COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY – Revision paper answers

1. What is Cognitive Psychology?

a. It is the attempt to understand human cognition by observing the behavior of peple
performing various cognitive tasks.
2. Name the four main approaches to human cognition?
a. Experimental Cognitive Psychology
b. Cognitive Neuroscience
c. Cognitive Neuropsychology
d. Computational Cognitive Science
3. Explain the term parallel processing
a. It is when two or more cognitive processes occur at the same time.
4. Differentiate between rods and cones
a.
Rods Cones
Very light sensitive Sensitive to certain colors
Achromatic vision Color vision
Vision in dim light (scotopic vision) Can best see in bright light
Low spatial acuity High spatial acuity

5. What is the main pathway between the eye and the cortex?
a. Retina-geniculate-Striate pathway.
6. What are the three types of opponent processes in the visual system according to opponent
processing theory of vision?
a. Red-green channel: perception of green when it responds in one way and red when
responding in the opposite way.
b. Blue-yellow channel: produces perceptrion of blue or yellow in the same fashion.
c. Achromatic channel: produces the perception of white at one extreme and of black at the
other.
7. What is the name of the disorder which involves brain damage in which there is little or no
color perception, but form and motion perception are relatively intact.
a. Achromatopsia
8. With examples explain proximity and continuity according to gestalts law of organization?
a. Proximity: Objects that are close together are grouped together.
b. Continuity: Smooth continuity is preserved by perceptual mechanism than in favor of abrupt
edges.
9. What are the steps involved in Object recognition proposed by Biederman?
a. An early edge extraction stage, responsive to differences in surface characteristics, namely,
luminance, texture, or color, providing a line drawing description of the object.
b. The next step is to decide how a visual object should be segmented to establish its parts or
components.
c. The other major element is to decide which edge information from an object possesses the
important characteristic of remaining invariant across different viewing angles.
 10. Define Part–whole effect:
a. The realization that it is easier to recognize a face part when it is presented within a whole
face rather than in isolation.
11. The pattern of light reaching the eye is an optic array; this structured light contains all the
visual information from the environment striking the eye. The optic array provides
unambiguous or invariant information about the layout of objects in spaces. This information
comes in many forms, name three.
a. Texture gradient
b. Affordances
c. Optic flow patterns
12. Nilli Lavie in the mid 90’s originated the perceptual load theory to resolve the debate in
attention research on the role of attention in information processing. Explain this theory.
a. Perception has limited capacity but operates in automated, involuntary manner on all the
information within its capacity.
b. During high perceptual load capacity is fully exhausted by the processing of the attended
information, resulting in no perception of unattended information.
c. During low perceptual load, spare capacity from processing the information in the attended
task will inevitably spill over resulting in the perception of task-irrelevant information that
people intended to ignore.
13. Define affordance
a. It is the potential use of an object.
14. Define texture gradient
a. It is the rate of change of texture density from the front to the back of a slanting object.
15. Define focus of expansion.
a. It is the point towards which someone who is in motion is moving.
16. Define optic flow
a. It is the changes in the pattern of light reaching an observer when there is movement of the
observation and aspects of environment.
17. What are the main characteristics of planning system of planning and control model?
Planning Control model
• It is used mostly before the initiation of movement. • It is used during the carrying out of a movement.
• It selects an appropriate target (e.g., pint of beer), • It ensures that movements are accurate, making
decides how it should be grasped, and works out the adjustments if necessary based on visual feedback.
timing of the movement.
• It is influenced by factors such as the individual’s • It is influenced only by the target object’s spatial
goals, the nature of the target object, the visual context, characteristics (e.g., size, shape, orientation) and not
and various cognitive processes. by the surrounding context.
• It is relatively slow because it makes use of much • It is fairly fast because it makes use of little
information and is influenced by conscious processes. information and is not susceptible to conscious
influence.

• Planning depends on a visual representation located in

the inferior parietal lobe together with motor processes
in the frontal lobes and basal ganglia More specifically,
the inferior parietal lobe is involved in integrating
information about object identification and context with
motor planning to permit tool and object use.

