How long can information last in STM, assuming that the subject is prevented from rehearsing the information?

a) Information in STM can last as long as 1 second, after which all information will be lost through decay or interference.

b) Information in STM can last as long as 20 seconds, after which all information will be lost through decay or interference.

c) Information in STM can last as long as 2 - 3 minutes, after which all information will be lost through decay or interference.

d) Information in STM can last as long as 2 - 3 days, after which all information will be lost through decay or interference.

B

It is known that memory span is smaller for lists of similar sounding words, e.g., CAT, THATCH, PACK, TRACK, etc., than for lists of dissimilar sounding words, e.g., CAT, BOOK, SCENE, BASE, WRIST, etc. This fact is taken as evidence for what aspect of human psychology?

a) It is evidence that short-term memory (STM) has limited capacity.

b) It is evidence that short-term memory (STM) and long-term memory (LTM) are different memory systems.

c) It is evidence that deeper processing creates more effective retrieval cues.

d) It is evidence that working memory (WM) has a component for manipulating representations of verbal sounds (phonological loop or PL).

D

Many working memory experiments use articulatory suppression in order to ....

a. prevent semantic priming by semantically related words.

b. prevent rehearsal in the phonological loop.

c. block the representation of information in the visuospatial sketchpad.

d. prevent retrieval of associated concepts from long-term memory.

B

The central executive controls the switching of attention between tasks.

a) TRUE

b) FALSE

A

The central executive maintains an active representations of word sounds, e.g., a list of words that the subject has been instructed to keep in memory.

a) TRUE

b) FALSE

B

The central executive retains useful information over longer periods of time, e.g., several days or even several years.

a) TRUE

b) FALSE

B

To control his epilepsy, the patient HM had brain surgery that removed his hippocampi ("hippocampi" is the plural of "hippocampus" - there is one hippocampus on each side of the brain). Although HM suffered a number of different problems with his memory after this surgery, what aspect of his memory problems was most surprising and scientifically intriguing?

a) HM could not remember his childhood, e.g., he had no memory of important events that happened to him in his early teenage years.

b) HM lost his memory for places but not for persons, e.g., he could not remember the house where he lived, but he could remember his family and friends.

c) HM lost his ability to form new episodic memories, e.g., even if you had a serious conversation with him on Monday, then on Tuesday, he would not remember having met you.

d) HM had severe difficulty remembering the names of common objects like "chair" or "pencil."

C

What is the standard cognitive psychology explanation for primacy effects in serial position curves?

a) Words that are early in the list are attended to more than words that are later in the list.

b) Words that are early in the list are more likely to be transferred to long-term memory because subjects have more time to rehearse them.

c) Words that are early in the list prevent later words from entering short-term memory.

d) Words that are early in the list are more likely to enter the phonological loop.

B

Which of the following is an example of episodic memory.

a) Suppose I am in a memory experiment and I am asked to study a list of words. Later I remember correctly that I saw a particular word, "bottle", on the list of words that I studied.

b) Suppose that I went to many baseball games as a teenager. Today I remember that a pitcher is the person who throws the ball to the catcher.

c) Suppose that I studied American history in high school. Today I can remember that Abraham Lincoln was president during the American Civil War.

d) Suppose I once got sick from eating too much popcorn. Now when I smell popcorn it makes me feel slightly nauseated.

A

Suppose a patient has lost the ability to form new episodic memories (like HM or Clive Wearing who were described in the Goldstein textbook), but assume that this patient continues to have a functioning WM. What would you predict for this person's serial position curve?

a) the patient's serial position curve should show a primacy effect, but no recency effect.

b) the patient's serial position curve should show a recency effect, but no primacy effect.

c) the patient's serial position curve should not show either a primacy effect or a recency effect.

d) the patient's serial position curve should be flat - all serial positions should be equally likely to be recalled.

B

Suppose that you need to learn how to perform first aid under difficult circumstances, e.g., in a noisy confusing environment when many people are screaming and crying around you. Which of the following describes a learning strategy that is based on the encoding specificity principle?

a) Practice performing the first-aid procedures in an environment that is free from distractions.

b) Read stories that describe how others have performed first aid successfully under the difficult circumstances described above.

c) Practice performing the first aid procedures under the difficult circumstances described above.

d) Create a mental image of each step that must be performed in the first aid procedure.

C

It is often the case that people who suffer concussions cannot remember events that happened just prior to their concussions, e.g., 15 minutes before the concussion. This is regarded as evidence that:

a)  the experiences that were lost from memory had not yet undergone memory consolidation.

b) the experiences that were lost from memory were still in working memory at the time of the concussion, i.e., they had not yet been transferred to long-term memory.

c) the concussion causes extreme proactive interference with the lost memories.

d) the concussion prevents rehearsal of experiences in the phonological loop, thus preventing information from entering working memory.

