ASPPB Cognitive Psychology 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: According to Baddeley's working memory model, the 'phonological loop' is primarily responsible for:
- Visual-spatial information processing
- Coordinating subsidiary systems
- Maintaining verbal and phonological information (Correct answer)
- Episodic buffer integration
Correct answer: Maintaining verbal and phonological information
The phonological loop temporarily holds and rehearses verbal and sound-based information through an articulatory rehearsal process.
Question 2: The 'fan effect' in cognitive psychology demonstrates that:
- Emotional arousal fans out to enhance multiple memories simultaneously
- Reaction time increases as more facts are associated with a concept (Correct answer)
- Practice fans out to improve performance across related skills
- Attention narrows when task demands increase
Correct answer: Reaction time increases as more facts are associated with a concept
The fan effect shows that retrieval time for a fact increases as the number of facts associated with a given concept grows, due to spreading activation competition.
Question 3: In dual-process theories of cognition, System 2 thinking is characterized as:
- Fast, automatic, and heuristic-based
- Slow, deliberate, and rule-governed (Correct answer)
- Unconscious and emotional in nature
- Dependent on implicit memory
Correct answer: Slow, deliberate, and rule-governed
System 2 involves slow, effortful, conscious reasoning that follows logical rules and requires working memory resources.
Question 4: Which of the following best describes the 'availability heuristic'?
- Judging probability based on how easily examples come to mind (Correct answer)
- Anchoring estimates to an initial value and adjusting insufficiently
- Assuming others share one's own beliefs and values
- Overweighting recent information when making predictions
Correct answer: Judging probability based on how easily examples come to mind
The availability heuristic involves estimating the likelihood of events based on how quickly or easily relevant examples can be retrieved from memory.
Question 5: A patient who can no longer recognize the function of objects despite intact visual perception most likely has:
- Prosopagnosia
- Visual object agnosia
- Semantic dementia or associative agnosia (Correct answer)
- Hemispatial neglect
Correct answer: Semantic dementia or associative agnosia
Associative agnosia (or semantic dementia) involves failure to access semantic knowledge about objects despite intact perceptual processing.
Question 6: The Stroop effect is best explained by which cognitive mechanism?
- Limited attentional resources and automatic processing conflict (Correct answer)
- Failure of sensory gating in the thalamus
- Decay of working memory traces under dual-task conditions
- Impaired semantic priming in word recognition
Correct answer: Limited attentional resources and automatic processing conflict
The Stroop effect occurs because automatic word reading competes with the intentional color-naming task, creating interference due to limited attentional control.
Question 7: Which research finding provides evidence that perception is inherently top-down as well as bottom-up?
- The just-noticeable difference threshold varies with stimulus intensity
- Context and prior knowledge influence what ambiguous stimuli are perceived as (Correct answer)
- Sensory adaptation reduces responding to constant stimuli
- The visual cortex is organized retinotopically
Correct answer: Context and prior knowledge influence what ambiguous stimuli are perceived as
The influence of context and expectations on perception of ambiguous stimuli (e.g., perceiving 'THE CAT' vs. '13' based on surrounding letters) demonstrates top-down processing.
ASPPB Cognitive Psychology 3
According to Baddeley's working memory model, the 'phonological loop' is primarily responsible for: