Psychology University
PSYC 100 – Introductory Psychology University of Maryland University College Second Examination – DUE December 6, 2015 Fall, 2015 Instructions: Please submit (either via LEO or attached to an email) only your answers, numbered 1-50, on a single page. Do not send me the entire exam. ____1. The process of sensory adaptation underscores the fact that human perception is most sensitive to: (A) constant stimuli; (B) changing stimuli; (C) threatening stimuli; (D) subliminal stimuli. ____2. On what basis was intelligence compared to hard-core pornography in lecture? (A) Both are inherited. (B) Both are easy to define but difficult to recognize. (C) Both are difficult to define but easy to recognize. (D) Both are easily ob- tained in large cities. ____3. Your friend claims that she can remember instances of childhood sexual abuse that occurred when she was 6 months of age. Why would most psychologists be skeptical of this claim? (A) Decay leads to nearly immediate forgetting of newly acquired information. (B) Infantile amnesia makes it unlikely that these are true memories from that age. (C) Therapists who advocate the reality of such claims charge less to treat the victims of such abuse than those who doubt such claims. (D) Repression inhibits the conscious recognition of traumatic events, such as childhood sexual abuse. ____4. On the topic of genius, Sir Francis Galton argued that: (A) there is no such thing as genius; (B) genius is determined by early childhood experiences; (C) only males can be geniuses; (D) genius is inherited. ____5. Charles Spearman’s g factor refers to: (A) general intelligence; (B) reliability for intelligence tests; (C) the contribution of genetics to intelligence; (D) multiple intelligences. ____6. Which of the following outcomes is most likely when you are relearning pre- viously learned material? (A) You will need to study twice as long, because of interference by all the things you learned between the original learning and the relearning. (B) Your free recall ability will increase faster than any type of rec- ognition memory. (C) You will relearn the material faster and more easily than you did during the original learning. (D) Although the material can be relearned, you will be more susceptible to the effects of context-dependencies (e.g., state- specific learning, mood congruence, encoding specificity). ____7. The Gestalt group of psychologists well known for studying: (A) perceptual per- formance in stressful conditions; (B) issues of free will and personal responsibil- ity; (C) organizational processes in perception; (D) the physiology of the eye. ____8. Which of the following can be concluded from Posner’s studies of mental coding? (A) Additional processing speeds up processing time. (B) Additional processing leads to slower response times. (C) Faster response times mean greater task difficulty. (D) Faster response times are always associated with greater accuracy. PSYC 100 – Introductory Psychology University of Maryland University College Second Examination – DUE December 6, 2015 Fall, 2015 ____9. Which of the following would best predict a college senior’s current IQ score? (A) her IQ score from one year ago; (B) her IQ score from around her high school graduation; (C) her IQ score taken upon entrance to high school; (D) her IQ score from age six. ____10. Jean Piaget was best known for his efforts to understand: (A) the way children interpret their emerging sense of sexuality; (B) the way children think, reason, and solve problems; (C) language development; (D) bystander intervention. ____11. If differences among people in their IQ scores are based largely on differences in heredity, we should expect to find that: (A) the correlation of IQ scores should be higher for fraternal twins than for identical twins; (B) the correlation of IQ scores should be higher for identical twins than for fraternal twins; (C) children reared by their own parents should have higher IQs than do children reared by adoptive parents; (D) children reared by adoptive parents should have higher IQs than do children reared by their own parents. ____12. A 7-year-old has a much better chance of recovering from aphasia than a 50- year-old with similar brain damage. Which conclusion can be drawn about this observation? (A) It suggests that young brains are less developed than older brains. (B) It suggests that old brains take more time to recover from injuries than young brains. (C) It is consistent with the critical period hypothesis of language learning. (D) It refutes the critical period hypothesis of language learning. ____13. If you want to increase your chances of successful recall, a general rule is that your ability to remember will be greatest when: (A) there is a match between the circumstances surrounding your encoding and your retrieval; (B) there is a