge.
D)a lifetime of false memories.