18. Explain any two theory of forgetting.

a. Interference theory states that forgetting occurs because memories interfere with and
disrupt one another, in other words forgetting occurs because of interference from other
memories
i. There are two ways in which interference can cause forgetting:
1. Proactive interference (pro=forward) occurs when you cannot learn a new
task because of an old task that had been learnt.
2. Retroactive interference (retro=backward) occurs when you forget a
previously learnt task due to the learning of a new task.

b. Repression is the motivated state of forgetting traumatic or other threatening events.

i. According to Freud “The essence of repression lies simply in the function of rejecting
and keeping something out of consciousness.”
ii. He claimed that very threatening or traumatic memories are often unable to gain
access to conscious awareness, - term repression to refer to this phenomenon.
19. Explain Terisman’s Attenuation theory
a. According to Treisman’s attenuation theory selection occurs in two stages.
b. The first stage replaces the filter in Broadbent’s theory with an attenuator.
c. The second stage involves a dictionary unit.
d. The attenuator analyzes incoming messages by not only physical characteristic but also by
the language and meaning of the message, and the messages are then let through into the
final output (dictionary unit).
e. The dictionary unit has stored words, each of which has a different threshold for activation,
more important words have a lower threshold and can be detected easily.
f. Treisman proposed that not only does the attended message get through but important parts
of the unattended message can get through as well.
20. Example of a semantic memory?
a. Semantic memory is the aspect of human memory that corresponds to general knowledge of
objects, word meanings, facts and people, without connection to any particular time or place.
i. E.g.: Knowing what type of ball is used for football
21. Example of an episodic memory?
a. Episodic memory involves storage (and retrieval) of specific events or episodes occurring in
a given place at a given time.
i. E.g.: what you ate for breakfast?
22. What is a flashbulb memory give an example?
a. It is vivid and detailed memories of dramatic events.
i. E.g.: Tsunami
23. What is prospective memory?
a. Prospective memory is a form of memory that involves remembering to perform a planned
action or recall a planned intention at some future point in time.
24. What is a concept?
a. A concept is a mental representation of a class or individual and deals with what is being
represented and how that information is typically used during the categorization.
25. What is a spectrograph?
a. Spectrograph: an instrument used to produce visible records of the sound frequencies in
speech.
26. Explain cohort model of listening?
a. According to cohort model there are three stages of word recognition.
b. Stage 1- activate a set of possible candidates
c. Stage 2 – narrow the search to one candidate
d. Stage 3 – integrate single candidate into semantic and syntactic context
27. Explain what Lexical decision task is.
a. A task in which individuals decide as rapidly as possible whether a letter string forms a word.
28. The Gestalt psychologists argued that problems often require insight, and past experience
sometimes disrupts current problem solving. What is an insight?
a. Insight involves a sudden restructuring of a problem and is sometimes accompanied by the
“ah-ha experience”
29. What are the two main stores in the sensory store of memory according to the multi store
model?
a. Iconic and Echoic store.
30. What are the main disorders related to reading?
a. Phonological dyslexia
b. Deep dyslexia
c. Surface dyslexia
31. Explain confirmation bias?
a. It is a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one’s
preconceptions.
32. Define the term heuristics and name two types of heuristics learned in this module.
a. Heuristics: rules of thumb that are cognitively undemanding and often produce
approximately accurate answers
i. Mean-end analysis
ii. Hill climbing.
33. What are the two main sensory stores?
a. Iconic and Echoic
34. What are the 4 components of working memory?
a. A modality-free central executive resembling attention.
b. A phonological loop holding information in a phonological (speech-based) form.
c. A visuo-spatial sketchpad specialized for spatial and visual coding.
d. An episodic buffer, which is a temporary storage system that can hold and integrate
information from the phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, and long-term memory.
35. What are the two components of Visuo-spatial sketchpad?
a. Visual cache: This stores information about visual form and color.
b. Inner scribe: This processes spatial and movement information.
36. Explain internal retrieval cues?
 a. Means that if we are not in the same physical and emotional state as we were when the
learning happened, we may not be able to access the memory.
37. How do repression and motivated forgetting differ?
a. Motivated forgetting: when people purposefully forget things.
b. Repression: when certain events are stressful and anxiety provoking, they are banished to the
unconscious.
38. Give an example for proactive interference.
a. When your old telephone number interferes while remembering your new telephone number.