mismatch between the circumstances surrounding your encoding and your re- trieval; (C) information from the outside world is prevented from entering your short-term memory; (D) information from long-term memory is prevented from entering your short-term memory. ____14. Walter Mischel followed up on the children who had participated (at age 4) in his “marshmallow study” 14 years later (when they were 18 years old). Mischel found that the children who had successfully waited (for 15 minutes) to receive a second marshmallow ______ those who ate their first marshmallow. (A) were more self-reliant, trustworthy, and academically successful than; (B) were not as good at planning for their futures as; (C) had poorer social adjustment than; (D) had similar SAT scores as. ____15. Despite changes in the size of the retinal image, an object that is viewed from different distances does not appear to become larger or smaller. The perceptual principle here is ______, which results from ______. (A) distance relativity, visual adaptation; (B) distance constancy, visual accommodation; (C) size relativity, bottom-up processing; (D) size constancy, top-down processing. PSYC 100 – Introductory Psychology University of Maryland University College Second Examination – DUE December 6, 2015 Fall, 2015 ____16. Although Pauline is unable to recognize her husband by sight, she can identify him by his voice as soon as he speaks. She is displaying the symptoms of: (A) achromatopsia; (B) prosopagnosia; (C) visual neglect; (D) Wernicke’s aphasia. ____17. Research by Elizabeth Loftus on eyewitness memory has demonstrated that: (A) eyewitness testimony is very accurate, regardless of pretrial investigation; (B) retrieval cues can bias eyewitness accounts; (C) eyewitness memory is highly resistant to leading questions; (D) women are generally more accurate eyewitnesses than men. ____18. Which of the following conclusions was drawn from George Sperling’s (1960) studies comparing whole report and partial report of the contents of a brief visual display? (A) Very short term sensory memory can hold more infor- mation than was once thought possible. (B) Semantic encoding leads to the deepest levels of processing. (C) Information that is unrehearsed will not be transferred (i.e., “consolidated”) to long-term memory. (D) Memory reports of eyewitnesses are unreliable. ____19. Which of the following tasks would a patient who has sustained damage to the pathway between her occipital cortex and her parietal cortex most likely have difficulty with? (A) identifying an object; (B) reaching for an object; (C) seeing an object; (D) responding with the emotional response. ____20. Most instances of adolescent risk taking occur when an adolescent is: (A) alone; (B) with his or her family; (C) during school hours; (D) in groups of same-age peers. ____21. The optic nerves send visual information to the ______, which sends it to the ______. (A) limbic system, occipital lobes; (B) thalamus, primary visual cortex; (C) cerebellum, occipital lobes; (D) hypothalamus, primary visual cortex. ____22. One type of visual illusion is the ______, which requires multiple fixations be- fore the illusion is recognized as such. (A) illusory conjunction; (B) ventrilo- quism effect; (C) impossible figure; (D) phi phenomenon. ____23. Which of the following tasks would a patient who has sustained damage to the pathway between her occipital cortex and her temporal cortex most likely have difficulty with? (A) identifying an object; (B) reaching for an object; (C) seeing an object; (D) keeping track of time. ____24. A woman has participated in an ongoing research study of intelligence for the past 20 years. Every few years, a researcher tests her intelligence and asks her questions about her achievements. The woman is involved in a study that is using a ________ research design. (A) cross-sectional; (B) chronological; (C) lifespan; (D) longitudinal. PSYC 100 – Introductory Psychology University of Maryland University College Second Examination – DUE December 6, 2015 Fall, 2015 ____25. After studying a textbook chapter for a test, a student goes over the material with his study group. He knows the material from the beginning and end of the chapter very well, but he remembers very little from the middle of the chapter. The student’s memory for the chapter illustrates what psychologists call the ______ effect. (A) primacy; (B) recency; (C) serial position; (D) levels of processing. ____26. In Harry Harlow’s research on attachment, baby monkeys that had been separ- ated from their mothers were exposed to two different surrogate mothers. One was made of wire mesh and provided food; the other was padded, covered with terry cloth, and provided “contact comfort” but no nourishment. When present- ed with a fear stimulus, the baby monkey would: (A) run to the wire mother for