Short-essay questions

1. If you briefly presented an image to the right visual field of a right handed ‘split brain’ individual would
you expect them to be able to verbally identify it?

2. What specific deficit(s) are present in someone suffering from prosopagnosia?

3. According to the valence hypothesis of emotional processing, which hemisphere is primarily involved
in processing positive emotions?

4. Which component of Baddeley and Hitch’s multicomponent model of working memory would be most
likely to be employed when recalling the following list of items (“Cat”, “Dog”, “Young”, “Dingo”)?

5. You look up a phone number and having located it begin to silently repeat it to yourself in an attempt to
avoid forgetting it, in terms of Baddeley and Hitch’s model of working memory what is this process of
repetition called?

6. When attempting to remember a friend’s new phone number you find that you keep erring by recalling
parts of their old phone number. This is an example of what kind of interference?

7. What is the long term mental store of information about the forms and meanings of words is known as?

8. Collins and Loftus described the organization of the mental lexicon as a ________ network. Fill in the
blank in the previous sentence.

9. According to Collins and Loftus’ model of the semantic network activation of the lexical entry of a
word in the mental lexicon spreads to other related words. What is this process called?

10. What aspect of a word does semantic information relate to?

11. After reading the sentence “The cat snargged the rabbit” I am able to determine that snargged is
likely intended to be a verb and describe some form of action. What kind of information am I employing
to make this determination?

12. Is the relationship between the words robin and emu primarily semantic or associative in nature?
13. Which of the following pair of words is primarily semantically related--“owl-pigeon” or “owl-hoot?”

14. You are asked to visualize a cat alongside a second animal x, you are then asked to answer
questions about the cat. Would you expect to be able to answer the questions more rapidly if x was -- a
bear, an elephant, a mouse or a dog?

15. You conduct a mental rotation experiment presenting participants with pairs of shapes which differ
in alignment by 0–180 degrees and asking them to determine if the shapes are identical or mirror
images of each other. What kind of relationship would you expect to find overall between difference in
alignment between shapes and time taken to make decisions?

16. After memorizing a map you are asked to verify whether a pair of features had been present on the
map. Based on the findings of Kosslyn, Ball and Reisser’s (1978) imaginal scanning study what impact
would you expect the distance between the pair of features on the original map to have on the time it
takes you to verify that both had been present?

17. You are presented with a series of pictures of hands presented with their palms towards you. The
first hand is medially rotated 90 degrees from upright, the second laterally rotated 90 degrees from
upright and the third rotated 180 degrees from upright. If you were asked to make a decision about
whether each was depicting a left or a right hand which of the pictures would you expect to be able to
most rapidly classify?

18. Which of the two major theoretical positions discussed in this tutorial suggests that mental
representation of a concept consists of a series of propositions about the properties of that concept?
19. Pylyshyn has long argued that the mental representation of images is not pictorial or spatial in
nature. What is his alternative explanation of the mechanisms underlying imagery called?

20. What relationship did Johansson et al. (2002) find between eye-movement and the spatial location
of the elements of a memorized picture as they were described?

21. You are conducting a Stroop task which requires participants to name the colours of stimuli from the
following three conditions, list them in order of hardest to easiest.
1. colour patches,
2. colour words printed in conflicting ink colours and
3. colour words printed in non-conflicting ink colours.
22. Explained in terms of automatic and controlled processes, what would you expect to occur as
you become more and more practiced in carrying out a task?

23. When a relatively automatic process coincides with a relatively controlled process and the two
processes have conflicting results what is the likely impact on the controlled process?

24. What is the Stroop Effect?

25. Under what kind of cognitive load are you more likely to engage in late selection?
ANSWERS ARE GIVEN IN THE BACK PAGE.
More questions for practice. Answers are readily available in the lecture slides and text. Strictly NO
answers will be given. And the marks indicated are MERELY given as a guide to answering the
questions.

 What are the two areas critical of the brain implicated with language in early clinical studies? (2m)

 What are the four stages of learning to read that children normally go through? (4m) or State the four
stages of language acquisition (4 m)

 List all the Gestalt laws of perceptual organization (“five of them”) and explain what one of the laws is
about (2 m)

 Describe one of the laws you listed in the question above (1m)

 Jill friends tell her she has good memory and she decides to test this by remembering a list of to do
items given at work each day. On the first day, she performs well and remembers 90% of the items. On
the second day she only remembers 80%, on the third day she remembers only 50% of the content and
this falls further on the fourth day to 20%. What natural phenomenon of memory is occurring here? (1m)

 Differences between STM and WM (2 m)

 Name three main components of Baddeley and Hitch working memory. (3m) or Name three
components of working memory (3 m)

 The name of the researcher who first created the attention model (1 m)

 In Treisman's model, which stage has a threshold (1 m)

 In Treisman’s attenuator model, at which stage does the message get attenuated? (1m)

 Describe the late selection model in terms of theories of attention (1 m)

 What term was given to semantic networks to explain the effect of priming? (1m)
 When a task type at encoding matches task type at retrieval, memory is better, what is this term
called? (1 m)

 Name two types of explicit memory (2 m)

 What is the term used when chemical (smell) is converted into electrical signals? (1 m)

 List 3 types of methods used to study the brain and state the advantages & disadvantages of each (4
m)

 How can we determine that what Kanzi was doing with lexigrams was language and not just random
actions (1 m)

 How can memory be improved with priming? (2 m)

 Explain the concept of mental imagery with Kosslyn’s mental scanning experiments (1 m)

 What is spreading activation? (2 m)

 Assume you are presented with the following problem: ''How many four letter English words can be
create using the letters A, E, M, N, R, S, T? Describe both an algorithmic approach and a heuristic
approach for finding the solution to this problem. Explain how your approaches would differ in terms of
success rate and speed of obtaining an accurate solution (4 m)

 Summarise a chapter of the text in layman terms (10 marks; see possible chapters to be summarised
as per the Guidance Notes).

1. Yes
2. Inability to recognise faces
3. Left
4. Phonological Loop.
5. Subvocal Rehearsal
6. Proactive interference
7. Mental Lexicon
 8. Semantic
9. Spreading Activation
10. It’s meaning
11. Syntactic
12. Semantic
13. Owl-Pigeon
14. Mouse

15. A Linear relationship between angle of rotation and response time for matching
shapes

16. As the distance on the image increases so will the time taken to give a response

17. The image depicting a hand medially rotated 90 degrees

18. Propositional Theory

19. Propositional Theory

20. Eye movements matched those which would be expected If the speaker where actually
viewing the screen and they described it.

21. 2, 1, 3

22. Carrying it out will become increasingly automatic

23. The automatic process will override or interfere with the controlled process

24. The observation that what a printed word says can interfere with the process of naming the
colour in which it is printed when the content of the word provides conflicting information.

25. Low