39. How do the systems involved in implicit learning differ from those involved in explicit learning
and memory?
a. Robustness
b. IQ independence
c. Age independence
d. low variability
e. commonality of the process
40. What are the three types of memory stores proposed in multistore model?
a. Sensory stores
b. Short-term store
c. Long-term store
41. What the two theorized modes of attention?
a. Active: Attention is active when controlled in a top down way by the individual’s goals or
expectations.
b. Passive: Passive when controlled in a bottom-up way by external stimuli.
c. Passive: Passive when controlled in a bottom-up way by external stimuli.
42. What happens during high perceptual load?
a. Capacity is fully exhausted by the processing of the attended information, resulting in no
perception of unattended information- Early selection.
43. What are the three important factors that determine how well we can perform two activities at
the same time?
a. Task similarity
b. Task difference
c. Practice
44. What is perceptual segregation?
a. Perceptual segregation is the human ability to work out accurately which parts of presented
visual information belong together and thus form separate objects.
45. What is proximity according to the Gestalt law of organization?
a. Elements that are close are often grouped together.
46. Recognition by components theory provides a bottom up explanation for object recognition.
What is a Geon according to this theory?
a. Objects main components or parts.
47. What is holistic processing?
a. It involves strong integration across the whole object.
48. What is the main pathway between eye and cortex?
a. Retina–geniculate–striate pathway.
49. There are two relatively independent channels or pathway within this system (retina-
geniculate-striate system): name these two systems?
a. Parvocellular
b. Magnocellular
50. What is functional specialization?
a. Functional specialization is when different parts of the cortex are specialized for different
visual functions.
51. What is color constancy?
a. The tendency for any given object to be perceived as having the same color under widely
varying viewing conditions
52. What is size constancy?
a. The tendency for any given object to appear the same size whether its size in the retinal
image is large or small.
53. What is serial processing?
a. Processing in which one process is completed before the next one starts.
54. What is bottom up processing?
a. Processing that is directly influenced by environmental stimuli.
55. What is categorical perception?
a. Perceiving stimuli as belonging to specific categories.
56. Explain phonemic restoration effect
a. An illusion in which the listener perceives a phoneme which has been deleted from a spoken
sentence.
57. Explain the trace model
• TRACE model claims that word recognition involves interactive top-down and bottom-up
processes.
• At each level, individual nodes (corresponding to features, phonemes, or words) compete for
activation.
• Facilitatory activation from bottom-up & top-down sources.
• Inhibition from bottom-up, top-down, & lateral sources.
• Recognition occurs when network settles into stable state with a clear winner.
• This is an interactive model since higher levels interact with lower levels in order to
complete successful word recognition.
58. What is deep dysphasia?
a. A condition in which there is poor ability to repeat spoken words and especially non-words,
and there are semantic errors in repeating spoken words.
59. What is parsing?
a. An analysis of the syntactical or grammatical structure of sentences.
60. Much of the research on parsing concerns the relationship between syntactic and semantic
analysis. What are the 4 possibilities?
a. Syntactic analysis generally precedes (and influences) semantic analysis.
b. Semantic analysis usually occurs prior to syntactic analysis.
c. Syntactic and semantic analysis occur at the same time.
d. Syntax and semantics are very closely associated, and have a hand-in-glove relationship.
61. Explain pragmatics with examples.
 a. Pragmatics is concerned with practical language use and comprehension, especially those
aspects going beyond the literal meaning of what is said and taking account of the current
social context.
i. E.g.: how the same word can have different meanings in different settings (Exposed)
62. What are the three main types of inferences?
a. Logical inferences depend only on the meanings of words.
b. Bridging inferences establish coherence between the current part of the text and the
preceding text, and so are also known as backward inferences.
c. Elaborative inferences add details to the text by making use of our world knowledge.
63. Explain spoonerism
a. It is a speech error in which the initial letter or letters of two words are structured.
64. Explain anomia
a. A condition caused by brain damage in which there is an impaired ability to name objects.
65. Name the four main approaches to human cognition?
a. Experimental Cognitive Psychology
b. Cognitive Neuroscience
c. Cognitive Neuropsychology
d. Computational Cognitive Science
66. Explain the term parallel processing
a. It is when two or more cognitive processes occur at the same time.
67. Differentiate between rods and cones.
a.
Rods Cones
Very light sensitive Sensitive to certain colors
Achromatic vision Color vision
Vision in dim light (scotopic vision) Can best see in bright light
Low spatial acuity High spatial acuity

