Thanks For The Memories

15 Points Per Correct Answer - No time limit  

1. The consequences of improperly recorded, distorted or implanted memory can be as trivial as embarrassment or as serious as a wrongful conviction for murder. Police questioned Donald Thompson, an Australian psychologist, about a rape because the victim's description of her assailant matched Mr. Thompson almost perfectly. The raped woman had watched a television interview that Mr. Thompson gave (ironically, on face recognition) just before the attack. This led her to mistakenly identify him as the rapist. Fortunately, being on television provided Dr. Thompson with the perfect alibi. What term describes the type of memory encoding error made by the rape victim? Storage decay Source misattribution Misinformation effect Transience

2. A proper understanding and application of the psychology of memory could improve your performance taking quizzes on this site. We are continually bombarded with sensory information only some of which is retained. Psychologists call the process by which we place the information in our memory "encoding". Which of the following strategies would we expect to be most successful learning a list of trivial facts? Study the information in the last seconds before sleep. Study the information in the first hour after arising. Play a recording of the information during sleep. Study the information during the last hour prior to sleep.

3. A committee is interviewing you for a job and you struggle to remember names as the introductions are made around the conference table. The "serial position effect" refers to the way in which the order of items presented affects which information will be most effectively encoded in memory. Which of the following is true about your ability to recall the names of the interview committee? Immediately after being presented the names, you will remember the last names presented the best. After a delay, you will best remember the first names presented to you. Both immediately after you hear the names and later, the names presented in the middle will be the most difficult to recall. All of these.

4. Once a memory has been encoded it must be retained and retrieved. In the 1950s Wilder Penfield applied electrical stimulation to the brains of conscious patients. Stimulated patients sometimes had vivid experiences such as hearing a song or seeing the view from a window in childhood. Did his experiments prove that all of our experiences are recorded as "engrams" in our brains? Yes No

5. David G Myers points out in his textbook chapter on memory, "Sometimes, just as you ask, 'what did you say?' you can hear in your mind the echo of what was said." What term is used for the recollection of a fleeting, auditory sensory memory? Iconic memory Potentiated memory Amnesic memory Echoic memory

6. A memory may be encoded correctly initially and then later be corrupted. Researcher Ulric Neisser had a group of college students compose a handwritten account of how they had learned of the Challenger space shuttle disaster one day after the disaster occurred. Three years later the same students were asked to again write down their recollections. What percent of the students recorded significantly different accounts? < 1% 10% 25% 5%

7. We have seen that stressful circumstances can be associated with information being wrongly encoded (misattribution errors). Which of the following is generally true about memory of traumatic events? Stronger emotional experiences make for weaker, less reliable memories. People who experienced the 1989 San Francisco Earthquake were more prone to memory errors about their experience at the time of the quake than those merely hearing about it. Administering a drug to block stress released hormones impairs people's ability to remember the details of an upsetting story. Those hearing about the 1989 San Francisco earthquake without experiencing it demonstrated no difficulty 1 ½ years later remembering the circumstances surrounding their hearing about the quake.

8. Was it really love at first sight? Can present circumstances alter past memories? In a study participants were asked questions related to their attitudes on marijuana and gender issues. Ten years later they were asked to recall their attitudes from ten years previous. What was the result? They recalled having attitudes on both issues more disparate from their current attitudes than what they had previously reported. They recalled their attitudes about gender issues but not marijuana as being closer to their current attitudes than what they had previously reported. They recalled their prior attitudes accurately. They recalled having attitudes on both issues closer to their current attitudes than what they had previously reported.

9. Changes in memory can occur as a result of specific influences that operate after a memory is first formed. In a classic experiment, researchers showed subjects a filmed traffic accident. Afterwards some subjects were asked to estimate the speed of collision when the cars "smashed together". Other subjects were asked to estimate the speed when the cars "hit each other". Subjects queried using the term "smashed together" not only gave higher speed estimates, but on specific inquiry also more often recalled broken glass despite the fact that no broken glass was present in the film. What name has been given to this phenomenon? Bias Absent-mindedness Memory persistence Misinformation effect

10. Elizabeth Loftus is responsible for much of the research and much of the publicity that has been given to the unreliability of memory, especially as it applies to wrongful convictions. She has been particularly involved in sexual abuse cases involving so-called "recovered memories". Which of the following is NOT true about this remarkable woman? A baby-sitter molested her at age 6. In college she was known as "second chance Fishman". The University of Washington once seized Ms Loftus files on a case and "gagged" her for one year and nine months. She examined Monica Lewinski's parent's divorce file.