Questions

Warning: These questions do not cover everything.

What is the difference between serial and parallel processing?
 * 02. Cognitive Neuroscience**

What is the binding problem?

What are two elements that help solve the binding problem?

MRI is to fMRI as a picture is to __.

What happens if you apply electrical stimulation to the "thumb area" of the motor cortex on the right side of your brain?

You wake up before dawn and want to pick a shirt without turning on the lights. You can see your clothes but you can’t make out any colors. Why?

What are the advantages/disadvantages of fMRI, ERP, and single-cell recording?

What are the pros and cons of brain imaging versus lesion studies?

What is gating?

How many neurons in the human brain?

Is visual binding serial or parallel?

Localization studies: If brain area x is involved in process a, what two predictions should we make?

How do you tell whether a brain area is necessary for a mental activity?

Why do CAPTCHAs work?
 * 03. Perception**

What's an example where sensation and perception differ?

Name a prediction made by the RBC model that is not supported by the data.

What evidence is there that:
 * faces are special
 * it's not just faces that are special

Are our representations concrete or abstract for the following:
 * Musical intervals
 * letters of the alphabet
 * object recognition

What is top down processing?
 * 04. Expectations**

What is bottom up processing?

How do bottom up and top down stimuli influence how we perceive the middle character in ABC and 12 13 14 (assume 13 and B look the same)?

Does top-down processing affect how hungry you feel?

What's a study where expectations affected doctors?

Think of a situation in which expectations affect perceptions of food. How would you test your idea?

How do bottom-up and top-down processing explain hearing secret messages in songs when they're played backwards?

In top down processing, expectations affect __.__


 * 06. Attention**

If two tasks rely on the same resources, they will with each other.

With practice we can learn to do tasks ___, which frees up attentional resources.

There are two kind of priming, according to the attention chapter. One is stimulus-based priming. What is the other?

What two basic properties define attention?

Attention can filter out unwanted inputs. According to the book, what is a related function it also performs?

What is the difference between early selection and late selection? Which do we use?

Is spatial attention location-based or object-based?

What are two kinds of blindness?

Prof. Kornell's wife put a present in his sock drawer. 3 days later, he hadn't noticed. How would you explain this.

Which kind of blindness was...
 * the color-changing card trick?
 * the changing background in the monkey business video?
 * missing the gorilla?
 * talking to a stranger with a map?
 * the mossy rock?

Explain the two types of interference.
 * 07. Learning & Forgetting**

What is the relationship between accessibility and learning?

In what sense does massing similar math problems together lead people to practice the wrong thing?

What effect does guessing have if you guess wrong and are then told the correct answer?

What two elements define something as a desirable difficulty?

According to the desirable difficulty framework, why do people incorrectly believe that spacing impairs learning?

In what way is the Tulving & Psotka study (subjects study word lists; some subjects do math problems while some study more lists; the ones who studied more lists forgot a lot of the original list) evidence of retroactive interference?

Why is the Wickens et al. study (each subject studies list of a given category for three trials, then a list of fruits for the fourth; subjects who studied fruits for the first three did terribly in remembering the fourth) evidence of proactive interference?

What is the relationship between forgetting and learning?

What are some examples of failures of the central executive?
 * 08. Working memory and encoding**

What's an example of an action slip?

How does the word length effect influence intelligence testing across cultures?

What are the three stages of long-term memory?

What is the ultimate level of processing?

What are the three main elements of Baddeley's working memory system?

What is the capacity of working memory?

What kind of processing trumps even pleasantness ratings?

Major depression is related to difficulty concentrating and a deficit in the ability to inhibit unwanted negative thoughts. How is working memory relevant to these symptoms?

What evidence is there that the visuospatial buffer is really distinct from the articulatory rehearsal loop?

In what 3 ways does intention to remember change behavior?
 * 09. Encoding and Retrieval**

When does intention to remember matter--at encoding, retrieval, or both?

What activities create good connections?

What kinds of cues are there?

What is one possible explanation for why context effects were not apparent in the UC Berkeley classroom study?

Intention to remember doesn't matter by itself. Why and when can it matter?

Was the pool player responding based on state-cues or context cues when he remembered how to play pool when he was given a beer (even before he drank it)?

What is the spacing effect?

What is the difference between state-dependent learning and context-dependent learning?

Is repetition ever effective for encoding?


 * 10. Memory Systems**

What do we call it if two systems appear to be different?

In the Warrington & Weiskrantz experiment, which tests were explicit and which were implicit?

How is the addressing system of human memory different from that of a library?

What are three ways of measuring memory (from lecture)?

Name a piece of evidence that implicit and explicit memory are separable processes.

What are the basic types of memory in Squire's taxonomy?

What are two kinds of amnesia (temporally speaking)?

A recall test measures __memory.__

What is the role of the hippocampus in memory?


 * 11. --- Exam 1 ---**


 * 12. Memory errors**

What are some elements of a false memory “recipe?”

Why are eyewitnesses often inaccurate?

What are some ways of increasing the usefulness of eyewitness memory?

