WARNING: The correct answers are NOT at the end of
this exam. You will have to figure out
the answers yourself.
1. In classical conditioning, the tendency for stimuli similar to the conditioned stimulus to evoke a response is called:
A. Higher order conditioning
B. Extinction
C. Generalization
D. Overreaction
2. In the eye, the ____ allow us to see in dim light, while the _____ allow us to see color.
A. Photoreceptors; Fovea
B. Fovea; Photoreceptors
C. Rods; Cones
D. Cones; Rods
3. According to Weber’s law,
A. The strength of sensory experience grows as the logarithm of the stimulus intensity.
B. It is easier to notice the difference between two light weights than between two heavy weights.
C. The difference threshold for a stimulus is a constant proportion of its intensity.
D. Both B and C.
4. According to the book, studies
of selective listening have found that:
A. People can memorize and repeat
unattended information.
B. People can process unattended
information.
C. Unattended information is
eliminated from memory.
D. Both A and B.
5. In the 1960s, doctors found that children being treated with chemotherapy often refused to eat. According to lecture, one likely explanation for this is that:
A. The children were rebelling against their parents.
B. The children were associating the nausea (caused by the chemotherapy) with the food they were eating instead of with the chemotherapy.
C. The chemotherapy was altering their brain so that they could not feel hunger.
D. The children had associated eating with receiving chemotherapy.
6. _______ is a memory for specific events, such as remembering when you broke your leg; whereas _______ is a memory for general principles, such as remembering that your friend Joe is a generous person.
A. Episodic; semantic
B. Semantic; episodic
C. Declarative; procedural
D. Procedural; declarative
7. How do sensation and perception differ?
A. Sensation involves the transduction of physical stimuli into neural, whereas perception involves the transduction of neural stimuli into physical.
B. Sensation involves the use of neural energy, whereas perception involves the use of chemical energy.
C. Sensation involves transmitting experiences generated by external stimuli whereas perception involves the organization and interpretation of sensory stimuli.
D. Sensation involves ordinary, weak external stimuli, whereas perception involves unusual or very strong stimuli.
8. A dog whose classically conditioned salivation response to a bell has been extinguished is again placed in the same experimental situation after a 20-minute time lapse. The dog’s salivation response returns briefly. This illustrates the classical conditioning principle of _____________.
A. Reinforcement
B. Stimulus Discrimination
C. Learned Helplessness
D. Spontaneous Recovery
9. Kim learned German in high school. In college she went to
A. Proactive interference
B. Retroactive interference
C. Serial order effect
D. Chunking
10. Loftus and Palmer performed a famous experiment on eyewitness testimony, in which they showed subjects a video of a car crash and then asked them questions about the video. Their experiment showed that:
A. People’s judgments about the speed of the cars was affected by the color of the cars
B. People’s judgments about the speed of the cars was affected by the sound of the cars
C. People’s judgments about the speed of the cars was affected by the words used in the phrasing of the question
D. None of the above
11. Which of the following is a psychological term meaning “sense of balance”?
A. Kinesthesis
B. Synesthesia
C. Vestibular sense
D. Transduction
12. According to the book, which of the following is true of pheromones?
A. Humans can consciously smell them.
B. They are responsible for aggressive behavior in humans.
C. They play a major role in sexual signaling in many species.
D. Both B and C.
13. Naomi’s dad decides to give her a piece of candy every five minutes for as long as she continues to do her homework. This schedule of reinforcement is called:
A. Fixed-ratio schedule
B. Variable-ratio schedule
C. Fixed-interval schedule
D. Variable-interval schedule
14. Ebbinghaus tried to memorize lists of nonsense syllables and when he tested himself found that he forgot them very fast. Researchers found that college students remembered the lists for much longer periods of time than Ebbinghaus. According to lecture, what is the most likely explanation for this?
A. Ebbinghaus had brain damage that impaired memory.
B. College students’ extensive experience with acronyms helped them make meaning out of the nonsense syllables.
C. Ebbinghaus tried to memorize many lists of such syllables and these interfered with his ability to retain any one list in his memory for very long.
D. The college students had extraordinarily high levels of IQ.
15. In _______ conditioning, a subject learns to associate two stimuli, whereas in _______ conditioning, a subject learns to associate a response with its consequences.
