APA Cognitive Psychology 2 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: Which type of long-term memory involves skills and habits that are expressed through performance rather than conscious recall?
- Explicit memory
- Episodic memory
- Semantic memory
- Procedural (implicit) memory (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Procedural (implicit) memory
Procedural memory stores skills and conditioned responses (like riding a bike) that are performed automatically without requiring conscious recollection.
Question 2: What does the 'levels of processing' model (Craik & Lockhart) propose about memory?
- Memory has three distinct structural stores
- Deeper, more meaningful processing at encoding leads to better retention (Correct answer)
- All memories decay at the same rate regardless of encoding
- Working memory capacity determines long-term memory success
Correct answer: Deeper, more meaningful processing at encoding leads to better retention
Craik and Lockhart proposed that retention depends on depth of processing, with semantic (meaningful) encoding producing far better memory than shallow structural or phonological processing.
Question 3: What is 'confirmation bias' in cognitive psychology?
- Overconfidence in one's own knowledge
- The tendency to search for and interpret information in ways that confirm existing beliefs (Correct answer)
- Preferring familiar options over novel ones
- Assuming that others share one's own beliefs
Correct answer: The tendency to search for and interpret information in ways that confirm existing beliefs
Confirmation bias is the tendency to favor information that confirms pre-existing beliefs and to discount or ignore disconfirming evidence.
Question 4: Which cognitive phenomenon explains why people often overestimate how much they knew about an event before it occurred?
- The misinformation effect
- Hindsight bias (Correct answer)
- Source monitoring error
- Reconstructive memory
Correct answer: Hindsight bias
Hindsight bias (the 'I knew it all along' phenomenon) is the tendency to perceive past outcomes as having been predictable once those outcomes are known.
Question 5: What is 'chunking' in the context of working memory?
- Breaking information into smaller units for easier processing
- Grouping individual items into meaningful units to increase effective memory capacity (Correct answer)
- Distributing practice over time to improve retention
- Suppressing unwanted memories through active effort
Correct answer: Grouping individual items into meaningful units to increase effective memory capacity
Chunking involves organizing items into familiar, meaningful groupings, which increases the amount of information that can be held in working memory.
Question 6: Which model of working memory, developed by Baddeley, includes a central executive, phonological loop, and visuospatial sketchpad?
- Multi-store model
- Levels of processing model
- Parallel distributed processing model
- Baddeley's multicomponent working memory model (Correct answer)
Correct answer: Baddeley's multicomponent working memory model
Baddeley's model replaces the concept of a single short-term store with multiple specialized components: a phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer, and central executive.
APA Cognitive Psychology 2
Which type of long-term memory involves skills and habits that are expressed through performance rather than conscious recall?