Attention, Perception, Learning and Memory Questions and Answers

Answer: A

A person's knowledge about the world is their semantic memory.

Endel Tulving distinguished semantic memory, general knowledge of facts, concepts and meanings (that Delhi is the capital of India, what a bird is), from episodic memory, the memory of personal events located in time and place. Both are forms of explicit, declarative long-term memory.

Implicit memory is memory without conscious recollection, such as skills and priming. Consciousness is awareness, not a memory store. Long-term memory is the broad store that contains semantic memory, but it also holds episodic and procedural memory, so semantic memory is the specific term.

Answer: D

Loss of memory for events before a brain injury is retrograde amnesia.

Retrograde amnesia affects memories formed before the injury, often most severely those from the period just before it, as when a person cannot remember the accident or the days leading up to it.

Anterograde amnesia is the inability to form new memories after the injury, as in the case of H.M. Proactive interference is old learning disrupting new learning, which is ordinary forgetting rather than amnesia. 'Retractive interference' is not a term in use; the related concept is retroactive interference, where new learning disrupts old.

Answer: C

A liberal criterion produces points above the no bias line.

On an ROC graph, hit rate is plotted against false-alarm rate. The 'no bias' line is the minor diagonal, along which the observer is neither inclined to say 'yes' nor 'no'. A liberal observer says 'yes' readily, which raises both hits and false alarms and moves the point towards the upper right of the graph, above that line. A conservative observer's points fall below it, towards the lower left.

Points near the line indicate an unbiased criterion, and points below or far below it indicate a conservative one.

Answer: C

One of the most effective ways to make memory distinctive is mental imagery.

Forming vivid images makes items stand out and gives them a second code. Paivio's dual-coding theory explains why: concrete words that can be pictured are stored both verbally and as images, and are remembered better than abstract words. Bizarre or interactive images are especially memorable, which is why imagery underlies most mnemonic techniques.

Rehearsal maintains information but simple repetition does not make it distinctive. Cues help retrieval but do not create distinctiveness. Concentration aids attention, not the distinctiveness of the memory trace.

Answer: C

Semantic memory is not one of the stages in the Atkinson-Shiffrin model.

Atkinson and Shiffrin's multi-store model (1968) describes three stores through which information passes: sensory memory, which holds sensory input very briefly; short-term memory, which holds a small amount for a short time; and long-term memory, which stores information more or less permanently.

Semantic memory is a type of long-term memory described later by Endel Tulving (1972), not a separate stage in the multi-store model.

Answer: B

The law of Pragnanz states that the best, simplest and most stable organisation will be perceived.

Pragnanz ('good form') is the central Gestalt law of perceptual organisation. Of the possible ways of organising a stimulus, people tend to see the one that is simplest, most regular, symmetrical and stable. Overlapping circles are seen as two circles, not as a complex set of curved shapes.

Familiarity can influence perception, but it is not what the law states. Size is not the criterion either; the law concerns simplicity and good form, not the largest or smallest possibility.

Answer: B

Poor children perceived coins as larger than they actually are.

In Bruner and Goodman's classic 1947 study, ten-year-old children adjusted a circle of light to match the size of coins. All the children overestimated the coins, more for higher values, and children from poor families overestimated them more than children from well-off families. The study was taken as evidence that needs and values influence perception.

The poor children did not see coins as smaller, the same size or inconsistently sized; the systematic finding was overestimation.

Answer: B

The illusion is the phi phenomenon.

Max Wertheimer's experiments of 1912, which launched Gestalt psychology, showed that two lights flashed in quick succession at different places are seen as one light moving. Textbooks give the name phi phenomenon to this perception of movement from a rapid series of still images, the basis of motion pictures and moving neon signs.

'Apparent motion' is the general heading under which the phi phenomenon is classed, but the question asks for the named illusion. Isomorphism is the Gestalt idea that brain activity mirrors the structure of experience, and figure-ground is the organisation of a scene into an object and its background; neither involves motion.

Answer: B

The effect is the state-dependent memory effect.

State-dependent memory is better recall when a person's internal state at retrieval (for example under alcohol or another drug) matches the state at learning. Eich's review of the drug studies (1980) found that the effect appears reliably in free recall but is largely absent in recognition tests, because the item itself, presented for recognition, is a strong enough cue to override the missing state cue.

The spacing effect, better memory for study spread over time, appears in recall and recognition alike. Cue overload, the weakening of a retrieval cue linked to too many items, is likewise not tied to recall. Mood-dependent memory is a weaker, less consistent variant studied mainly through mood induction, and the classic recall-only finding is the one stated for state-dependent memory.

Answer: A

It is an example of social learning.

In Bandura's social learning theory, people acquire behaviour by observing a model and imitating it. The children hear the teacher say 'A for Apple' and reproduce the same words, which is learning through observation and imitation of a model.

Social cognition is how people perceive and think about others and social situations. A social attitude is an evaluative orientation towards a social object. Socialization is the broad, lifelong process through which a person takes on the norms and roles of a society; a single act of imitation in class is better described as social learning.