• Intro
• Attention
• Memory
• Imagery
• Language
• Concepts & Categories
• Reasoning & Problem Solving
• Intelligence & Creativity
• Cognitive Development
• Judgment & Decision Making
• Culture & Cognition

1. Define these terms: cognition, symbolic processing, computational model, semantic network, method of subtraction, Stroop effect, template matching, change-blindness, top-down processing, visual agnosia
2. How does the Gestalt approach to cognition differ from the Behaviorist view?
3. What are the main principles of the information processing view of cognition?

1. Define these terms: cocktail party effect, dichotic listening task, pop-out, hemineglect, bottleneck
2. What happens to unattended information? Is it processed or remembered? Provide one piece of evidence to support your answer.
3. Distinguish among early selection theory, attenuation theory, and late-selection theory.
4. Imagine that you are trying to do two things at once and are having a difficult time. What 3 things could you change (about yourself or about the tasks) that would improve your performance?
5. Detecting a white X in a field of black Ts can be done with parallel processing. Detecting a green N in a field of green Ms requires serial processing. How can you show that one is serial and the other is parallel?
6. What is the difference between automatic and controlled processing?
7. Describe the target detection study by Schneider & Shiffrin (1977) on varied vs. consistent mapping. What was the main finding?
8. What is Treisman's feature integration theory? How does it explain why it is faster to detect an X within a field of Ls than it is to detect an X within a field of Vs?
9. What does Wolfe mean by guided search? Does it involve pre-attentive processing or focused attention processing, or both?

1. Define these terms: serial position effect, retroactive interference, script, suffix effect (in echoic memory), Brown-Peterson task, release from proactive interference, paired-associate learning, semantic network
2. Describe George Sperling's experiment that assessed the storage capacity and duration of iconic memory.
3. What do flashbulb memories tell us about how memory works?
4. Sternberg (1966) found that retrieval from STM involves a search that is serial and exhaustive. What does that mean, and what experimental result indicates this?
5. What 3 components make up working memory, according to Baddley?
6. Give one piece of evidence that suggests that the recency effect is not the result of short term memory.
7. Forgetting could occur because of decay or because of a retrieval failure. Explain the difference between these two possibilities. What empirical evidence could be used to distinguish between the two?
8. Recognition is usually easier than recall. What does this imply about how memories are retrieved?
9. What "sin" of memory does the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon illustrate? Why does it occur?
10. Describe the levels of processing theory and how it explains how information gets from STM to LTM. Describe one piece of evidence that supports this theory and one criticism of this theory.
11. What's the difference between anterograde and retrograde amnesia?
12. Barick conducted studies of LTM where he looked at retention for foreign languages learned decades ago and the memories college alumni had of the streets and landmarks in their college town. What did these studies show?
13. Encoding specificity, context effect in retrieval, and state-dependent learning are all essentially difference labels for the same phenomenon. What is this phenomenon?
14. Explain the difference between implicit and explicit memory tests. Why is this distinction important? Jacoby used an inclusion and a exclusion task as an implicit memory test. Explain how and why that test measures implicit memory.
15. Explain the distinction between semantic and episodic memory systems and provide one piece of evidence for this distinction. Do the same for declarative vs. procedural memory.
16. Describe an experiment that shows that schemas influence memory and the types of memory errors that occur as the result of schema use. Do schemas influence retrieval or just encoding?
17. Schacter argues that the sins of memory are the result of otherwise adaptive features of the memory system. Describe 3 of the sins, including an example of each. For each one, explain what otherwise-adaptive feature of memory leads to this error.
18. Is memory verbatim or reconstructed? Cite evidence to support your view.
19. Does a false memory actually replace and substitute for the original memory? Cite evidence. How easy is it to implant memories for impossible events? What is necessary to accomplish this?

1. Explain Pavio's dual-coding theory
2. Each of the following are sometime cited as evidence that some information is represented in memory as images. For each item, explain what it is and how it supports the imagery view.
• a. mental rotation
• b. RT in identifying items on a previously seen picture (e.g., of a boat)
• c. better memory for concrete or image-able nouns
• d. effectiveness of imagery mnemonics, such as the method of loci

Language

1. Define these terms: ad hoc category, universal grammar, deep vs. surface structure, conversational maxims, productive thinking, modus tollens, breaking set, state-action representation, heuristic sub-goal, transfer, normative theory, risk-seeking.
2. Psycholinguistics argues that children have innate knowledge about language in the form of constraints (or a limited set of hypotheses). What are some of these constraints, and how to they help children acquire language?
3. What kinds of language errors are made (and not made) by children, and what does this error pattern tell us about the mechanism of language acquisition?
4. Why are nouns easier to learn than verbs? What type of input is most useful for learning each type of word?

1. Explain the following three theories of categorization: classical, prototype, and exemplar models. Summarize the empirical evidence for and against each. Cite one piece of evidence that favors the exemplar view over the prototype view.
2. What is the difference between a natural kind category and an artifact category, and why is this distinction important?