A. proactive; retroactive
B. retroactive; proactive
C. operant; classical
D. classical; operant
16. Which of the following is a physiological term referring to perception that takes place below the threshold of conscious awareness:
A. Opponent-processing
B. Subliminal processing
C. Transduction
D. Seduction
17. Jeannine was at a loud, crowded party talking
to a friend, when across the room she heard someone mention her name. This phenomenon (the ability to notice
important sounds even when you are not focusing on them) is known as:
A. The cocktail party phenomenon.
B. Sensitive consciousness.
C. The dichotic listening
technique.
D. The categorization of auditory information
18. When mixing colors, ________ is a physical process, and ________ is a psychological process.
A. transduction; accommodation
B. accommodation; transduction
C. subtractive mixing; additive mixing
D. additive mixing; subtractive mixing
19. Mary was telling John about
her trip to the beach. Upon hearing the words
“ocean” and “waves”, John thought of “tide” which reminded him of the laundry
detergent and he remembered that he needed to hurry home and do his
laundry. This is an example of
_________.
A. Decay theory
B. The spreading activation model
C. Motivated forgetting
D. The framing effect
20. According to the book, the phenomenon in which synaptic connections are strengthened so that postsynaptic neurons are more easily activated is known as:
A. Habituation
B. Sensitization
C. Long-term potentiation
D. Addiction
21. Which of the following most accurately expresses Thorndike’s law of effect?
A. When people get sick after eating a certain food, they develop an aversion towards that food.
B. Our minds naturally connect events that occur in sequence.
C. Behavior is controlled by its consequences: behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely.
D. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
22. According to the book, which of the following is an effective behavioral treatment of phobias?
A. Systematic desensitization
B. Stimulus discrimination
C. Counter-conditioning
D. Both A and C
23. When asked whether they would rather lose $50 or take a 50% chance to either lose no money or lose $100, people tend to take the chance rather than the certain $50 loss. According to class, this is because:
A. People are risk averse when it comes to loss
B. People are risk prone when it comes to loss
C. People like round numbers better.
D. People are bad at math.
24. According to the book, people
are more likely to remember a list of words if they use which type of encoding?
A. Visual
B. Acoustic
C. Semantic
D. All are equally likely
25. Cues to depth perception that require the use of two eyes are called ______ cues, while those that work with only one eye are called ______ cues.
A. Binocular; Monocular
B. Pictorial; Monocular
C. Opponent; Constancy
D. Constancy; Opponent
26. Marcus always gets very nervous and nauseous before his track meets. Before every track meet, he listens to his Radiohead CD. Now, after several track meets, just the sound of Radiohead is enough to make him nauseous. In this example, which is the conditioned stimulus?
A. The upcoming track meet
B. The Radiohead music
C. The nausea
D. Marcus
27. In a class demonstration, we found that it
was difficult to say the color of the letters of words that were themselves the
names of colors. This difficulty can be attributed to the fact that reading is
a(n):
A. Effortful attention task.
B. Controlled process.
C. Automatic process
(automaticity).
D. Retetrograde interference task.
28. Which of the following demonstrations from class demonstrates the distribution of rods and cones on the retina?
A. Place two dots on a page, four inches apart. If you cover one eye and bring the paper towards the face, at some point, one of the dots will disappear.
B. A white square shown on the overhead close up. After staring at the square for forty seconds, thus burning out your white color receptors, look at the blank screen. A black square seems to appear on the screen.
C. The lights are turned out, and a page full of colored letters is shown. As the eyes adjust to the darkness, the letters appear before the colors are clear.
D. As a colored square is brought into peripheral vision, the shape is identified before the color is discernable.
29. Bobby hears a song on the
radio while he’s driving. Later, when
playing the guitar, he plays the same tune but thinks that it is his original
idea. According to the book, this
misattribution is known as:
A. Cryptomnesia
B. Retrograde amnesia
C. The von restorff effect
D. Anterograde amnesia
30. In an experiment on heroin addiction, experimenters gave rats heroin in a special “heroin room” for several trials. Then, for the next dose of heroin, they took half of the rats to the “heroin room” and the other half to a new room. The rats in the new room were more likely to die from a heroin overdose than the rats taken to the “heroin room.” According to lecture, what is the most likely explanation for this result?
