Question 1

Suppose that researchers want to determine whether young college students have stereotypes about elderly people.An implicit measure of stereotyping would be better than an explicit measure because

Accepted Answer

A) an implicit measure would be less influenced by people's tendency to supply a socially appropriate answer. 
B) the norms are more accurate if they are based on implicit measures. 
C) people's schemas would have greater influence on implicit measures. 
D) the pragmatic view of memory would interfere with an explicit measure.

Question 2

The category "animal" has a graded structure,which means that

Accepted Answer

A) most of the examples are well known to the general public. 
B) the members of that category are not all equally representative of that category. 
C) procedural knowledge is more important than declarative knowledge. 
D) there is a family resemblance among the members of this category.

Question 3

According to John Anderson's theories of semantic memory and other aspects of cognitive processes,

Accepted Answer

A) each of the components of cognition operates independently. 
B) every concept in a proposition can be represented by a network of connections. 
C) the term spreading activation refers to our knowledge about facts and things. 
D) each item in semantic memory is listed according to its appropriate graded structure.

Question 4

"Marie received seven presents at her birthday party.The stuffed elephant was her favorite gift." If you believe that one of the seven presents that Marie received was,in fact,a stuffed elephant,you have made

Accepted Answer

A) an attribution error. 
B) an inference. 
C) an episodic mistake. 
D) a script.

Question 5

According to the introductory discussion about schemas in Chapter 8,

Accepted Answer

A) behaviorists frequently used the term "schema" in their theories. 
B) Piaget applied the concept of schemas to infants. 
C) outside the area of cognitive psychology,other psychologists rarely discuss the concept of schemas. 
D) Sigmund Freud was the first to incorporate the concept of a schema into a psychological theory.

Question 6

How do the prototype approach and the exemplar approach differ from each other?

Accepted Answer

A) The prototype approach emphasizes that all examples of a concept are equally good. 
B) The exemplar approach represents a concept in terms of many specific examples of a concept. 
C) The exemplar approach focuses on the most frequently encountered example of a concept. 
D) The exemplar approach argues that an exemplar is an idealized example,based on all members of a category.

Question 7

What is the current status of the parallel distributed processing approach?

Accepted Answer

A) It was popular when the Atkinson-Shiffrin model was judged to be too rigid,but it is no longer prominent. 
B) Research shows that it has no neurological support. 
C) It has been applied to many cognitive processes,but it fails to acknowledge that some cognitive processes use serial processing. 
D) It is so limited in scope that it probably will not remain popular for long.

Question 8

According to your textbook,Anderson's ACT-R theory

Accepted Answer

A) is broader in scope than the prototype approach or the exemplar approach. 
B) points out that higher mental processes require insight and the reorganization of large bodies of information. 
C) emphasizes that procedural knowledge is roughly comparable to semantic memory. 
D) argues that semantic memory is basically organized into a series of hierarchies.

Question 9

Suppose that some research participants are asked to remember a story.Furthermore,this story contains some particularly vivid and surprising material that is not consistent with a standard schema.The participants would be most likely

Accepted Answer

A) to show spreading activation to schema-inconsistent material. 
B) to emphasize prototypical information. 
C) to prefer scripts to schemas. 
D) to recall the schema-inconsistent material.

Question 10

Suppose you are sitting in an art class,and you have been instructed to draw from memory the scene you see from a window in your own bedroom.Although you cannot actually see the top of a tree through the bedroom window,you still draw the complete tree.The error you have committed is called

Accepted Answer

A) episodic memory. 
B) boundary extension. 
C) change blindness. 
D) a script error.

Question 11

Chapter 8 discussed in some detail the research by Heit and Barsalou about students' understanding of the concept "animal." If this research could be generalized to the concept "fruit," you would expect to find that

Accepted Answer

A) experts considered prototypical fruits to be oranges and apples,whereas novices considered those fruits to be nonprototypical. 
B) the less common fruits would be more likely to show spontaneous generalization. 
C) the concept "fruit" includes some uncommon fruits as well as some prototypes. 
D) spreading activation is the most useful mechanism for understanding the meaning of "fruit."

Question 12

Which of the following statements about the parallel distributed processing approach is correct?

Accepted Answer

A) When one unit is stimulated,all the units that are connected with it are simultaneously inhibited. 
B) When one unit is stimulated,all the other units are automatically given a default assignment. 
C) When one unit reaches an appropriate activation level,it can either inhibit or excite other units to which it is connected. 
D) At any given time,numerous serial operations are proceeding at the same time through several portions of the cortex.

Question 13

In the name parallel distributed processing approach,the word distributed refers to

Accepted Answer

A) the distribution of information across many locations in the brain. 
B) the distribution of attention while processing memorable material. 
C) spontaneous generalization,or remembering material that was not initially learned. 
D) the simultaneous processing of several ideas.

Question 14

If you have just heard the word vegetable,you can quickly make judgments about the word carrot; in contrast,your judgments about the word mushroom take much longer.According to the prototype approach,this observation shows that

Accepted Answer

A) family resemblance is stronger for prototypes than for nonprototypes. 
B) prototypes are items that have the smallest number of connection weights. 
C) after priming,people respond faster to prototypes than to nonprototypes. 
D) basic-level categories are judged more quickly than superordinate-level categories.

Question 15

According to the discussion of categories,the basic level of reference has special status.This means that

Accepted Answer

A) the basic level is more likely than other levels to show family resemblance. 
B) basic-level names are used more often and they are more informative than the superordinate-level names. 
C) the basic level is the most general label that can be supplied. 
D) basic-level names are prototypes,whereas superordinate- and subordinate-level names are not.

Question 16

Chapter 8 discusses the term "graded structure" in connection with the prototype theory of semantic memory.The best example of this term is

Accepted Answer

A) the observation that we frequently make spontaneous generalizations. 
B) the structure of our knowledge during the tip-of-the-tongue effect. 
C) the arrangement of words in a specific category,from most prototypical to least prototypical. 
D) the fact that the terms "concept" and "category" are related but somewhat different from each other.

Question 17

Chapter 8 described a study in which participants stayed briefly in an office.Later,their recall showed that

Accepted Answer

A) when people have a schema for a scene,their recall is typically accurate. 
B) people with little expertise on a topic are likely to have particularly clear-cut schemas for that topic. 
C) people are likely to recall objects and events that are consistent with the schema. 
D) schemas usually reduce our memory accuracy.

Question 18

The pragmatic view of memory proposes that

Accepted Answer

A) people typically pay attention to the gist of a story; however,if they realize that exact wording is important,they are likely to emphasize verbatim recall. 
B) people are more concerned with the politeness of a message than with its grammatical structure or the specific meaning in that message. 
C) people realize that researchers are going to be testing verbatim recall,so they pay much more attention to the specific words than they do in real-life situations. 
D) we tend to remember schema-inconsistent material more accurately than schema-consistent material.

Question 19

According to the discussion in Chapter 8,the best definition of the word concept is:

Accepted Answer

A) a specific set of objects that belong together. 
B) your mental representation of a category. 
C) the best example of a particular category. 
D) the information in your immediate environment,which contributes to your general knowledge.

Question 20

In the parallel distributed processing approach,learning basically involves

Accepted Answer

A) graceful degradation. 
B) spontaneous inhibition of default assignments. 
C) spontaneous generalization to new nodes in the network. 
D) the strengthening of connections among relevant nodes.

Exam 8: General Knowledge