Can You Pass This Cognition Test? Trivia Quiz

According to an evolutionary psychological perspective, people will perform better on a reasoning problem if that problem can be related to:

• Hunting or gathering

• Permission

• Detecting cheaters or betrayal

• Statements about necessity rather than sufficiency

People tend to be more alert and responsive to evidence that supports their preexisting notions and beliefs than to evidence that challenges them. This effect is called

The expected value of an option:

• Provides an estimate that is independent of the likelihood of reaching the action’s desired outcome

• Can be calculated as a value independent of the action’s consequences

• Is calculated as the utility of the likely outcome of the action multiplied by the probability of reaching that outcome

• Is negative if the likelihood of success with the action is extremely low

Studies indicate that participants tend to integrate base-rate information with diagnostic information.

• True

• False

A problem’s “initial state” refers to the knowledge and resources one possesses at the outset of the problem.

• True

• False

In general, a training procedure will promote subsequent analogy use if the procedure:

• Helps participants to remember the exact formulation of the training problems

• Makes the value of analogy use clear to participants

• Encourages participants to pay attention to the training problem’s deep structure

• Teaches the participants general principles about how analogies function

Expert problem-solvers:

• Focus on the surface of a problem rather than on its deep structure

• Use analogies less often than do novices

• Tend to categorize problems in terms of their deep structure

• Do not need to rely on mapping in their use of analogies

All television shows are junk. Junk is not worth watching. Therefore, all television shows are not worth watching.” This is an example of a ____________,a type of logical argument.

The tendency to be rigid in how one thinks about an object’s function is called:

• Mental stickiness

• Functional fixedness

• Functional narrowness

• Narrow focus

Deduction is a process that allows us to make specific predictions on the basis of more general knowledge.

• True

• False

Many years ago, Wallas argued that creative thought proceeds through four stages. Which of the following is NOT one of these stages?

• Illumination

• Articulation

• Preparation

• Incubation

A great deal of behind–the-scenes activity is necessary to make possible intellectual achievements like thinking and remembering. This behind-the-scenes activity is referred to by psychologists as

• Nuts-and-bolts work

• The cognitive unconscious

• Subconscious production

• Running the program

Conditional statements follow the format of some A are B.

• True

• False

Several authors have proposed that we are generally aware of the _____ of our own thoughts even though we are usually unaware of the _____ of thought

• Product; processes

• Decision-making processes; products

• Implicit mechanisms; explicit mechanisms

• Inferences; strategies

Erin has Korsakoff’s amnesia and is asked to perform in a memory experiment. Erin is likely to:

• Be capable of learning but do poorly in explicit tests of memory

• Recall explicitly events that she has witnessed but not the things that she has done

• Perform well on tests requiring conscious recollection even though her performance is poor if memory is tested indirectly

• Be unable to recall material learned in the past even though she explicitly recognizes the material when she encounters it

Lisa rides the train to work and always gets off at stop A. One Saturday she has to go into town, and rides the same train she takes to work. She is supposed to get off at Stop F, but she starts talking to her mother on the phone and gets off at stop A. What does this tell us about unconscious processing?

• Unconscious processing is impossible.

• If not consciously attending to what we are doing, we will rely on habit.

• Unconscious processing only causes problems.

• People tend to make the same mistakes over and over again.

A group of participants has just completed a series of problems involving water jars. In each problem, the participants needed to fill the largest jar, pour from it once into the middle-sized jar, and then pour from the largest jar twice into the smallest jar. The participants are now given a new problem, which cannot be solved via this procedure. We would expect that the participants will:

• Quickly solve the new problem because they have had practice with a series of very similar problems

• Have difficulty with the new problem because they are now locked into the procedure they had used successfully

• Behave just as participants who have no experience with water jar problems; that is, there will be no effect of the prior training

• Try their already practiced procedure and, once they realize this procedure does not help them, they will show no effect of the prior training

Mistakenly relying on a habitual response when a novel response was needed is referred to as an "".

Which of the following is NOT a heuristic used in problem-solving?

• Framing

• Hill-climbing

• Means-end analysis

• Working backward from the goal state

Dual-process models state that people have two ways of thinking: one is a fast and automatic process, whereas the other is slower but more accurate.

• True

• False

Participants’ use of “hill-climbing” is evident in that

• Participants solve problems more quickly if they can divide the problem into smaller subproblems

• Problem-solving often gets stalled if a problem requires the participant to move briefly away from the goal state in order (ultimately) to reach the goal

• Participants are disrupted in their problem-solving if they are asked to think out loud as they proceed

• Participants are often confused unless the problem’s path constraints are clearly specified