Psych Exam 2 Quiz Questions – Flashcards

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The process of transducing air pressure waves into neural messages that the brain interprets as meaningful sound is known as
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Audition
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• A softball may appear smaller to batters who are discouraged by their poor performance than to batters who are hitting well. This best illustrates that perceptions are influenced by
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Emotion
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• Patients who have negative expectations about the outcome of a surgical procedure may experience increased postoperative pain. This best illustrates the importance of
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Top-down processing
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• The amount of light entering the eye is regulated by the
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Iris
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• Gestalt psychologists were the first to explain how
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we organize the world into meaningful forms.
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• Berdine has developed cataracts in both eyes, preventing her from being able to identify even her mother's face. Berdine most clearly suffers a deficiency in
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bottom-up processing
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• The olfactory receptors are activated by
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Airborne molecules
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• The perception of the letter "t" as two intersecting lines rather than as four nonintersecting lines illustrates the principle of
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Continuity
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• Suppose two objects cast retinal images of the same size. The object that appears to be closer is perceived as ________ the object that appears to be more distant
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Smaller than
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• The process of receiving and representing stimulus energies by the sensory receptors and the nervous system is called
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Sensation
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• The principle that two stimuli must differ by a constant minimum proportion for their difference to be perceived is known as
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Weber's Law
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• The greatest difficulty facing contemporary research on ESP is the
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lack of reproducible evidence of ESP.
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• The horizon Moon appears to shrink in size if it is viewed through a narrow tube that eliminates the perception of distance cues. This best illustrates the importance of
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Context effects
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• The perceived brightness of visible light waves is determined by their
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amplitude
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• The influence of our physical gestures on our psychological preferences is said to be an indication of
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Embodied cognition
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• Those who reject a dissociation theory of hypnosis believe that hypnosis is a form of normal
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Social influence
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The ability to simultaneously process the pitch, loudness, melody, and meaning of a song best illustrates
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Parallel processing
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Telepathy refers to
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extrasensory transmission of thoughts from one mind to another.
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19. For burn victims, a computer-generated virtual reality uses ________ to help control pain
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Distraction
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20. Stan continued playing with minimal pain during the closing quarter of an exciting collegiate football game even though he had suffered a very severe ankle sprain when he was tackled. It is likely that Stan's pain was psychologically minimized by ________ and physically minimized by the brain's release of ________.
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Distraction; endorphins
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21. On the way to the temporal lobe's auditory cortex, neural impulses from the auditory nerve are first relayed to the
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Thalamus
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22. The organizational rules identified by Gestalt psychologists illustrate that
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the perceived whole differs from the sum of its parts
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23. For some people, hearing certain sounds may activate color-sensitive regions of the cortex so as to trigger a sensation of color. This phenomenon is called
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Synesthesia
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24. Which receptor cells are best at detecting color?
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Cones
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25. Visual information is processed by
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ganglion cells before it is processed by feature detectors
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26. Wave amplitude determines the perceived ________ of light and the perceived ________ of sound
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Brightness; loudness
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27. The ability to adjust to an artificially displaced or even inverted visual field is called
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Perceptual adaption
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28. After losing his left hand in an accident, Hsin continued to experience pain in his nonexistent hand. His experience illustrates
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phantom limb sensations
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29. A perceptual set is
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mental predisposition that influences what we perceive
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30. An area of the brain dedicated to the specialized task of recognizing faces is located in the right ________ lobe
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Temporal
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31. The perceptual tendency to fill in gaps in order to perceive disconnected parts as a whole object is called
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Closure
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32. Relative height is a cue involving our perception of objects higher in our field of vision as
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farther away
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33. Experiments evaluating the impact of subliminal recordings indicated that they
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did not help more than a placebo
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34. Retinal disparity refers to the
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somewhat different images our two eyes receive of the same object
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People's response to subliminal priming indicates that
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they are capable of processing information without any conscious awareness of doing so
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As a rock musician who has spent too many hours listening to loud music, Rodney is beginning to lose his hearing. It is most likely that this hearing loss results from damage to
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Hair cells
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Subliminally presented stimuli
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can sometimes be consciously perceived
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Psychics who have worked with police departments in an effort to solve difficult crimes have demonstrated the value of
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none of these abilities
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Retinal disparity is an important cue for
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depth perception
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Hypnosis involves a state of
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heightened openness to suggestion
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The process by which our sensory systems transform stimulus energies into neural impulses is called
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transduction
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A time lag between sound waves striking our left and right ears is important for accurately
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Locating sounds
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Joe Wilson, age 55, has been told by experts that he has conduction hearing loss and that a hearing aid would restore his lost sense of hearing. It is likely that Joe's hearing loss involves problems within the
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Middle ear
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While listening to sad rather than happy music, people are more likely to perceive a spoken word as mourning rather than morning. This best illustrates that perception is influenced by
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context effects
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Color constancy refers to the fact that
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objects are perceived to be the same color even if the light they reflect changes
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Information processing guided by higher-level mental processes is called
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top-down processing
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The ability to see objects in three dimensions is most essential for making judgments of
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Distance
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When researchers added a few drops of vinegar to a brand-name beer, the beer tasters disliked it only if they had been told they were drinking vinegar-laced beer. This best illustrated the impact of
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perceptual set
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Cocking your head would be most useful for detecting the ______ of a sound.