protection; (B) run to the terry cloth mother for protection; (C) be just as likely to run to the terry cloth mother as it is to run to the wire mother; (D) venture out to explore the fear stimulus and then return to the terry cloth mother before ex- ploring further. ____27. The separation of figure from ground is: (A) an illusion; (B) inherent in the visual stimulus; (C) a sensory process, accomplished by the receptors; (D) a perceptual process, accomplished by the brain. ____28. Research on language acquisition in deaf persons indicates that: (A) no system of functional communication can be developed in the absence of auditory stim- uli; (B) sign language is unlike spoken language, because it has few morphemes and lacks syntactical structure; (C) similar developmental stages exist for the acquisition of sign language in deaf children and spoken language in hearing children; (D) sign language only permits very primitive and basic communica- tion between individuals. ____29. What is responsible for the visual blind spot? (A) the absence of rods where the optic nerve exits the retina; (B) ) the absence of cones where the optic nerve exits the retina; (C) the absence of rods and cones where the optic nerve exits the retina; (D) the absence of photopigments where the optic nerve exits the retina. ____30. The confidence expressed by a witness reporting his memory for the witnessed event is: (A) a very good indicator of the accuracy of his memory; (B) a good indicator of the accuracy of his memory, but should not be trusted because the witness may be lying; (C) a very poor indicator of the accuracy of his memory; (D) hardly ever taken into account by a jury. ____31. What happens when congenitally deaf persons learn American Sign Language (ASL) as a first language in adolescence? (A) They have difficulty in commu- nicating in ASL, even after over 30 years of practice. (B) They have an easier time learning to read English, compared to congenitally deaf people who learned ASL earlier. (C) They fail to use function words consistently, even after over 30 years of practice. (D) all of the above. PSYC 100 – Introductory Psychology University of Maryland University College Second Examination – DUE December 6, 2015 Fall, 2015 ____32. Homer is considering the purchase of subliminal self-help tapes to aid him in losing weight. His wife Marge is skeptical about this plan and asks for your advice. Based on your knowledge of scientific psychology, what would you tell her about the effectiveness of subliminal self-help tapes? (A) They are effective. (B) They are ineffective. (C) Their effectiveness has never been scientifically tested. (D) More research is needed to assess their level of effectiveness. ____33. The behaviorist idea that children learn their native language via reinforcement has the greatest difficulty explaining which fact? (A) Children say one word, rather than another, when referring to a particular object. (B) Children learn to take turns in a conversation. (C) Children learn grammar, even though they are seldom corrected for grammatical mistakes. (D) Children talk for no reason except to get attention. ____34. Traditional tests of recall and recognition, such as those used in college courses: (A) assess procedural memory; (B) depend on elaborate rehearsal performed during study; (C) assess explicit memory; (D) employ repetition priming. ____35. A child has two favorite glasses, each of which will hold eight ounces of liquid. One glass is a tall, skinny one with a picture of a giraffe; the other is a short, fat one with a picture of a hippopotamus. When her mother pours some of her juice into the “hippo glass,” the girl asks her mother to move the juice into the “giraffe glass,” because she is really thirsty. If the girl believes that transferring the juice into the taller glass increases the amount of juice, she probably: (A) is capable of mental operations; (B) is capable of accommodation; (C) is in Piaget’s stage of formal operations; (D) has not yet reached the concrete operational stage. ____36. As a result of brain damage, D.F. cannot recognize the faces of her relatives and friends or identify common objects. She says she can’t perceive the differences among various objects. She can, however, walk across a room without bumping into anything, and is able to insert an object into a rectangular slot when asked to do so. Why is D.F. able to maneuver in her environment despite being unable to consciously identify objects? (A) Symptoms like D.F.’s are invariably linked to conversion disorders. (B) D.F.’s symptoms suggest that she is malingering (i.e., lying about her disability). (C) Humans have multiple brain pathways for processing visual information. (D) Some brain damaged people develop a “sixth sense” when they have an impairment in one of the other five senses. ____37. Hypnotized