1. Distinguish between these problem solving heuristics: generate and test, hill climbing, and working backwards.
2. Describe two problems that illustrate mental set or functional fixedness.
3. For each of the following problem solving tasks, describe the task and the solution. How do people usually try to solve this problem, and where do they have difficulties or make errors? What does this descriptive pattern tell us about the psychology of problem solving?
• a. rats & cats problem
• b. tower of Hanoi
• c. game of Nim
• d. Wason 4 card selection task
• e. stomach tumor problem & related fortress problem
• f. Luchin's water jug task
• g. 8 penny problem
4. Describe 3 characteristics of expertise. How do experts differ from novices? Describe one situation where a novice can perform as well as or better than an expert.
5. Summarize two pieces of information showing that experts organize knowledge differently than novices do.
6. What does it mean to say that novices represent problems using surface structure while experts represent problems using deep structure?
7. How does practice contribute to expertise? How much practice is needed?
8. How might we explain that fact that a computerized neural network outperformed an expert cardiologist in categorizing EKGs?
9. What is the difference between the validity vs. the factual truth of a conclusion?
10. Normative theories of reasoning distinguish between form vs. content of an argument. Explain this distinction and describe one piece of evidence showing that people are actually influenced by content.
11. Describe Wason's 4 card problem and what it tells us about deductive reasoning.
12. Describe Johnson-Laird's mental models theory of syllogisms and how it explains why some syllogisms are more difficult than others.
13. What is analogical problem solving? When are people more or less likely to use it?
14. According to Miriam Bassok, why does the content of a problem influence analogical transfer?
15. Consider the following abstract:

The authors examined why similarities and differences between the objects of analogous problems affect transfer. They present results showing that object attributes affect transfer by affecting the way in which people represent problem structures (e.g., speed changes continuously and monetary investments discretely). Participants learned to solve problems involving either constant change in speed or in investment. They were then tested for transfer to problems that were matched on a variety of object attributes but involved entities known to be changing either continuously or discretely (e.g., melting ice vs. ice delivered to a restaurant). Although the manner of change was never specified as a constraint for solving the training problems, transfer in the continuous-to-discrete direction was rare and involved laborious mappings, whereas transfer in the discrete-to-continuous direction was frequent and straightforward.

How is analogical transfer influenced by discrete or continuous change in the problem?

  16. Consider this abstract:

Leone, Gilles. Taine, Marie Claire. Droulez, Jacques. The influence of long-term practice on mental rotation of 3-D objects. Cognitive Brain Research. Vol 1(4), Dec 1993, 241-255.

Evaluated the influence of long-term practice on the performance of a mental rotation task. 16 Ss with varying aptitudes for mental imagery judged whether 2 3-dimensional objects presented in different orientations were identical or mirror-reflected pairs. Ss participated in 12-25 sessions over 6 wks. Two catalogues of different stimuli were alternatively used during consecutive sessions to determine the influence of complexity and familiarity of figures. For all Ss, there was a linear relation between response times and angular differences, and the inverse of the rate of mental rotation along the sessions was adequately fitted by a decreasing exponential curve. Asymptotic variations could be attributed to differences in stimuli as well as Ss' imaging skills, and these differences remained constant over the training period. Training did not lead to the disappearance of the mental rotation process.

Lines 5-6 say that "there was a linear relation between response times and angular differences." What does that mean? What was the effect of training?

Intelligence & Creativity

1. Contrast the "g" approach to intelligence with Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences.
2. What are the three parts of Sternberg's triarchic theory? What does Sternberg mean by practical intelligence?
3. Is intelligence the result of nature or nurture? Cite evidence to support your answer.
4. What is creativity? Why might the Remote Associations Test and the Alternative Uses Test measure it?
5. Present one problem that illustrates creative problem solving and explain the principle that it illustrates.
6. Describe two theories of creativity. What predictions do they it make (if any?)
7. How does cognitive ability differ from cognitive style?

1. Research on cognitive development has shown that young children manifest many abilities at ages younger than Piaget would have predicted. Give examples of two such abilities, and describe the experiments that demonstrate these abilities in infants or young children.
2. Define these terms: object permanence, dishabituation, conservation task, concrete operations
3. Can infants count?

1. What is the difference between a normative and a descriptive theory?
2. What is the normative theory of decision making under uncertainty and why? What is the normative theory for judgments of uncertainty (that is, probability judgments)?
3. What is the representativeness heuristic? Describe two judgment biases that result from use of this heuristic. For each one, explain why it is a bias and how representativeness can account for it.
4. Explain the following judgment biases: availability bias, conjunction fallacy, anchoring bias. Why does the conjunction fallacy occur?
5. Explain the following concepts: conjunction fallacy, regression to the mean, law of small numbers, hot hand effect, base rate neglect, fast & frugal heuristic, Laplacean Demon.
6. Apply Expected Utility Theory to the following example: you are deciding whether or not to get a flu shot. The probability of getting the flu this winter is 50% with the shot and 75% without the shot. The relevant utilities are: no shot & no flu: 1.00; shot and no flu: 0.90; no shot and flu: 0.10, shot and flu: 0.00. What should you choose and why?
7. Draw a risk averse utility function for money. Why is it called risk averse?
8. What were the result of the class Oreo/Twix experiment? What decision bias did this study demonstrate, and how can Prospect Theory account for it? What alternative accounts (besides Prospect Theory) would explain the findings? If you were going to replicate the study, what improvements would you make to the study design?
9. Following are a list of biases. Explain why they violate Expected Utility Theory and how Prospect Theory can account for them. (Be sure to specify which part of Prospect Theory accounts for each).
• a. Asian flu framing effect
• b. Jacket/calculator mental accounting
• c. Theater ticket mental accounting
• d. Endowment effect
• e. Certainty effect
10. What is the overconfidence bias? According to the fast & frugal heuristic approach, why does this bias occur? What is the "Take the Best" heuristic, and what kind of confidence judgments does it produce?
11. According to Chase, Hertwig, and Gigerenzer, why do base rate neglect and the conjunction fallacy occur?

1. Explain how culture affects cognition in one of the following areas: perception, memory, categorization, reasoning, counting. How does schooling affect reasoning?
2. How do risk preferences and decision making differ across cultures?
3. According to Richard Nisbett, how do East and West cultures differ in reasoning and why?