A. The rats in the new room suffered from isolation
B. The “heroin room” served as a conditioned stimulus that prepared the rats for the upcoming shot of heroin.
C. The “heroin room” was an unconditioned stimulus that relaxed the rats.
D. The new room caused anxiety in the rats and made them more susceptible to an overdose.
31. According to lecture, which problem solving strategy involves a step-by-step process that guarantees a solution?
A. Algorithms
B. Heuristics
C. Trial and error
D. Insight
32. According to the book, why is perception an “ill-posed problem”?
A. Because the methods scientists use to study perception are inadequate.
B. Because there are many possible solutions to explain how the brain turns 2-dimensional input into a 3-dimensional mental representation.
C. Because we cannot differentiate between sensation and perception.
D. Because perception seemingly defies the laws of physics.
33. According to the book, Bandura’s famous studies of observational learning revealed that:
A. Children who watched an adult act aggressively towards Bobo the doll were more than twice as likely to act aggressively towards the doll themselves.
B. Children who watched an adult act aggressively towards Bobo the doll were more than twice as likely to fear the adult.
C. Monkeys reared in captivity are more likely to fear snakes than monkeys reared in the wild.
D. Monkeys reared in captivity are incapable of learning fear.
34. In class we saw that more people were afraid of terrorist attacks than traffic accidents, even though traffic accidents are much more likely. This is probably because terrorist attacks are more publicized than traffic accidents and thus come to mind more easily. This example illustrates:
A. The representativeness heuristic
B. Framing
C. The availability heuristic
D. Belief perseverance
35. Imagine that you live right next to railroad tracks. A friend comes to visit you and is kept awake all night by the sound of trains going by, yet you don’t even notice the sounds. According to the book, your reaction can be attributed to:
A. Perceptual constancy
B. Insight
C. Heuristics
D. Sensory adaptation
36. When we say that 7 is the magic number in psychology, we are referring to the idea that:
A. Short-term memory has a
capacity of about 7 items
B. Short-term memory has a duration of about 7 seconds
C. When you ask someone to pick a number between 1 and 10, the most frequently chosen number is 7.
D. You generally have to introduce yourself to someone 7 times before they will remember your name.
37. Cross-cultural research on the perception of illusions indicates that people whose culture does not include many straight lines or sharp corners are:
A. More susceptible to the Muller-Lyer illusion than people whose cultures do include many straight lines and sharp corners.
B. Equally susceptible to the Muller-Lyer illusion than people whose cultures do include many straight lines and sharp corners.
C. Less susceptible to the Muller-Lyer illusion than people whose cultures do include many straight lines and sharp corners.
D. Unable to see the Muller-Lyer illusion because of a genetic abnormality.
38. According to the book, which
part of the brain is most important for spatial memory?
A. The amygdala
B. The hippocampus
C. The parietal lobe
D. The limbic system
39. According to the book, which
of the following is true about forgetting?
A. It is important because it
allows us to remember and use important information.
B. Forgetting often occurs because
of interference from other information.
C. It is always maladaptive –
people would be better off if they never forgot anything.
D. Both A and B
40. Joe’s mom lets him borrow her car. Joe gets in a car accident. Joe’s mom gets mad and tells him he can never use the car again. This method of operant conditioning is called:
A. Negative punishment
B. Positive reinforcement
C. Extinction
D. Negative reinforcement
41. Christina is deciding whether
to go to a concert or stay home and study for her psychology exam. She imagines how she would feel in each case
and decides she couldn’t live with herself if she went to the concert and then
failed the exam. According to the book,
which decision making theory best describes her thinking?
A. Prospect theory
B. Expected utility theory
C. Script theory
D. Regret theory
42. The change in the shape of
the lens when an object is near or far is known as ______________.
A. Accommodation
B. Convergence
C. Retinal disparity
D. Fovea
43. The tendency for people to remember items at the beginnings and ends of lists better than items in the middle is called:
A. The representativeness heuristic
B. The availability heuristic
C. The serial positioning effect
D. The plight of the middle child
44. In a class demonstration, several students tried to balance on one foot with their eyes closed. The purpose of this demonstration was to show that:
A. Our sense of balance also relies on vision.
B. The vestibular sense organs are located in the eye.
C. The cochlea is circular.
D. Women have a better sense of balance than men.
45. _____ decision making is a process that a perfectly rational person would use, whereas _____ decision making refers to how decisions are actually made.
A. Classical; operant
B. Operant; classical
C. Normative; descriptive
D. Descriptive; normative