Deck 6: Memory

Question 1

Mason was absolutely certain that he knew the name of the actress who played the character of Monica on the popular television series Friends, but he could not think of her name. This is an example of:

A) prospective memory.
B) source amnesia.
C) a tip-of-the-tongue experience.
D) the misinformation effect.

Answer 1

a tip-of-the-tongue experience.

Question 2

According to George Miller, capacity of short-term memory:

A) is about four items of information, plus or minus one.
B) can be increased by clustering.
C) can be increased by maintenance rehearsal of the information.
D) is about seven items of information, plus or minus two.

Answer 2

is about seven items of information, plus or minus two.

Question 3

Research with the sea snail Aplysia has demonstrated that:

A) the sea snail's nervous system is too primitive to form memories.
B) long-term potentiation is only possible in animals with more sophisticated and complex nervous systems.
C) forming a new memory involves changes in both the function and structure of neurons.
D) anterograde and retrograde amnesia involve fundamentally different neural circuits.

Answer 3

forming a new memory involves changes in both the function and structure of neurons.

Question 4

During a test of his short-term memory, Tommy was given lists of items to remember. He found the task much easier if he grouped the items according to whether they were animals, plants, minerals, and so on. Tommy is using a memory aid called:

A) clustering.
B) the self-referencing technique.
C) chunking.
D) massed practice.

Question 5

Another name for implicit memory is _____ memory.

A) nondeclarative
B) prospective
C) declarative
D) procedural

Question 6

Of the different stages of memory, _____ memory has the shortest duration.

A) working
B) sensory
C) short-term
D) long-term

Question 7

Which of the following statements about long-term memory is FALSE?

A) Information stored in long-term memory can potentially last a lifetime.
B) The amount of information that can be held in long-term memory is limitless.
C) The three components of long-term memory are the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the central executive.
D) One category of long-term memory is semantic memory.

Question 8

When information in short-term memory is not rehearsed or encoded, what happens to it?

A) The information fades, or decays, after a very brief period of time, usually within a matter of seconds.
B) The information moves back into sensory memory.
C) The information is automatically transferred to working memory until it is ready to be processed further.
D) The information is circulated in the phonological loop until it is ready to be processed further.

Question 9

Carlos and his roommate rearranged the kitchen, and now whenever Carlos reaches for the silverware, he keeps reaching for the drawer that used to contain the silverware. Carlos's failure to remember the new location of the silverware is probably due to:

A) encoding failure.
B) retroactive interference.
C) the misinformation effect.
D) proactive interference.

Question 10

Which of the following is NOT one of the key brain structures involved in encoding and storing memories?

A) hypothalamus
B) hippocampus
C) prefrontal cortex
D) cerebellum

Question 11

"My first memory? I can remember the nature walks that our preschool class took almost every day. It was really just a city park that had a small lake and was about three blocks away, but I remember all of us walking in pairs, holding hands, and crossing the streets." According to the research discussed in the Culture and Human Behavior box, memories of general, group activities centered on family or community members were most likely to be:

A) a pseudo-memory.
B) reported by European American college students.
C) a déjà vu experience.
D) reported by Chinese and Taiwanese college students.

Question 12

When asked to define the learning concept negative reinforcement, Hannah replied, "Negative reinforcement is when you perform a behavior that stops or lets you avoid an unpleasant stimulus, so you're more likely to repeat the behavior when you encounter the same unpleasant stimulus in the future." Hannah's answer reflects which category of long-term memory?

A) implicit memory
B) procedural memory
C) episodic memory
D) semantic memory

Question 13

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus had participants in one study watch a film about an auto accident, write a description of the accident, and then answer a series of questions, which were different for different groups of participants. A week later, the participants were questioned again. What was one basic finding of the study?

