Cognitive Psychology Spring 2020 Midterm

Chapter 1:

1. How is cognitive psychology relevant to everyday experience?

2. How is it possible to study the inner workings of the mind when we can’t really see the mind
directly?

3. What was the cognitive revolution?

Chapter 2:

1. How is information transmitted from one place to another in the nervous system?

2. How are things in the environment, such as faces and trees, represented in the brain?

3. What are neural networks, and what is their role in cognition?

Chapter 3:

1. Why can two different people experience different perceptions in response to the same
stimulus?

2. How does perception depend on a person’s knowledge about characteristics of the

environment?

3. How does the brain become tuned to respond best to things likely to appear in the
environment?

4. What is the connection between perception and action?

Chapter 4:

1. Is it possible to focus attention on just one thing, even if there are many other things going on at
the same time?

2. Under what conditions can we pay attention to more than one thing at a time?

3. What does attention research tell us about the effect of talking on cell phones while driving a
car?

4. Is it true that we are not paying attention to a large fraction of the things happening in our
environment?

Chapter 5:

1. How is memory involved in processes such as doing a math problem?

2. Do we use the same memory system to remember things we have seen and things we have
heard?
Cognitive Psychology Spring 2020 Midterm

Chapter 6:

1. How does damage to the brain affect the ability to remember what has happened in the past
and the ability to form new memories of ongoing experiences?

2. How are memories for personal experiences, like what you did last summer, different from
memories for facts, like the capital of your state?

3. How do the different types of memory interact in our everyday experience?

Chapter 7:

1. What is the best way to store information in long-term memory (LTM)?

2. What are some techniques we can use to help us get information out of long-term memory
when we need it?

3. How is it possible that a lifetime of experiences and accumulated knowledge can be stored in
neurons?

4. How can the results of memory research be used to create more effective study techniques?