eyewitnesses: (A) never recall useful details; (B) have insights and abilities they do not possess when not hypnotized; (C) can sometimes be induced to remember false information; (D) always remember events accurately. ____38. Broca’s area in the brain is most closely associated with: (A) memory; (B) emo- tion; (C) language; (D) physical movement. PSYC 100 – Introductory Psychology University of Maryland University College Second Examination – DUE December 6, 2015 Fall, 2015 ____39. A person with visual agnosia has difficulty with: (A) remembering what particu- lar words mean; (B) recognizing what he sees; (C) perceiving and copying lines at particular orientations; (D) perceiving motion in particular directions. ____40. Baby Brendan cannot yet form mental representations of objects. If you hide a toy from him, he will not attempt to look for it. In which of Piaget’s stages of cognitive development is Brendan? (A) sensorimotor; (B) preoperational; (C) concrete operational; (D) formal operational. ____41. The hypothesis that cognitive ability can be boosted by listening to classical music (i.e., the “Mozart effect”): (A) was based on a single study conducted with college students; (B) involved a single paper-folding task, rather than the variety of tasks used in typical IQ tests; (C) has never received strong empirical support in studies of children; (D) all of the above. ____42. Top-down processing is: (A) also called “data-driven” processing; (B) always deliberate and under conscious control; (C) why we experience certain illusions, such as the Ames Room; (D) unrelated to our expectancies. ____43. Two research strategies, twin studies and adoption studies, have enabled re- searchers to discern the relative contributions of nature and nurture to many aspects of the human condition, including the development of cognitive abilities and various types of psychopathology. These two research strategies are popular because twin studies control for ______ and adoption studies control for ______. (A) nature, nurture; (B) nurture, nature; (C) environmental effects, learning from experience; (D) acquired habits, innate tendencies. ____44. Tim and Jim are identical twins who were raised apart. Ned and Ted are frater- nal twins who were raised together. Which pair of twins, if either, will have a greater degree of similarity between their IQ scores? (A) Tim and Jim; (B) Ned and Ted; (C) Both sets of twins will display a high degree of similarity in IQ scores. (D) Both sets of twins will display a low degree of similarity in IQ scores. ____45. Suppose you can just tell the difference between lifting 100 grams and 102 grams. According to Weber’s Law, you would need to add _____ grams to distinguish the new weight from a standard weight of 1,000 grams. (A) 2; (B) 10; (C) 20; (D) 200. ____46. The most famous quotation attributed to the Gestalt psychologists is “The whole is different from the sum of its parts.” By this, the Gestalt psychologists meant that: (A) when a group makes a decision, it will probably be very different from any decision that an individual might make; (B) appearances can be deceiving; (C) individuals are prone to making errors, even in simple mathematical prob- lems; (D) perceptual experience cannot be fully understood if it is broken down into its basic elements. PSYC 100 – Introductory Psychology University of Maryland University College Second Examination – DUE December 6, 2015 Fall, 2015 ____47. You and your spouse can best predict your newborn son or daughter’s future in- tellectual aptitude by: (A) carefully assessing the infant’s sensory and reflexive responses; (B) observing your son or daughter’s general level of emotional reac- tivity; (C) noting the age at which your child first walks and talks; (D) obtaining information about your own levels of intelligence. ____48. Several youngsters are taking a test in a large room. The person giving the test is very careful that every child takes the test under the same conditions. Every child hears exactly the same instructions and is given the same amount of time. It appears that the test these youngsters are taking is: (A) standardized; (B) valid; (C) reliable; (D) an intelligence test. ____49. The most common way of assessing attachment in human infants is to: (A) have the child track a picture of the mother with her eyes; (B) see if the child smiles at a picture of her mother; (C) determine the predominant child-rearing style of the parents; (D) see how the child responds when separated from and then reunited with her mother. ____50. The term “conservation” refers to a child’s (A) egocentric perspective regard- ing social issues; (B) awareness that altering the form or shape of an object does not alter the amount of that object; (C) release from lack of object permanence; (D) inability to mentally “undo” a process or procedure.