A) Participants who were asked how fast the cars were going when they "contacted each other" gave the highest speed estimates.
B) Participants who had themselves been in auto accidents confused details of their own accidents with details from the film, an example of source confusion.
C) Participants who were shown photographs of the drivers and passengers had more vivid memories of the accident than participants who did not see photographs, an example of imagination inflation.
D) Participants who were asked how fast the cars were going when they "smashed into each other" mistakenly remembered seeing broken glass in the film, an example of the misinformation effect.

Question 14

Psychologist George Sperling's classic experiment demonstrated that:

A) the capacity of short-term memory is virtually limitless.
B) the schemas that people hold in a particular situation can erroneously influence the details they later remember about the situation.
C) distributed practice is superior to massed practice.
D) information is held in visual sensory memory for about half a second.

Question 15

You can keep information in short-term memory beyond the usual 20-second duration by:

A) engaging in maintenance rehearsal.
B) using clustering.
C) engaging in chunking.
D) using imagination inflation.

Question 16

What is the "lost-in-the-mall" technique?

A) a suggestive technique that has been shown to be effective in helping people recover repressed memories of being abused or abandoned as children
B) a way of testing people's spatial memory, in which participants are led through an unfamiliar shopping mall and then they are timed as they try to locate particular stores
C) a mnemonic technique, which involves remembering a list of unrelated items by mentally imagining them at different store locations at a familiar shopping mall
D) using family members of a study participant to help induce a false memory for an event that never occurred, such as being lost in a shopping mall as a child

Question 17

The phonological loop and the visuospatial sketchpad are:

A) different names for auditory sensory memory and visual sensory memory.
B) two of the three components in psychologist Alan Baddeley's model of working memory.
C) two mnemonic devices that can be used to help you remember a list of unrelated items, such as nonsense syllables.
D) two components in psychologist George Sperling's model of sensory memory.

Question 18

When Kate got home, Guy rummaged through the grocery sack, then said, "Kate, you forgot the dental floss and the coffee creamer! They were the last two things I told you to get! Don't you remember me saying that?" That Kate remembered to get the first items on the list is a pattern of remembering called:

A) the tip-of-the-tongue experience.
B) the recency effect.
C) the primacy effect.
D) encoding specificity.

Question 19

Adam vividly remembers the accident that sent him to the emergency room to get stitches. This is an example of which type of long-term memory?

A) procedural memory
B) semantic memory
C) implicit memory
D) episodic memory

Question 20

In telling the detective everything she could recall about what happened when she went into the bank to make a deposit, Lynn got to the point that she could not recall any more details. At that point, Lynn was probably experiencing:

A) retroactive interference.
B) retrieval cue failure.
C) inattentional blindness.
D) source amnesia.

Question 21

Working memory is the third memory stage and is also called long-term memory.

Question 22

In the study in which participants sat briefly in a psychology professor's office:

A) most participants were unable to remember significant details of the office when tested later.
B) most participants were able to accurately remember significant details of the objects that were present in the office when tested later.
C) memory for details of the office was easily distorted by the later use of misinformation during the recall test.
D) many participants erroneously remembered items that were not actually present in the room but that were consistent with the schema of a professor's office.

Question 23

When seven-year-old Grace had to recite the Girl Scout Pledge in front of the other members of her Brownie troop, she had trouble remembering some of the lines in the middle of the pledge. This illustrates:

A) the serial position effect.
B) state-dependent retrieval.
C) source confusion.
D) mood congruence

Question 24

The famous Ebbinghaus forgetting curve:

A) shows that long-term potentiation failure is the primary cause of forgetting.
B) demonstrates that much of what we forget is lost relatively soon after we originally learn the information.
C) demonstrates that encoding failure is the primary reason we forget most information.
D) shows that the "magical number" of items that can be held in short-term memory is four, plus or minus one, and not seven plus or minus two, as had been believed.

Question 25

The standard stage model of memory has three distinct memory components: the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the central executive.

Question 26

Why did Karl Lashley fail to uncover the area of the rat's brain in which the memory trace of the maze was stored or located?