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Location
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A response is learned most rapidly and is most resistant to extinction if it is acquired under conditions of
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continuous reinforcement followed by partial reinforcement
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Your heart may race when you are confronted by a lion but not when you are approached by a kitten. This best illustrates the adaptive value of
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Discrimination
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Any stimulus that, when removed after a response, strengthens the response is called a
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positive reinforcer
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In an experiment, preschool children pounded and kicked a large inflated Bobo doll that an adult had just beaten on. This experiment served to illustrate the importance of
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observational learning
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A stimulus that gains reinforcing power through its link with a primary reinforcer is called a ________ reinforcer.
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Conditioned
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When grocery shopping with his mother, 4-year-old Hakim sometimes throws temper tantrums if his mother refuses his requests for a particular snack food. Parent-training experts would suggest that his mother should
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continue shopping while ignoring Hakim's tantrums.
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Voluntary behaviors that produce rewarding or punishing outcomes are called
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operant behaviors
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A child who is punished for swearing at home but not for swearing on the school playground is most likely to demonstrate a patterned habit of swearing that is indicative of
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discrimination
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Four-year-old Chella asks her mother for a special treat every time they go to the grocery store. At first, her mother gave in to every request, but now she does so only once in a while. Research suggests that Chella will
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continue to ask for a treat nearly every time she goes to the store
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Researchers condition a flatworm to contract its body in response to a light by repeatedly pairing the light with electric shock. The stage in which the flatworm learns the link between the light and electric shock is called
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acquisition
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Behaviors followed by favorable consequences become more likely and behaviors followed by unfavorable consequences become less likely. This principle is called
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the law of effect
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An executive in a computer software firm works with his office door closed. At the same time every hour he opens the door to see what his employees are doing. The employees have learned to work especially hard during the five minutes before and while the door is open. Their work pattern is typical of responses that are reinforced on a ________ schedule.
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fixed-interval
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Children are especially likely to behave aggressively after viewing TV violence in which an attractive person commits
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justified violence that causes no visible pain or harm
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Positive reinforcers ________ the rate of operant responding, and negative reinforcers ________ the rate of operant responding.
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increase; increase
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A partial reinforcement schedule that reinforces a response after an unpredictable number of responses is a ________ schedule.
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variable-ratio
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In classical conditioning, generalization refers to the tendency for the conditioned response to be evoked by stimuli that are similar to the
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conditioned stimulus
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B. F. Skinner believed that teaching machines could promote effective learning because they allow for both
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continuous reinforcement and latent learning
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After a scary biking accident, Alex extinguished his conditioned fear of bikes by cycling on a safe biking trail every day for a week. The reappearance of his previously extinguished fear when Alex rode a bike on the same trail two weeks later best illustrates
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spontaneous recovery
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Administering an aversive stimulus following an operant response is
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positive punishment
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Purchasing state lottery tickets is reinforced with monetary winnings on a ________ schedule
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variable-ratio
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The tendency to recall the first and last items in a list better than the middle items is known as the ________ effect.
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serial position
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Explicit memories are
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memories of facts and personal events that can be consciously retrieved
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Your activated but limited-capacity memory is called ________ memory.
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short-term
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Research on memory construction indicates that
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false memories often feel as real as true memories.
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Jeremy can accurately process and store new information, but when he is tested on what he has learned he becomes so anxious that he can't easily recall the new information. Jeremy most clearly demonstrates difficulty with
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Retrieval
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After learning the combination for his new locker at school, Milton is unable to remember the combination for his year-old bicycle lock. Milton is experiencing the effects of
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retroactive interferenc
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To understand how we form and retrieve memories, psychologists have developed
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information-processing models
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Which type of memory has an essentially limitless capacity
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long-term memory
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The finding that people who sleep after learning a list of nonsense syllables forget less than people who stay awake provides evidence that forgetting may involve
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interference
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Damage to the hippocampus would most likely interfere with a person's ability to learn
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the names of newly introduced people
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The disruptive effect of new learning on the recall of previously learned information is called
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retroactive interference
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Forming many associations between new course material and what you already know is an effective way to build a network of
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retrieval cues
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A loss of an encoded memory as a result of a gradual fading of the physical memory trace best illustrates
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storage decay
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Encoding that requires attention and conscious awareness is called
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effortful processing
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The retention of encoded information over time refers to
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storage
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People should avoid back-to-back study times for learning Spanish and French vocabulary in order to minimize
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interference
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Remembering how to solve a puzzle without any conscious recollection that you can do so best illustrates ________ memory.
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implicit
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We encode implicit memories by means of
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automatic processing
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Cheri doesn't remember that she got sick after eating oatmeal on several occasions in early childhood. However, whenever she smells oatmeal she experiences a classically conditioned feeling of nausea. Cheri's conditioned reaction indicates that she retains a ________ memory.
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Implicit
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To remember the information presented in her psychology textbook, Susan often relates it to her own life experiences. Susan's strategy is an effective memory aid because it facilitates
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meaningful encoding
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You are most likely to automatically encode information about
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the sequence of your day's events
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A good night's sleep is most likely to improve exam grades by supporting the process of
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Memory consolidation
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For a moment after hearing his dog's high-pitched bark, Mr. Silvers retains the sounds of the yelp in his mind. His experience most clearly illustrates ________ memory.
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Echoic
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Mice could not learn their way out of a maze if they could not produce an enzyme needed for
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long-term potentiation
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