Attention, Perception, Learning and Memory Questions and Answers

Answer: B

This is the Ponzo illusion.

Two identical horizontal lines are drawn between two lines that converge towards the top, like railway tracks receding into the distance. The upper line looks longer, although both lines are the same length and cast the same image on the retina. The usual explanation is size constancy: the converging lines signal depth, so the upper line is taken to be farther away and is therefore seen as larger.

The Muller-Lyer illusion uses arrowhead fins at the ends of two lines, not converging lines. 'Visual illusion' and 'depth illusion' are general categories, not the name of this particular figure.

Answer: B

This is the Hick-Hyman law.

Hick (1952) and Hyman (1953) showed that choice reaction time increases linearly with the amount of information to be processed, measured in bits: with N equally likely alternatives, reaction time rises with the logarithm of N.

\[ RT = a + b \log_{2} N \]

Donders devised the subtractive method of measuring mental processes from reaction times. Posner and Mitchell's letter-matching studies compared physical and name identity. 'Matters-Millers' is not a law of reaction time.

Answer: B

The correct code is a-4, b-3, c-1, d-2.

• The trichromatic theory describes the first level of colour processing, in the retina, where three types of cone respond to short, medium and long wavelengths (4).
• The opponent-process theory describes the second stage, in ganglion cells and the thalamus, where signals are coded as red-green, blue-yellow and black-white pairs (3).
• Retinal disparity is the slight difference between the images of an object seen by the left and right eyes, a binocular depth cue (1).
• Convergence is the turning inward of the eyes to focus on a nearby object (2).

The modern view reconciles the two colour theories as successive stages, which is why the order matters here.

Answer: A

The key's answer is that both (A) and (R) are true, but (R) is not the correct explanation of (A).

Collins and Quillian (1969) found that people take longer to verify 'A shark is an animal' than 'A shark is a fish', so A is true. In their model, concepts are nodes in a hierarchy (shark under fish, fish under animal), and verifying a statement means searching along the links; 'animal' is two links away from 'shark' and 'fish' only one, so the search takes longer.

R says that nearer superordinate categories are easier to recall than remote ones. That is a restatement of the finding, and it speaks of recall rather than of verification time; it does not give the model's mechanism, the number of links traversed in the network. So the key treats R as true but not the explanation, ruling out options B, C and D.

Answer: C

The phenomenon is the tip-of-the-tongue state.

A person is sure he knows a word or name and that it will come back, and may even recall its first letter or number of syllables, but cannot retrieve it at that moment. Brown and McNeill (1966) studied it by reading out definitions of rare words, and it shows that information can be stored but temporarily inaccessible.

Suppression is deliberately pushing a thought out of mind, and repression, in psychoanalytic theory, is unconsciously keeping threatening material out of awareness; neither involves the confident feeling of knowing. Interference is forgetting caused by other learning, a broader account of forgetting rather than this specific experience.

Answer: B

Better recall of the first items in a list is the primacy effect.

In free recall of a list, the serial position curve is U-shaped. Items at the beginning are recalled well because they received more rehearsal and were transferred to long-term memory. Items at the end are also recalled well, because they are still in short-term memory at the time of recall.

That second effect, better recall of the last items, is the recency effect, so option A names the wrong end of the list. 'Primary recall' is not the term, and recognition is a different way of testing memory, not this effect.

Answer: A

The two problems are that speech is continuous and a single phoneme sounds different in different contexts.

The first is the segmentation problem: in the acoustic signal there are no clear pauses between words, yet listeners hear separate words. The second is the lack of invariance: because of coarticulation, the same phoneme is pronounced differently depending on the sounds around it, so the /d/ in 'dee' and 'doo' are acoustically quite different. Context helps listeners solve both problems.

Speech is not monotonous; it varies in pitch and stress, so options C and D are wrong. Option B states the variability problem the wrong way round: the issue is that one phoneme has many acoustic forms.

Answer: C

Logan and Etherton proposed the attentional hypothesis of automatization.

Gordon Logan and Joseph Etherton (1994) argued that what is learned as a task becomes automatic depends on attention: only what is attended to during practice is encoded into the memory instances that later make performance automatic, and unattended material is not learned. This builds on Logan's instance theory of automaticity.

Attentional capture is the involuntary drawing of attention by a salient stimulus, studied by Yantis and others. Automatic processing in general was described by Shiffrin and Schneider. 'Theory of future integration' is not their proposal.

Answer: A

The model is by McClelland and Rumelhart (printed 'Rumelhalt').

McClelland and Rumelhart's interactive activation model (1981) explains letter and word perception with three levels of units, features, letters and words, connected by excitatory and inhibitory links. Activation flows both bottom-up and top-down, which explains the word superiority effect: letters are identified better in words than alone.

Reicher (1969) discovered the word superiority effect but did not offer this model. James Gibson developed the ecological theory of direct perception, and Kozlowski and Cutting studied recognition of a walker's sex from point-light displays of gait.

Answer: B

Tolman's types of learning are place and response learning.

Edward Tolman and his colleagues (Tolman, Ritchie and Kalish, 1946) contrasted place learning, in which a rat learns where the goal is and reaches it by whatever route is open, with response learning, in which it learns a fixed sequence of turns. Their maze studies showed that place learning was usually easier, supporting Tolman's idea of cognitive maps.

Observational learning belongs to Bandura, not Tolman. 'Sign and solution learning' are the two kinds of learning in Mowrer's two-factor theory. Observational and cognitive learning is a loose pairing that is not Tolman's distinction.