A) Memory could not be studied with the relatively crude and simplistic methods Lashley used in the early 1900s.
B) A rat's memory for maze running is a classically conditioned response and is not localized in one area of the brain, such as the cortex or cerebellum.
C) Lashley was looking in the cerebral cortex for the memory trace, when he should have been looking in the cerebellum.
D) A rat's memory for maze running is not a single memory but a complex set of interrelated memories involving information from multiple senses, and it is distributed throughout the brain and not localized in the cortex.

Question 27

In Baddeley's model of working memory, one component called the _____ is specialized for verbal material, such as lists of numbers or words.

A) visuospatial sketchpad
B) semantic network
C) phonological loop
D) central executive

Question 28

The information that is held in sensory memory lasts only a few seconds at the longest.

Question 29

One important memory process is encoding, or the process of transforming information into a form that can be retained by the memory system.

Question 30

Information can be held in short-term memory for about 20 seconds.

Question 31

Sensory memory is also called working memory.

Question 32

Professor Sheehan spent most of the class session lecturing on different aspects of memory, and ended by reminding her students of the test at the next class session. After her students shuffled out of the classroom, Professor Sheehan noticed a student's cell phone on a desk toward the back of the classroom. The student forgetting his cell phone is an everyday example of _____ that is most probably due to _____.

A) inattentional blindness; source amnesia
B) source amnesia; retrieval cue failure
C) prospective memory; retrieval cue failure
D) absentmindedness; encoding failure

Question 33

When you are in a positive mood, you are more likely to recall positive memories. This phenomenon is referred to as _____, and it is one form that _____ can take.

A) source amnesia; source monitoring
B) mood congruence; the encoding specificity principle
C) inattentional blindness; encoding failure
D) mood congruence; long-term potentiation

Question 34

In the stage model of memory, the first stage is called sensory memory.

Question 35

Whether it is visual or auditory, sensory memory registers a limited amount of information from the environment but holds that information for up to 20 seconds.

Question 36

The famous case of the man known as H.M. illustrates the important role _____ play(s) in the formation of new memories.

A) the amygdala
B) beta-amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles
C) the hippocampus
D) cerebellum

Question 37

The basic premise of repressed memory therapy or recovered memory therapy is that:

A) adult psychological problems are often due to sexual abuse in childhood, and memories of the childhood abuse have been repressed.
B) memories can be changed through hypnosis and suggestion.
C) people can be trained or taught to actively suppress traumatic memories, which will result in improved psychological functioning.
D) adult psychological problems are usually due to clear and vivid memories of childhood sexual abuse that are difficult to actively suppress.

Question 38

The Enhancing Well-Being with Psychology section provides several techniques and suggestions to enhance your memory of information. Which of the following is one of those suggestions?

A) Use maintenance rehearsal to help encode information for meaning.
B) Minimize interference by using massed practice.
C) Counteract the serial position effect by spending more time learning material at the beginning and end of a sequence.
D) Take the distributed-practice approach to learning new information.

Question 39

The stage model of memory consists of three distinct stages: sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory.

Question 40

The active, working memory system that holds all of the information that you are currently thinking about is called short-term memory.

Question 41

David looks up a phone number and then continues to repeat the number until he has dialed it. This is an example of maintenance rehearsal.

Question 42

Clustering is one way of increasing the storage capacity and duration of short-term memory.

Question 43

The research of psychologist George Sperling demonstrated that the maximum capacity of short-term memory is four items of information, plus or minus one.

Question 44

As Erin watched the small airplane start its engine, she could see the trailing, fading images of the propeller twirling. This is an example of visual sensory memory.

Question 45

The capacity of short-term memory is virtually limitless.

Question 46

George Miller's classic experiment suggested that short-term memory has a capacity of about seven bits of information, plus or minus two.

Question 47

Maintenance rehearsal focuses on the meaning of information and is useful for maintaining information in long-term memory.

