Attention, Perception, Learning and Memory Questions and Answers

Answer: A

The answer is hallucination.

A hallucination is a perception, such as hearing voices or seeing figures, that occurs with no external stimulus at all.

An illusion is a misinterpretation of a real stimulus, such as taking a rope for a snake. A delusion is a fixed false belief, not a perception. Delirium is an acute state of confusion that may include hallucinations, but it is a syndrome rather than the false perception itself.

Answer: A

In trace conditioning the conditioned stimulus (CS) precedes the unconditioned stimulus (UCS).

The defining feature is that the CS begins and ends before the UCS arrives, leaving a gap. The animal must hold a memory trace of the CS across the interval, which is where the name comes from. Delay conditioning, where the CS stays on until the UCS starts, is the other forward arrangement.

The UCS coming first is backward conditioning, which usually produces little learning. CS and UCS beginning together is simultaneous conditioning. Ending at the same time is not a named procedure; it describes the end of a delay trial.

Answer: C

The process of getting the number into memory is encoding.

Memory is usually described in three stages: encoding puts information into the memory system in a usable form, storage keeps it over time, and retrieval brings it back out. Since the stem asks how the number gets into memory, it describes the first stage.

Retrieval and storage are later stages. Rehearsal is tempting, because repeating the number is how many people would hold it, but rehearsal is a strategy that keeps information active and helps it to be encoded; the stage the question names is encoding itself.

Answer: A

This is the refractory period.

The stem's 'intentional system' stands for the attentional system. After attention has been committed to one stimulus, there is a short interval before it can deal with a new one. A second stimulus arriving within that interval is responded to more slowly, the psychological refractory period, and a related limit appears in the attentional blink.

'Refectory' is a dining hall, a distractor built on the similar spelling. Attenuation belongs to Treisman's filter theory, where unattended messages are weakened, not delayed. Feature integration is Treisman's account of binding features into objects, not a recovery interval.

Answer: A

This is the Feature Integration Model.

Treisman's feature integration theory proposes two stages. In the preattentive stage, basic features such as colour, orientation, form and motion are registered early, automatically and in parallel. In the focused attention stage, attention binds those features into a perceived object, so objects are identified only later.

Gibson's direct perception denies such staged processing. Biederman's recognition-by-components builds objects from geons rather than separate features. Selfridge's Pandemonium model uses layers of feature 'demons' but does not describe automatic registration followed by attention-based binding.

Answer: B

This is the trichromatic theory.

The Young-Helmholtz trichromatic theory explains colour vision by three types of cone, most sensitive to short (blue), medium (green) and long (red) wavelengths. Every colour is coded by the ratio of their activity.

Hering's opponent-process theory explains colour by paired opposites (red-green, blue-yellow, black-white) and accounts for afterimages; it works at a later stage than the cones. Signal detection theory concerns detecting faint stimuli under uncertainty, and gate control theory is about pain.

Answer: A

The correct matching is (a)-(iii), (b)-(ii), (c)-(i), (d)-(iv).

• (a) Motion parallax: closer objects appear to move faster than objects farther away (iii).
• (b) Linear perspective: railway tracks converge in the distance (ii).
• (c) Interposition: one building partly blocks another, so it is seen as nearer (i).
• (d) Relative size: distant objects look smaller than near ones (iv).

The other options misplace at least two cues; the last, for instance, pairs interposition with converging tracks.

Answer: C

The answer is Richardson-Klavehn and Gardiner.

Richardson-Klavehn and Gardiner are the memory researchers who built their studies of stem completion on the retrieval intentionality criterion, comparing incidental and intentional tests and measuring whether people were aware of remembering. They varied the level of processing at study (for example semantic against non-semantic encoding) and examined its effect on priming and on awareness. Their 1998 paper is titled 'Depth-of-processing effects on priming in stem completion'.

Schott et al. (2005) used fMRI to separate implicit and explicit retrieval, but their study task was a single one, counting the syllables of each word, with no deep against shallow comparison, so it was not a levels-of-processing procedure. Jacoby and Dallas are known for relating recognition to perceptual identification, and Gardiner and Java for the remember/know procedure; neither pair is the one the stem names.

Answer: D

Tolman's theory is not a stimulus-response theory.

Tolman's purposive behaviourism is a cognitive theory of learning. His rats learned cognitive maps of a maze and showed latent learning without reinforcement, which suggested that learning is the acquisition of expectations about the environment, not of S-R connections.

Thorndike's connectionism and law of effect, Pavlov's classical conditioning and Skinner's operant conditioning all describe learning as the strengthening of associations between stimuli and responses, and are classed as S-R theories.

Answer: A

The pairing is unfamiliar; familiar.

Bottom-up processing builds a percept from the sensory features upward. It dominates when a stimulus is unfamiliar, because there is no stored knowledge to guide interpretation. Top-down processing uses expectations, context and prior knowledge, and dominates with familiar stimuli, such as reading well-known words.

Reversing the pair gets the relationship backwards. Both kinds of processing work in every sense, so visual versus auditory is wrong, and perceptual versus subliminal does not describe the distinction at all.