68. What is the main pathway between the eye and the cortex
a. Retina-geniculate-striate pathway
69. What are the three types of opponent processes in the visual system according to opponent
processing theory of vision?
a. Red-green channel: perception of green when it responds in one way and red when
responding in the opposite way.
b. Blue-yellow channel: produces perception of blue or yellow in the same fashion.
c. Achromatic channel: produces the perception of white at one extreme and of black at the
other.
70. What is the name of the disorder which involves brain damage in which there is little or no
color perception, but form and motion perception are relatively intact?
a. Achromatopsia.
71. With examples explain continuity according to gestalts law of organization?
a. Smooth continuity is preserved by perceptual mechanism than in favor of abrupt edges.
72. Define Part–whole effect.
 a. The realization that it is easier to recognize a face part when it is presented within a whole
face rather than in isolation.
73. The pattern of light reaching the eye is an optic array; this structured light contains all the
visual information from the environment striking the eye. The optic array provides
unambiguous or invariant information about the layout of objects in spaces. This information
comes in many forms, name three.
a. Texture gradient
b. Affordances
c. Optic flow patterns
74. Lee (1976) argued that it is unnecessary to perceive the distance or speed of an approaching
object to work out the time to contact, provided that we are approaching it (or it is approaching
us) with constant velocity. And proposed the theory which roots from the tau, what is tau?
a. Lee defined tau as the size of an object’s retinal image divided by its rate of expansion.
b. Tau specifies the time to contact with an approaching object – the faster the rate of expansion
of the image, the less time there is to contact.
75. Nilli Lavie in the mid 90’s originated the perceptual load theory to resolve the debate in
attention research on the role of attention in information processing. Explain this theory.
a. Perception has limited capacity but operates in automated, involuntary manner on all the
information within its capacity.
b. During high perceptual load capacity is fully exhausted by the processing of the attended
information, resulting in no perception of unattended information.
c. During low perceptual load, spare capacity from processing the information in the attended
task will inevitably spill over resulting in the perception of task-irrelevant information that
people intended to ignore.
76. Explain Triesman’s Attenuation theory
a. According to Treisman’s attenuation theory selection occurs in two stages.
b. The first stage replaces the filter in Broadbent’s theory with an attenuator.
c. The second stage involves a dictionary unit.
d. The attenuator analyzes incoming messages by not only physical characteristic but also by
the language and meaning of the message, and the messages are then let through into the
final output (dictionary unit).
e. The dictionary unit has stored words, each of which has a different threshold for activation,
more important words have a lower threshold and can be detected easily.
f. Treisman proposed that not only does the attended message get through but important parts
of the unattended message can get through as well.
77. Example of a semantic memory?
a. Semantic memory is the aspect of human memory that corresponds to general knowledge of
objects, word meanings, facts and people, without connection to any particular time or place.
78. Example of an episodic memory?
 a. Episodic memory involves storage (and retrieval) of specific events or episodes occurring in
a given place at a given time.
79. What is a flashbulb memory give an example?
a. It is vivid and detailed memories of dramatic events.
i. E.g.: Events of 9/11.
80. What is a concept?
a. A concept is a mental representation of a class or individual and deals with what is being
represented and how that information is typically used during the categorization.
81. Prototype approach is a model of concept organization, explain this approach with an example
a. Theory based on the idea of graded categories.
b. It suggests that each category has more and less central, or typical, members.
c. It is a set of the most characteristic attributes of a category, and differs from one person to
another.
i. For example, robin is a more typical ‘bird’ than a penguin is.
82. Explain cohort model of listening?
a. The original cohort model emphasized interactions between bottom-up and top-down
processes in spoken word recognition.
b. However, Marslen- Wilson revised his cohort model to increase the emphasis on bottom-up
processes driven by the auditory stimulus.
c. According to cohort model there are three stages of word recognition.
d. Stage 1- activate a set of possible candidates
e. Stage 2 – narrow the search to one candidate
f. Stage 3 – integrate single candidate into semantic and syntactic context
83. What are the criticisms faced by Gestalt psychologists?
a. All evidence based on two dimensional drawings.
b. Produced descriptions of interesting perceptual phenomena, but failed to provide adequate
explanation.
c. Did not consider fully what happens
84. What are the two main stores in the sensory store of memory according to the multi store
model?
a. Echoic and Iconic
85. What are the main disorders related to reading?
a. Phonological dyslexia: a condition in which familiar words can be read but there is impaired
ability to read unfamiliar words and non-words.
b. Deep dyslexia: a condition in which reading unfamiliar words is impaired and there are
semantic reading errors.
c. Surface dyslexia: a condition in which regular words can be read but there is impaired ability
to read irregular words.
86. What is a cognitive interview?
a. The cognitive interview (CI) is a method of interviewing eyewitnesses and victims about
what they remember from a crime scene.
87. What is neglecting base rate?