A

What is described by the so-called "magic number 7 plus or minus 2"?

a) The number of facts that can be held in short-term memory.

b) The number of unrelated pieces of information that can be held in short-term memory

c) The duration that items last in short-term memory before they decay.

d) The average size of a chunk in short-term memory.

B

What role does chunking play in human memory?

a) Chunking is a process by which relatively inactive memories are primed for later recall. Therefore recall of this information is faster after chunking has occurred.

b) Chunking decreases the rate at which information is transferred from sensory memory to shortterm memory. It is a basic mechanism of attention.

c)  Chunking allows people to retain larger amounts of information in short-term memory (STM) by reorganizing multiple pieces of information into a smaller number of "chunks."

d) Chunking is a process that causes loss of information from STM - older similar memories interfere with the retention of new information.

e) Chunking new information can prevent proactive interference, i.e., it produces release from proactive interference.

C

The phonological similarity effect is the finding that memory span is smaller for similar sounding words than for dissimilar sounding words. Why does articulatory suppression reduce or eliminate the phonological similarity effect?

a) While performing the articulatory suppression task, the central executive has fewer cognitive resources for searching for related information in long-term memory, so dissimilar sounding words have no advantage.

b)  While performing the articulatory suppression task, subjects are prevented from rehearsing the words in the phonological loop (PL) so sound similarity cannot interfere with rehearsal of words in PL.

c) While performing the articulatory suppression task, subjects have difficulty forming mental images of familiar objects so mental images of word meanings cannot be used as cues for the words.

d) While performing the articulatory suppression task, the memory span for similar sounding words increases because the articulatory suppression task focuses attention on the sound of words.

B

Which of the following is a basic finding of the theory of working memory (WM)?

a) Information decays and is lost from WM after about 90 seconds.

b)  If subjects are asked to perform two tasks at the same time, the tasks will interfere with each other more if both tasks require visual/spatial processing than if one task requires visual/spatial processing and the other requires verbal processing.

c) Spaced practice (distributed practice) creates stronger memories than massed practice.

d) Most people over the age of 50 will have an unusually large number of memories between the ages of 10 and 30.

B

Which of the following is an example of proactive interference?

a)  Suppose that at the beginning of the quarter I learn the names of 5 male students in Psych 355. I find that it is easier to learn the name of a 6th student if that student is female than if that student is male.

b) I feel that I have a better memory for a spectacular event, e.g., the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, than for a less striking event, e.g., Obama's victory in the 2012 presidential campaign.

c) I have more trouble remembering events that happened last week than events that happened yesterday.

d) It is easier for me to remember the results of a famous psychology experiment than to remember the results of a famous physics experiment.

A

The inability to remember experiences that follow an event like a blow to the head is called ....

a) the primacy effect.

b) the recency effect.

c) anterograde amnesia.

d) retrograde amnesia

C

For you, personally, the following statement represents what kind of memory? "Martin Luther King was an American Civil Rights leader during the 1960's."

a) episodic memory

b) semantic memory

c) procedural memory

d) implicit memory

B

Which statement below is a central aspect of the depth of processing hypothesis?

a) People who respond emotionally to a stimulus are more likely to remember it at a later time.

b) Information enters memory by passing through a number of levels, beginning with sensory memory, then short-term memory, then long-term memory.

c) Events that are repeated many times can influence our behavior, even after we have forgotten the original events.

d) Deeper processing at the time of encoding will produce better recall at a later time

D

Suppose that you need to learn how to perform first aid under difficult circumstances, e.g., in a noisy chaotic environment when many people are screaming and crying around you. Your instructors have found that students perform best in this situation if they practice giving first aid in a similar noisy chaotic environment. This illustrates what principle of memory?

a) encoding specificity

b) contextual relevance

c) reactivation

d) elaborative encoding

A

Sometimes people will say "I have a terrible short-term memory" as a comment on the fact that they have forgotten what happened earlier that same day. From the standpoint of current cognitive theories, what is erroneous about this comment?

a) People have better short-term memories than they think they do; they typically don't know how to use their own short-term memories effectively.

b) People have a biased perception of the effectiveness of short-term memory because they notice when they fail to remember something, but they do not notice when they successfully remember something.

c) Memory for prior experiences would improve substantially if people actively rehearsed the information that they will later want to remember.

d) Failure to recall what happened earlier that day is NOT a failure to retain information in shortterm memory; rather it is a failure of encoding or retrieval from long-term memory.

