Deck 7: Learning to Think on Their Own: Executive Function, Strategies, and Problem Solving

Question 1

There is ample support for Barkley's (2014) contention that children with ADHD show deficits in behavioral inhibition. For example, relative to non-ADHD controls, children with ADHD have the following characteristics except:

A) do more poorly on working memory tasks.
B) have a better sense of time and know when it's time to be medicated.
C) are more likely to be described as irritable, hostile, and excitable.
D) perform more poorly on comprehension tasks.

Answer 1

B

Question 2

In addition to not requiring any mental effort, truly automatic processes are hypothesized to do all of the following except:

A) to occur without intention and without conscious awareness.
B) to deliberately interfere with the execution of other processes.
C) not to improve with practice.
D) not to be influenced by individual differences in intelligence, motivation, and education.

Answer 2

B

Question 3

Executive function refers to the processes involved in regulating attention and in determining what to do with information just gathered or retrieved from long-term memory. What is not one of those processes?

A) It plays a central role in planning and behaving flexibly, particularly when dealing with new information.
B) It involves a related set of basic information-processing abilities.
C) Only certain abilities are not related to how quickly one can process information and to selectively attending to relevant information.
D) Each of these abilities develops over time.

Answer 3

C

Question 4

Cognitive flexibility refers to the ability to shift between sets of rules or tasks.

Question 5

A core assumption of information-processing approaches is that information moves through a system of stores such as the short-term and long-term stores.

Question 6

There is a separate sensory register, or sensory store, for each sense modality (e.g., vision, audition), and these registers can hold large quantities of information-but only for a few seconds.

Question 7

Limited resource capacity is defined as the concept whereby we can only process so much information at any single time.

Question 8

Even 5-year-old children are easily distracted by extraneous information in their environments. In one study, Fisher et al. (2014) reported that kindergarten children who were in classrooms with many displays on the walls and throughout the classroom showed:

A) fewer learning gains than children in less-distracting classrooms.
B) fewer learning gains than children in more-distracting classrooms.
C) more learning gains across the board.
D) there was no effect on these children.

Question 9

Span of apprehension refers to the amount of information people can extract from a passively held store such as auditory sensory memory.

Question 10

Inhibition refers to an active suppression process, such as the removal of task-irrelevant information from working memory.

Question 11

Effortful processes, which have also been called strategies or control processes, are hypothesized to do all of the following except:

A) to have limited availability to consciousness.
B) to interfere with the execution of other effortful processes-that is, to drain mental resources.
C) to improve with practice.
D) to be influenced by individual differences in intelligence, motivation and education.

Question 12

Barkley (1997) proposed that the principal cause of ADHD is deficits in behavioral inhibition. Behavioral inhibition influences all of the following except:

A) working memory.
B) episodic and long-term memory.
C) self-regulation of emotion.
D) internalization of speech.

Question 13

The incidence of ADHD in the United States is estimated to be between 5% and 11% of the childhood population; it is more common in boys than in girls, with between about a third to half of all childhood cases of ADHD persisting into adulthood.

Question 14

Which of the following is not one of the metaphors for limited resource capacity?

A) hyperbole metaphor (one can only exaggerate so much before being caught)
B) space metaphor (one has only so much mental space in which to store or operate on information)
C) time metaphor (one can only perform operations so fast)
D) attention metaphor (one can only pay attention to so many things at once)

Question 15

Selective attention is the ability to focus only on chosen stimuli and not be distracted by other "noise" in the environment.

Question 16

Resistance to interference refers to susceptibility to performance decrements under conditions of singularly non-distracting stimuli.

Question 17

According to Baddeley and Hitch's (1974) model of working memory, working memory consists of a central executive that stores information and two temporary systems, one for coding verbal information and another for coding visual information. What are these two systems called, respectively?

A) the auditory loop and the visual loop
B) the articulation feedback loop and the visual-sighted loop
C) the articulatory loop and the visuospatial scratch pad
D) the auditory spatial retrieval loop and the sighted scratch pad

Question 18

With respect to overall speed of processing, young children require about the same amount of time (and, thus presumably use less of their limited capacity) to execute most cognitive processes than do older children.

Question 19

What was determined in the studies by Cowan and colleagues (1999) assessing the span of apprehension?

A) Average span of apprehension was about 3.5 digits for adults, about 3 digits for fourth-graders, and about 2.5 digits for first-grade children.
B) Average span of apprehension was about 7.5 digits for adults, about 6 digits for fourth-grades and about 4.5 digits for first-grade children.
C) Average span of apprehension was equal for both adults and fourth-graders but almost nil for first-grade children.
D) Average span of apprehension could not be determined given the limited resources to assess for apprehension in first-grade children.

Question 20

Working memory involves storage capacity plus the ability to transform information held in the short-term system.

Question 21

Explain in detail the modern information-processing approach.

Question 22

Explain in detail the individual differences in various measures of executive function (EF).

Question 23

Explain in detail Baddeley's and Hitch's (1974) model of the development of working memory.

Question 24

Traditionally, the capacity of the short-term store has been assessed by tests of memory span that measure the number of unrelated items that can be recalled in exact order. Explain the age differences in children with regard to memory span.