 a. People often take less account of the prior odds (base-rate information) than they should
according to Bayes’ theorem.
b. Base-rate information: the relative frequency of an event within a population.
c. They focused only on the evidence of the witness.
88. Define the term heuristics and name two types of heuristics learned in this module
a. Heuristics: rules of thumb that are cognitively undemanding and often produce
approximately accurate answers
i. Mean-end analysis
ii. Hill climbing.
89. What is functional specialization?
a. Functional specialization is when different parts of the cortex are specialized for different
visual functions.
90. What is color constancy?
a. The tendency for any given object to be perceived as having the same color under widely
varying viewing conditions
91. What is size constancy?
a. The tendency for any given object to appear the same size whether its size in the retinal
image is large or small.
92. What is categorical perception?
a. Perceiving stimuli as belonging to specific categories.
93. Explain phonemic restoration effect
a. An illusion in which the listener perceives a phoneme which has been deleted from a spoken
sentence.
94. Explain the trace model
• TRACE model claims that word recognition involves interactive top-down and bottom-up
processes.
• At each level, individual nodes (corresponding to features, phonemes, or words) compete for
activation.
• Facilitatory activation from bottom-up & top-down sources.
• Inhibition from bottom-up, top-down, & lateral sources.
• Recognition occurs when network settles into stable state with a clear winner.
• This is an interactive model since higher levels interact with lower levels in order to
complete successful word recognition.
95. What are the 4 components of working memory?
a. A modality-free central executive resembling attention.
b. A phonological loop holding information in a phonological (speech-based) form.
c. A visuo-spatial sketchpad specialized for spatial and visual coding.
d. An episodic buffer, which is a temporary storage system that can hold and integrate
information from the phonological loop, the visuo-spatial sketchpad, and long-term memory.
96. What are the two components of Visuo-spatial sketchpad?
 a. Visual cache: This stores information about visual form and color.
b. Inner scribe: This processes spatial and movement information.
97. Explain internal retrieval cues?
a. State cues mean that if we are not in the same physical and emotional state as we were when
the learning happened, we may not be able to access the memory.
98. How does repression and motivated forgetting differ?
a. Motivated forgetting: when people purposefully forget things.
b. Repression: when certain events are stressful and anxiety provoking, they are banished to the
unconscious.
99. Explain social functionalist approach of decision making
a. According to Tetlock’s social functionalist approach, decision making is strongly influenced
by the social context.
b. More specifically, when making decisions we often focus on accountability and on the need
to justify ourselves to others.
100. With the use of an example explain deductive reasoning
a. Deductive reasoning: reasoning to a conclusion from some set of premises or statements,
where that conclusion follows necessarily from the assumption that the premises are true.
i. Example: Since all humans are mortal, and Ali is a human, then Ali is mortal.
101. With the use of an example explain inductive reasoning
a. Inductive reasoning: forming generalizations (which may be probable but are not certain)
from examples or sample phenomena.
i. Example: Ali is a terrorist. Ali is a Muslim. Therefore, all Muslims are terrorists.
102. What are the two main assumptions of prospect theory?
a. Individuals identify a reference point generally representing their current state.
b. Individuals are much more sensitive to potential losses than to potential gains; this is loss
aversion.
c. Loss aversion: the tendency to be more sensitive to potential losses than to potential gains.
d. This explains why most people are unwilling to accept a 50 –50 bet unless the amount they
might win is about twice the amount they might lose.
103. List down four functions of a concept
a. Learning of new concepts
b. Understanding
c. Prediction
d. Reasoning
104. List the 4 main language skills.
a. Listening
b. Reading
c. Writing
d. Speaking
105. Which part of the brain is responsible for face recognition?
a. Fusiform face area in the lateral fusiform.
106. What are the three stages of learning and memory?
a. Encoding
b. Storage
 c. Retrieval
107. Hierarchical model of concept classification, means that there are more and less specific ways of
classifying things. List the 3 levels of classification that are common in a hierarchical model of
concepts with examples.
a. Superordinate categories (e.g. furniture)
b. Basic-level categories (e.g. chair)
c. Subordinate categories (e.g. rocking chair)
108. In the theory of object recognition. Marr proposed a series of representations (i.e., descriptions)
providing increasingly detailed information about the visual environment. List all the
representations proposed by Marr.
a. Primal sketch: this provides a two-dimensional description of the main light-intensity
changes in the visual input, including information about edges, contours, and blobs.
b. 2.5-D sketch: this incorporates a description of the depth and orientation of visible surfaces,
making use of information provided by shading, texture, motion, binocular disparity, and so
on. Like the primal sketch, it is observer-centered or viewpointdependent.
c. 3-D model representation: this describes three-dimensionally the shapes of objects and their
relative positions independent of the observer’s viewpoint (it is thus viewpoint invariant).
109. Write down two differences between prospective and retrospective memory?
a.
Prospective Retrospective
• focuses on when to do something, • Involves remembering what we know about something
• Has low informational content. • High in informational content.