D

A memory span experiment uses articulatory suppression when subjects are asked to repeatedly produce a simple sound, like repeatedly saying "the, the, the, ...", while performing a memory task. It has been found that articulatory suppression reduces or eliminates the word length effect. Why does this happen?

a) Articulatory suppression prevents retrieval of associations from previous trials that produce proactive interference with the current items in memory. Long words tend to generate greater interference than short words because they usually have more complex meanings. By preventing proactive interference, articulatory suppression reduces the difference between long and short words.

b) Articulatory suppression prevents rehearsal of words in the phonological loop (PL). Because the word length effect results from the fact that it takes longer to rehearse long words than short words, articulatory suppression reduces or eliminates the word length effect.

c) Because articulatory suppression involves repeatedly saying a short word, it interferes more with lists of short words. This reduces the advantage that short words have over long words in a memory span task.

d) Articulatory suppression makes it difficult to search related information in long-term memory. Consequently memory span for long words is reduced

B

Your text describes K.C., a man who suffered severe brain damage in a motorcycle accident. K.C. remembers facts like the difference between a one-way ticket and a round-trip ticket, but he is unaware of experiencing things like hearing about the circumstances of his brother's death which occurred two years before the motorcycle accident. His memory behavior suggests

a) his semantic memory is intact but his episodic memory is defective.

b) his procedural memory is intact but his semantic memory is defective.

c) his episodic memory is intact but his semantic memory is defective.

d) his episodic memory is intact but his procedural memory is defective.

A

A double dissociation has been observed in brain injuries that affect semantic and episodic memories. What does this mean?

a) Patients have been found who have impairment to both semantic and episodic memory (in a single patient).

b) Brain injuries always impair both semantic and episodic memory, or neither forms of memory.

c) Patients have been found who have impairment to semantic memory but not to episodic memory, and other patients have been found who have impairment to episodic memory but not to semantic memory.

d) fMRI studies reveal that there is no overlap between the brain areas that are active while retrieving semantic memories and the brain areas that are active while retrieving episodic memories.

C

The components of working memory are ....

a) Sensory memory, short-term memory, long-term memory.

b) Short-term memory, rehearsal, the central executive.

c) The phonological loop, the visuospatial sketch pad, the central executive.

d) Phonological coding, visual coding, semantic coding.

C

Suppose that as you enter the bank, you happen to meet a good friend who is leaving the bank. You have a 5 minute conversation about some interesting gossip. When your conversation ends, you enter the bank. While conducting your business in the bank, your attention is fully engaged by your banking business - you do not think about your conversation with your friend at all. Nevertheless, as you leave the bank, you remember the conversation with your friend and you start thinking about it. In which memory system was the information about your conversation stored while you were conducting your business in the bank?

a. Most likely, the conversation was rehearsed in the PL while you were doing your business in the bank.

b. Most likely, the conversation was retained as a mental image in the VSP while you were doing your business in the bank.

c. Most likely, the conversation was retained as an episodic memory in LTM while you were doing your business in the bank.

d. Most likely, the conversation was retained as a semantic memory in LTM while you were doing your business in the bank.

C

According to the standard model of memory encoding and consolidation, which of the following are functions performed by the hippocampus?

a. transferring information from working memory to long-term memory;

b. consolidating information in long-term memory (recreating activation patterns for recently stored long-term memories);

c. retrieving long-term memories that were recently formed, e.g., during the past week.

d. all of the above

D

You are able to recall many details of the movie because you continue to rehearse these details after the end of the movie.

a) Yes, this could be a reason for your ability to remember the details of the movie.

b) No, this is NOT a major factor in helping you remember the details of the movie.

B

You are able to recall many details of the movie because you can chunk the details of the story into a smaller number of larger conceptual units (the plot of the story).

a) Yes, this could be a reason for your ability to remember the details of the movie.

b) No, this is NOT a major factor in helping you remember the details of the movie

A

The generation effect refers to what aspect of memory?

a) Older adults, e.g., people of your parents' generation, do not perform as well on standard memory tests as younger adults.

b) Stories that are generated by computer algorithms are harder for subjects to remember in recall tests than stories that are sampled from people's everyday conversations.

c) Memory cues that are generated by the subject himself or herself are more effective retrieval cues than cues that are generated by someone else.

d) Subjects take longer to generate retrieval cues for lists of long words than for lists of short words.

C

It is often the case that people who suffer concussions cannot remember events that happened just prior to their concussions, e.g., 15 minutes before the concussion. This is regarded as evidence that:

a) the experiences that were lost from memory had not yet undergone memory consolidation.

b) the experiences that were lost from memory were still in working memory at the time of the concussion, i.e., they had not yet been transferred to long-term memory.

c) the concussion causes extreme proactive interference with the lost memories.

d) the concussion prevents rehearsal of experiences in the phonological loop, thus preventing information from entering working memory.

A