Explain the evidence for memory reconsolidation in rats.

What is a piece of evidence that false memories occur without “suggestion?”

Is there evidence that it’s possible to implant memories that most of us would be very surprised to forget?

What effect did stress have on accurate IDs? False IDs?


 * 13. Concepts and Categories**

Complete this sentence: Prototypes and exemplar theories attempt to explain how categories...

What is the difference between prototype theories and exemplar theories?

Do most scientists believe prototype or exemplar theories explain how we think?

Name two ways typicality effects have been demonstrated empirically.

List three examples of difficult real-world categorization tasks (that most people can't do without training).

What is simultaneous multiple constraint satisfaction?

In a study of category learning with paintings, a) how did interleaving (i.e., spacing) affect learning, and b) how did interleaving affect judgments of learning?

What's the difference between a semantic network and a connectionist/PDP network?

Besides basic hearing, what are three things that help us perceive phonemes?
 * 14. Language**

Define phoneme, morpheme, syntax, orthography, semantics, prosody, and aphasia.

If you can't understand what someone's saying, what's a practical trick you can use?

If you can't think of a word, what's a practical trick you can use?

There's a hierarchical organization of language. If sentences are at the top, followed by phrases, what are the next three levels?


 * 15. The great language debate**

What is the important difference between sign language and spoken language?

What does "home sign" tell us about the great debate?

Do you have to teach language to kids?

If we want to compare the linguistic abilities of humans and other animals, what are two research approaches we could use (as described in class)?

How are people affected by critical periods for language?

What made Nicaragua around 1980 uniquely suited for researchers who wanted to observe the evolution of language?

Explain the difference between language and gesture with respect to combining two meanings.

What is really the only ingredient necessary for humans to learn language?

What are the four essential properties of language?

What does it mean to say language is a) syntactic and b) generative

Which feature of language was Nim Chimpsky pretty clearly missing?

Why did smarter fruit flies die off while the dumber ones survived?
 * 16. Animal Cognition**

In what way is the human brain special (vs. animal brains)?

How would you test for episodic memory in a bird?

In explaining how mental images are stored, what's the difference between depiction and description?
 * 17. Visual Knowledge**

What is dual coding?

What are the two main theories of mental visual representation?

What is some evidence that mental images are like pictures?

What is some evidence that mental images are not like pictures?

What is some evidence that spatial representations are different from visual representations?

How might brain damage affect mental imagery, and how does this help us understand if there are multiple or single mechanisms for visual imagery?


 * 18. Judgment and heuristics**

What heuristic is responsible for our belief in the hot hand?

Define the representativeness heuristic.

Give an example of confirmation bias.

What is a base rate?

Describe framing effects

We tend to use how easily information comes to mind as a substitute for (i.e., when judging) ?

What is the law of large numbers?

What is the law of small numbers?

In the colonoscopy study, a) what did the results show, and b) what kind of scope neglect is this?

Why did doctors overestimate the likelihood of cancer in the mammogram example we looked at?

What is sample size neglect?

Plaintiffs who ask for ridiculously large amounts of money in court cases tend to get more money than if they asked for less money. What heuristic are they taking advantage of?
 * 19. Decision Making**

When we use anchoring and adjustment, what problem leads us to make inaccurate judgments?

Describe two real-world examples of anchoring and adjustment.

What evidence did we see in lecture supporting the idea of the default bias?

Define framing effect.

How does framing in terms of gains versus losses affect risk judgments?

Give an example of an endowment effect.

What is a problem space?
 * 21. Problem Solving**

Since problem space is too huge to manage for most problems (even well-defined problems) and we don't do it psychologically, how do we solve problems like Towers of Hanoi?

What is means-end analysis?

What is a well-defined problem?

What are the two levels that most problems have?

How good are we at using analogies?

Why are novices so bad at seeing/using analogies to solve problems?

Of the three explanations of why brainstorming hurts productivity, why two weren't supported and which one was?

How do we know whether IQ measures intelligence?
 * 22. Intelligence and Expertise**

Is IQ correlated with job and academic success?

What is one crucial cognitive process/ability that underlies intelligence?

 What is the difference between fluid and crystalized intelligence?

 Are IQ and working memory correlated?

 What evidence have we seen that there is a genetic component to IQ?

 Over the past 50 years, have worldwide IQ scores generally increased, decreased, or remained about the same?

 Do brain training programs increase fluid intelligence?

Describe new teachers’ improvement trajectory over their first five years.

What are five main elements of deliberate practice?

Where does consciousness come from?
 * 23. Consciousness**

Bees may not be conscious, but...are beehives?

How does a network of neurons give rise to consciousness?

What brain structures/functions give rise to consciousness?

Does attention = consciousness?

When you talk to Joe (split brain patient from the video), who/what are you talking to?

Does he know that he saw a phone?

What does “he” mean?

Can one body have two consciousnesses?

If you were going to have brain damage, where would you want it?

According to Gazzaniga, what should you never leave home without?

Can consciousness be turned on and off?