Question 48

Unless the information is actively rehearsed, the maximum duration of short-term memory is about 20 seconds.

Question 49

If information in short-term memory is not actively rehearsed, the information is transferred to long-term memory.

Question 50

Iconic memory and echoic memory are both types of sensory memory.

Question 51

The pioneering research of George Sperling identified the basic features of sensory memory.

Question 52

Sensory memory allows you to hear a series of musical notes as a melody.

Question 53

Working memory provides temporary storage for information that is currently being used in some conscious mental activity.

Question 54

Psychologist George Sperling is one of the most widely recognized authorities on eyewitness memory and the different ways it can go awry.

Question 55

New research suggests that the true "magical number" for the capacity of short-term memory is more likely to be four, plus or minus one, than seven, plus or minus two.

Question 56

Chunking is one way of increasing the storage capacity of short-term memory.

Question 57

The research of psychologist George Sperling demonstrated that the maximum duration of sensory memory is about 30 seconds.

Question 58

When your short-term memory store is filled to capacity, new information displaces currently held information.

Question 59

Visual sensory memory only lasts for about half a second, while auditory sensory memory lasts for a few seconds.

Question 60

Sensory memory briefly stores our sensory impressions of the world so that they overlap slightly with one another.

Question 61

Episodic memory is the category of long-term memory that includes the memory of facts, names, concepts, and other general knowledge.

Question 62

According to Culture and Human Behavior: Culture's Effect on Earliest Memories, autobiographical memory is closely related to episodic memory and refers to events of your life-your personal life history.

Question 63

When Travis got to his nine o'clock math class, another student asked him what had been discussed in the eight o'clock history class. Travis was able to answer because the information was stored in his long-term memory.

Question 64

According to the working memory model developed by British psychologist Alan Baddeley, the central executive controls attention, integrates information, and manages the activities of the phonological loop and visuospatial sketchpad.

Question 65

British psychologist and memory researcher Alan Baddeley developed the best-known model of working memory, which has three components, the phonological loop, the visuospatial sketchpad, and the central executive.

Question 66

According to the working memory model developed by British psychologist Alan Baddeley, the visuospatial sketchpad is the component that is specialized for spatial or visual material, such as remembering the layout of a room or city.

Question 67

A cross-cultural study found that the average age of earliest autobiographical memories for Taiwanese and Chinese college students tended to be earlier than the average age of earliest autobiographical memories for European American college students.

Question 68

Episodic memory and semantic memory are components of Baddeley's working memory model.

Question 69

A cross-cultural study found that the content of earliest autobiographical memories for Taiwanese and Chinese college students tended to concern routine activities performed in the company of other people.

Question 70

One of the most effective strategies for encoding information into long-term memory is elaborative rehearsal.

Question 71

Semantic information is information kept in short-term memory just long enough to be processed before being moved into long-term memory.

Question 72

Maintenance rehearsal is a more effective strategy than elaborative rehearsal for encoding information into long-memory.

Question 73

Based on several lines of evidence, today's memory researchers recognize that long-term memory is a simple, singular memory system.

Question 74

Long-term memory storage capacity seems to be limitless.

Question 75

Applying information to yourself, the self-reference effect, improves your memory for information.

Question 76

In a cross-cultural study comparing the earliest memories of college students, researchers found that the average age for earliest memories was much earlier for U.S.-born students than for Taiwanese or Chinese students.

Question 77

According to the working memory model developed by British psychologist Alan Baddeley, the phonological loop is the component that is specialized for spatial or visual material, such as remembering the layout of a room or city.

Question 78

If you're like most people, you probably don't remember when or where you acquired most of your semantic memories.

Question 79

A cross-cultural study found that the content of earliest autobiographical memories for Taiwanese and Chinese college students tended to concern discrete events and the personal emotions they evoked.

Question 80

Implicit memory is also referred to as nondeclarative memory because it consists of memories of which we are not consciously aware.