Cumulative Final Exam Study Guide
Below is a list of 30 questions. All of these questions will be the exact questions that are asked on the
cumulative final exam. The multiple-choice options have been removed, but these questions should help guide
you as you prepare for the exam.
represents
1. Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how the mind ______________ (forms an
processes
internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality) and ______________ (acts on those
symbols) information.
2. A participant is given a list of words “web, insect, bug, fright, fly, arachnid, crawl, tarantula,
poison, bite, creepy, animal, ugly, feelers, small.” The participants are then asked to recall the
words from the list. Which of the following statements is most likely to be true:
The word spider could be considered a critical intrusion
3. In an experiment, subjects watch a film of a car accident. Subjects see a car traveling down a
suburban road and then colliding with a tree. The subjects are asked how fast the car was
going when it “smashed” into the tree or when it “hit” the tree. What is the most likely result of
this experiment: remember the accident at different level of intensity on the verbs used
4. What aspect of perception does the “McGurk” effect demonstrate?
Visual cues when mismatched with auditory information can change the way we hear things
5. Mental chronometry is the study of the time course of mental processes. While mental
chronometry has been a productive tool for cognitive psychologist, its initial instantiation relied
on several assumptions that did not hold up over time. One of these assumptions is that you
could sum the duration of all stages to get the total reaction time. This, however, did not
account for the possibility that some processes could proceed in parallel. The assumption
described here is: Additive factor method
6. Throughout history, there have been many ideas about how best to study the mind.
Wilhelm Wundt
______________ thought that one could look inside and see the contents of their mind using
John B. Watson thought that it was useless studying something you cannot
introspection. ______________
see and instead focused their efforts on observing predictable stimulus-response pairs.
7. Multiple theories have been developed to describe how we recognize objects in the world.
Something that template theory cannot account for, but that structure theory (also called
recognition-by-components theory) can explain is:
8. There are many examples in which trying to pay attention to two things at once is disruptive to
the processing of one or both of those things. This is called the dual-task cost. The Response
Selection Bottleneck theory offers an explanation for why dual-task costs sometimes occur and
sometimes don’t (namely, multiple tasks compete for access to a central processing
bottleneck). This theory has relied heavily on psychological refractory period experiments.
What does research on the psychological refractory period suggest should happen as the
interval between the presentation of two tasks gets shorter?
The shorter time elapse between task 1 and 2, the task 2 will be slowed down because of longer time to wait
9. People tend to represent spatial information as cognitive maps. Cognitive maps, however, are
prone to distortions because of reliance on various heuristics. For example, when thinking
about world geography, when people are asked: “Which is further south, Rome, Italy or
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania?” People typically say Rome because Italy is in the southern part
of Europe whereas Pennsylvania is in the northern part of the United States. However,
Philadelphia is actually farther south. This error is due to which heuristic:
alignment heuristics
Below is a list of 30 questions. All of these questions will be the exact questions that are asked on the
cumulative final exam. The multiple-choice options have been removed, but these questions should help guide
you as you prepare for the exam.
represents
1. Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of how the mind ______________ (forms an
processes
internal cognitive symbol that represents external reality) and ______________ (acts on those
symbols) information.
2. A participant is given a list of words “web, insect, bug, fright, fly, arachnid, crawl, tarantula,
poison, bite, creepy, animal, ugly, feelers, small.” The participants are then asked to recall the
words from the list. Which of the following statements is most likely to be true:
The word spider could be considered a critical intrusion
3. In an experiment, subjects watch a film of a car accident. Subjects see a car traveling down a
suburban road and then colliding with a tree. The subjects are asked how fast the car was
going when it “smashed” into the tree or when it “hit” the tree. What is the most likely result of
this experiment: remember the accident at different level of intensity on the verbs used
4. What aspect of perception does the “McGurk” effect demonstrate?
Visual cues when mismatched with auditory information can change the way we hear things
5. Mental chronometry is the study of the time course of mental processes. While mental
chronometry has been a productive tool for cognitive psychologist, its initial instantiation relied
on several assumptions that did not hold up over time. One of these assumptions is that you
could sum the duration of all stages to get the total reaction time. This, however, did not
account for the possibility that some processes could proceed in parallel. The assumption
described here is: Additive factor method
6. Throughout history, there have been many ideas about how best to study the mind.
Wilhelm Wundt
______________ thought that one could look inside and see the contents of their mind using
John B. Watson thought that it was useless studying something you cannot
introspection. ______________
see and instead focused their efforts on observing predictable stimulus-response pairs.
7. Multiple theories have been developed to describe how we recognize objects in the world.
Something that template theory cannot account for, but that structure theory (also called
recognition-by-components theory) can explain is:
8. There are many examples in which trying to pay attention to two things at once is disruptive to
the processing of one or both of those things. This is called the dual-task cost. The Response
Selection Bottleneck theory offers an explanation for why dual-task costs sometimes occur and
sometimes don’t (namely, multiple tasks compete for access to a central processing
bottleneck). This theory has relied heavily on psychological refractory period experiments.
What does research on the psychological refractory period suggest should happen as the
interval between the presentation of two tasks gets shorter?
The shorter time elapse between task 1 and 2, the task 2 will be slowed down because of longer time to wait
9. People tend to represent spatial information as cognitive maps. Cognitive maps, however, are
prone to distortions because of reliance on various heuristics. For example, when thinking
about world geography, when people are asked: “Which is further south, Rome, Italy or
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania?” People typically say Rome because Italy is in the southern part
of Europe whereas Pennsylvania is in the northern part of the United States. However,
Philadelphia is actually farther south. This error is due to which heuristic:
alignment heuristics
