C81COG Cognitive Psychology REVISION LECTURE (2008-2009)

C81COGCognitive PsychologyREVISION LECTURE (2008-2009) Lecturers: Peter Chapman Alastair Smith Jonathan Stirk Richard Tunney Geoff Underwood

Structure of lectures • Semester 1 • Intro to cognition • Perception/Illusions • Pattern recognition/vision • Imagery • Attention

Structure of lectures • Semester 2 • Psychology of language • Word recognition/reading • Memory- sensory/categorical • Thinking/Problem solving • Deduction/Reasoning

Breakdown of assessment • 20 credit module • Assessment by exam & coursework • Exam: 75% • Coursework (tutorial essay): 25%

Structure of exam • Number of questions: 120 • 5-7 questions per lecture • Type of questions: ALL Multiple choice • BRING A PENCIL AND ERASER! • Length of exam: 2 hours

What to do when you sit in your seat • Read the instructions • Fill in the details on the ANSWER SHEET • Fill in the candidate slip

What to do • READ INSTRUCTIONS CAREFULLY! • FILL IN REQUIRED INFORMATION • REMEMBER TO USE THE GRID ON THE TOP RIGHT TO MARK OUT YOUR CANDIDATE NUMBER (WITH A PENCIL) • FILL IN THE ANSWER GRID WITH A PENCIL MAKING ONE THICK PENCIL LINE ONLY PER QUESTION • REMOVE ANY INCORRECT OR ADDITIONAL MARKS WITH AN ERASER

What not to do!  

Tips for answering MCQ’s • Read the directions carefully • The directions usually indicate that some alternatives may be partly correct or correct statements in themselves, but not when joined to the stem. • You are required to answer 120 multiple choice questions in 2 hours or less. This means you may have less than a minute, on average, to spend on each question. Some questions, of course, will take you only a few seconds, while others will require more time for thought.

Tips for answering MCQ’s • Plan to progress through the exam in three ways: • Read every question carefully but quickly, answering only those of which you are 100% certain. Put a "?" on those that need more thought. • Then, examine/study the questions not yet answered. Answer those you are reasonably sure of without pondering too long on each. Erase the "?" • Finally, study read the remaining unanswered questions. If you cannot come to a decision by reasoning or if you run out of time, guess. Erase the "?". A guess is better than a blank.

Tips for answering MCQ’s • Use the process of elimination procedure. Eliminate the obviously incorrect alternatives. • Read all of the stem and every alternative • Read the stem with each alternative to take advantage of the correct sound or flow that the correct answer often produces. Also, you can eliminate any alternatives that do not agree grammatically with the stem. • Consider "all of the above" and "none of the above." • Examine the "above" alternatives to see if all of them or none of them apply totally. If even one does not apply totally, do not consider "all of the above" or "none of the above" as the correct answer. Make sure that a statement applies to the question since it can be true, but not be relevant to the question at hand!

Tips for answering MCQ’s • Note negatives • If a negative such as "none", "not", "never", or "neither" occurs in the stem, know that the correct alternative must be a fact or absolute and that the other alternatives could be true statements, but not the correct answer. • Note superlatives • Words such as "every", "all", "none", "always", and "only" are superlatives that indicate the correct answer must be an undisputed fact. In the social sciences, absolutes are rare. • Note qualifying words • "Usually", "often", "generally", "may", and "seldom" are qualifiers that could indicate a true statement.

Tips for answering MCQ’s • Study Qualifications • Break the stem down into grammatical parts. Pull out the bare subject and verb (if it is in the stem), and then examine all the modifiers (qualifiers) to the subject and verb. This process ensures that you will examine every part of the stem. • Changing Answers • Research has shown that changing answers on a multiple choice or true-false exam is neither good nor bad: if you have a good reason for changing your answer, change it.

Example MCQ Questions • Cognitive psychology assumes that: • a. information processing is unlimited • b. perception is guided only by incoming data • c. perception is guided only by knowledge • d. none of the above

Example MCQ Questions • The Müller-Lyer illusion can be explained in terms of: • a. misapplied size constancy • b. interpreting the figure as showing lines in depth • c. integration of the lines into the objects at the ends • d. all of the above

Example MCQ Questions • In Shepard & Metzler's (1971) experiment: • a. rotation of images was much easier in 2-D than 3-D • b. time to answer was a linear function of the angular rotation required • c. the results did not accord with the participants' introspections • d. people had to physically rotate complex block figures

Example MCQ Questions • The Stroop Task illustrates that: • a. people can name words printed in coloured ink • b. words and colours are easily confused • c. some colours are so similar that we have to give them the same names • d. printed words can unavoidably interfere with attended processes

Example MCQ Questions • In Broadbent's (1958) theory, preattentive analysis is accomplished by: • a. the perceptual system • b. the template-matching system • c. the sensory system • d. none of these

Example MCQ Questions • Which of the following is true of Anne Treisman’s theory of selective attention: • a. unattended information is attenuated • b. unattended information is processed semantically • c. attended information is filtered • d. both a and b above

Example MCQ Questions • Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) allows us to: • a. produce both meaningful and meaningless sentences • b. produce only meaningful sentences • c. map from the deep structure to the surface structure of a sentence • d. produce grammatically incorrect sentences

Example MCQ Questions • The smallest unit of meaning in language is called: • a. a morpheme • b. a phoneme • c. a grapheme • d. a syllable

Example MCQ Questions • Craik & Tulving’s (1975) classic study showed that as depth of processing increases: • a. latencies decrease • b. latencies increase • c. recognition accuracy decreases • d. recognition remains constant

Example MCQ Questions • Kleiman’s (1975) experiments showed that: • a. graphemic decisions are not affected by articulatory suppression • b. phonemic decisions are not affected by articulatory suppression • c. semantic decisions are not affected by articulatory suppression • d. none of the above

Example MCQ Questions • In which of the following problems are people’s feelings of warmth good predictors of how close they are to success? • a. the Tower of Hanoi task • b. the cheap necklace problem • c. the reversing triangle task • d. the nine dots task

Example MCQ Questions • “If P then Q. Not-Q. Therefore not-P.” is an example of: • a. modus ponens • b. modus tollens • c. affirmation of the consequent • d. denial of the antecedent

Example MCQ Questions • “If P then Q. Not-Q. Therefore not-P.” is an example of: • a. modus ponens • b. modus tollens • c. affirmation of the consequent • d. denial of the antecedent • Denial of the consequent • “If I am happy, then I smile. I am not smiling, therefore I am not happy.”

Example MCQ Questions • Kahneman and Tversky attributed base rate neglect in the Taxi Cab problem to: • a. hindsight bias • b. representativeness heuristic • c. divided attention • d. prospect theory

And Finally…… GOOD LUCK!

ANSWERS • The correct answers for the example questions are in order below: • d d b d c d a a b d a b b

C81COG Cognitive Psychology REVISION LECTURE (2008-2009)