COOP Memory 5 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: During sleep, the brain is thought to consolidate memories primarily during which stage?
- Stage 1 NREM
- Stage 2 NREM
- Stage 3 NREM (slow-wave sleep) (Correct answer)
- Wakefulness
Correct answer: Stage 3 NREM (slow-wave sleep)
Slow-wave (deep) sleep is associated with the transfer and consolidation of declarative memories into long-term storage.
Question 2: A student cannot remember anything from before age 3. This is explained by:
- retrograde amnesia
- infantile amnesia (Correct answer)
- proactive interference
- motivated forgetting
Correct answer: infantile amnesia
Infantile (childhood) amnesia refers to the normal inability to recall early childhood memories, likely due to immature hippocampal development.
Question 3: The method of loci memory technique involves:
- creating a rhyme for each item to be remembered
- associating items with specific locations along a familiar route (Correct answer)
- grouping items into categories
- forming a vivid story connecting all items
Correct answer: associating items with specific locations along a familiar route
The method of loci (memory palace) places each item to remember at a distinct location along a mentally visualized familiar path.
Question 4: Which of the following represents a failure of ENCODING rather than retrieval?
- Knowing you know a word but being unable to say it
- Not noticing what color shirt someone was wearing during an event you witnessed (Correct answer)
- Forgetting a name you once knew well
- Feeling that a name is on the tip of your tongue
Correct answer: Not noticing what color shirt someone was wearing during an event you witnessed
If information was never attended to and recorded in the first place, it cannot later be retrieved — this is an encoding failure.
Question 5: Maintenance rehearsal (repeating information over and over) is LESS effective for long-term retention than elaborative rehearsal because:
- it overwhelms working memory capacity
- it does not connect new information to existing knowledge (Correct answer)
- it causes proactive interference
- it only works for procedural memories
Correct answer: it does not connect new information to existing knowledge
Elaborative rehearsal links new material to existing knowledge, creating deeper and more durable memory traces than simple repetition.
Question 6: A person recognizes a classmate's face but cannot recall her name. This difference between recognition and recall demonstrates:
- that recognition requires less retrieval effort than recall (Correct answer)
- source monitoring failure
- the misinformation effect
- retroactive interference
Correct answer: that recognition requires less retrieval effort than recall
Recognition is easier than recall because the cue (the face) is present and only requires a match, whereas recall requires generating the answer from scratch.
Question 7: Which factor MOST interferes with transferring information from working memory to long-term memory?
- Reading silently rather than aloud
- Dividing attention between two tasks while studying (Correct answer)
- Using colored highlighters
- Studying in a well-lit room
Correct answer: Dividing attention between two tasks while studying
Divided attention reduces the depth of encoding, making it harder to form durable long-term memories.
COOP Memory 5
During sleep, the brain is thought to consolidate memories primarily during which stage?