110. With the use of examples differentiate between viewpoint- variant and viewpoint-invariant
approached of object recognition.
a.
viewpoint- variant viewpoint- invariant
• Typically used when object, recognition • Mechanisms are more important when the
involves making easy categorical task requires difficult within-category
discriminations. discrimination.
• Example: Cars and bicycles. • Example: Different models of cars.

111. What are the two types of amnesia?

a. Anterograde amnesia: a marked impairment in the ability to remember new information
learned after the onset of amnesia.
b. Retrograde amnesia: problems in remembering events occurring prior to the onset of
amnesia
112. What are the two theorized modes of attention?
a. Active: Attention is active when controlled in a top down way by the individual’s goals or
expectations.
b. Passive: Passive when controlled in a bottom-up way by external stimuli.
113. Describe the following disorders.
Word meaning deafness A condition in which there is a selective impairment of the ability to understand
spoken (but not written) language.
Agrammatism A condition in which speech production lacks grammatical structure and many
function words and word endings are omitted; often also associated with
comprehension difficulties.
Phonological dyslexia A condition in which familiar words can be read but there is impaired ability to
read unfamiliar words and non-words.
Visual agnosia A condition in which there are great problems in recognizing objects presented
visually even though visual information reaches the visual cortex.
Neglect (or unilateral A disorder of visuak attention in which stimuli or parts of stimuli presented to the
neglect) side opposite the brain damage are undetected and not responded.
Achromatopsia Condition involving brain damage in which there is little or no color perception,
but form and motion perception are relatively intact.
Akinetopsia Condition in which stationary objects are generally perceived fairly normally but
motion perception is often deficient.
Phonological dysgraphia A condition caused by brain damage in which familiar words can be spelled
reasonably well but not words.
Deep dysphasia A condition in which there is a poor ability to repeat spoken words and especially
non-words and there are semantic errors in repeating spoken words.
Anomia A condition caused by brain damage in which there is an impaired ability to name
objects.