Attention, Perception, Learning and Memory Questions and Answers

Answer: C

This is the encoding failure explanation of forgetting.

Information that is never attended to is never encoded into long-term memory, so it cannot be retrieved later. Sumit was not paying attention to his mother, so her words never entered memory; what looks like forgetting is really a failure to store them in the first place.

Interference is forgetting caused by other learning that competes with the memory. Memory trace (decay) theory says stored traces fade with time. Repression is motivated forgetting of threatening material. All three assume the memory was stored and later lost, which is not the case here.

Answer: C

The keyed answer is Sensory threshold.

The staircase method is an adaptive form of the method of limits: the stimulus is made weaker after each 'yes' and stronger after each 'no', so the presentations cluster around the threshold and the reversal points are averaged. The same procedure is used to find the absolute threshold (the weakest detectable stimulus) and the difference threshold (the smallest detectable change), so the general term covering what it measures is the sensory threshold.

'Absolute' and 'Difference' each name only one of its two uses, which is why the key prefers the general term. 'Estimate' is not a kind of threshold.

Answer: A

The correct statements are (2) and (4) only.

Frequency, the number of sound-wave cycles per second, is measured in hertz (2), and the amplitude of a sound wave is expressed as a sound pressure level in decibels (4).

Statement (1) is wrong: pitch is the perceived quality that depends mainly on frequency, while loudness depends mainly on amplitude. Statement (3) is wrong because the correspondence is not exact: loudness also depends on frequency, so two tones of the same intensity but different frequencies can sound unequally loud, as the equal-loudness contours show. Any option including (1) or (3) is therefore wrong.

Answer: C

This is the Law of Pragnanz.

Pragnanz (German for 'conciseness' or 'good form') is the overarching Gestalt principle that the perceptual system organises a stimulus into the simplest, most regular and symmetrical form the conditions allow. That is why simple, symmetric figures are seen more easily than complicated, asymmetric ones.

Closure is the tendency to fill gaps and see incomplete figures as whole. Common fate is grouping elements that move in the same direction. Similarity is grouping elements that look alike. Each is a specific grouping rule, not the general preference for simplicity described here.

Answer: C

This is cue-utilization theory.

J. A. Easterbrook's cue-utilization hypothesis (1959) holds that rising arousal narrows the range of cues a person attends to. Moderate arousal helps by excluding irrelevant cues, but high arousal also starts to exclude relevant ones. High arousal is therefore beneficial only on tasks where relatively few cues have to be monitored, and harmful on complex tasks needing many. It is one explanation of the Yerkes-Dodson pattern.

Cue-initiation, cue-processing and cue-completion are not the name of this theory; each borrows the word 'cue' from it.

Answer: A

The correct matching is P-1, Q-2, R-3, S-4.

• P: the filter theory of attention, an early selection model, is Donald Broadbent's (1958) (1).
• Q: perceptual load theory, which says distractors are processed only when the main task leaves spare capacity, is Nilli Lavie's (2).
• R: feature integration theory, in which attention binds separate features into objects, is Anne Treisman and Garry Gelade's (1980) (3).
• S: research on culture and perception, showing that East Asians attend more to context and Westerners to focal objects, is Richard Nisbett's (4).

The last option gets P and Q right but swaps Treisman and Nisbett; the others misplace the theories further.

Answer: C

Signal detection can be applied only when the distributions are overlapping.

Signal detection theory pictures two distributions of internal response: one for noise alone and one for signal plus noise. When they overlap, some noise trials produce as strong a response as some signal trials, so the observer must set a criterion and will make both misses and false alarms. The analysis then separates sensitivity (d', the distance between the distributions) from response bias.

If the distributions were completely separate, every signal could be told from noise without error and there would be nothing to analyse. Equal or unequal variance is a technical assumption about the distributions, not the condition the method requires.

Answer: A

The correct sequence is perception, decision-making and response selection, response programming and execution.

The three-stage information processing model used in motor learning (Schmidt) and human factors (Wickens) follows the flow of information through the person. First the stimulus is identified (stimulus identification or perception), then a decision is made about what to do (response selection), and finally the chosen movement is organised and carried out (response programming and execution).

The other options put decision-making before perception or execution before decision, but a response cannot be chosen before the stimulus is perceived, nor carried out before it is chosen. Two of the options are printed with identical wording, and both start from decision-making.

Answer: B

This is bottom-up processing.

Bottom-up (data-driven) processing begins with the information picked up by the sensory receptors and builds up from those features to a perception of the whole. Recognising an unfamiliar shape by putting together its lines and angles is an example.

Top-down processing works in the opposite direction, from knowledge, expectations and context down to the interpretation of the input, as when context lets you read a smudged word. 'Neural processing' and 'perceptual processing' are general descriptions that do not specify where processing begins.

Answer: D

This is the key assumption of the signal detection method.

Signal detection theory separates two things that classical psychophysics merged: the observer's sensitivity to the signal (d') and the decision criterion (beta) the observer adopts about when to say 'yes'. A cautious observer and a liberal one with the same sensitivity will produce different hit and false-alarm rates, so the results depend on both.

The fast-guess and deadline models deal with the speed-accuracy trade-off in reaction time tasks. The method of (average) error is the classical method of adjustment for measuring thresholds, which assumes no separate decision criterion.