1) which of the following is a failure of selective attention? a. while you are working a problem set in the living room, you are thrown off track when your sister changes the tv channel. b. you are in the basement ironing and you hear the phone unexpectedly ringing upstairs. c. while upstairs talking to your best friend, you pretend not to hear your mother calling you to dinner. d. you are able to talk on the phone while driving. FEEDBACK: being thrown off track is a failure, since changing the channel causes you to lose you concentration. if selective attention working, there would be no loss of concentration when the channel is changed. 2) most participants in a dichotic listening task are... a. often able to notice personally relevant words like their names in the unattended channel. b. unable to describe physical features like the pitch of the stimulus in the unattended channel. c. usually able to report most of the semantic content of the stimulus in the unattended channel. d. unable to report the semantic content of the stimulus in the attended channel. FEEDBACK: stimuli that carry importance (such as a person's name) are notices when in the unattended channel. 3) which statement about visual attention is most accurate? a. by priming our detectors, we make expected stimuli more likely to be noticed and remembered. b. by pointing our eyes to an area, we automatically point our attention there. c. stimuli that are entirely unexpected are very likely to catch our attention. d. attention can be directed toward specific areas of space but not specific objects. FEEDBACK: priming our detectors makes them more sensitive to certain types of stimuli. 4) participants are asked to report the shape of a visual stimulus that appears on the left side of the screen. simultaneous with the presentation of this target stimulus, a second visual stimulus is flashed on the screen. based on our understanding of inattentional blindness, which of the following is NOT sufficient to make the participants notice the second stimulus. a. participants are told beforehand where, but not when, the second stimulus might appear. b. participants' eyes are oriented toward the place where the second stimulus will appear. c. participants' attention is directed to the place where the second stimulus will appear d. participants are told beforehand only that something else might appear. FEEDBACK: a participant may perceive a second stimulus but that will not be consciously detected. it is not a problem with seeing things, but rather with noticing the difference. 5) suppose you are at a cocktail party conversing with a friend. in this situation, you are LEAST likely to hear whether... a. there is music in the background b. the couple beside you are talking about a movie you just saw and loved. c. the person behind you is speaking intelligently of foolishly. d. it is a man or a woman standing behind you who is talking. FEEDBACK: the meaning of a conversation requires more resources and thus may not be consciously perceived in the unattended channel. 6) when listening intently to one message, you're likely to detect your name if it is spoken in a different message. this is likely to be because your name: a. is said loudly enough to be clearly perceived. b. is not "filtered" in any way by attention c. conforms to common English phoneme patterns d. is a stimulus for which you are well primed. FEEDBACK: your name is something that you hear freq. and is hence primed for easy recognition. 7) which of the following statements applies to expectation-based priming but not to stimulus-based priming? a. it is bottom-up b. it leads to faster recognition of subsequent related stimuli. c. it has a cost attached. d. it has an immediate effect on attention. FEEDBACK: because you are expecting something. it req. resources and hence has a cost attached to it. 8) in the absence of attention, a. there is no perception. b. participants still consciously perceive stimuli if the stimuli are simple enough. c. participants can perceive most aspects of the world but are not influenced by what they perceive. d. stimuli may not be consciously perceived but can still have an influence on the perceiver. FEEDBACK: perception is possible w/o attention. that is, you can have a response w/o knowing why you are responding. 9) in one experiment. participants were shown a stimulus preceded by a neutral cue, a correct prime, or a misleading prime. for some participants, the primes were usually correct (high validity), and for others they were usually misleading (low validity). which of the following was NOT a result of this experiment? a. performance in the misled cond. differed between high and low validity cond., demonstrating that the expectationbased priming, but not repetition priming, has no cost. b. participants responded faster in the primed high validity condition than in the primes low validity condition demonstrating that expectation influences priming. c. participants responded faster in the primed low validity condition than in the neutral condition, demonstrating repetition priming. d. participants in the high validity condition showed no difference between neutral and misled trails, demonstrating that there is no cost of priming. FEEDBACK: having a large number of correct primes leads to a larger cost, not a smaller one , on misleading trials. 10) expectation-based priming suggests that a. even when a misleading cue is ignored, it is costly. b. perception works within a limited-capacity system. c. the perceptual system gives input to, but does not receive output from, higher brain areas. d. visual perception works like a searchlight. FEEDBACK: expectation-based priming involves resources, and those are limited in capacity. 11) in a study of spatial attention, participants were given a neutral, correct, or misleading cue about where on the screen a stimulus would appear. what is the best explanation for what happened on trials with misleading cues? a. there were costs bc the spotlight of attention had moved to the misled location and had to move back. b. there were no costs bc, although spatial attention is limited, the resources req. for the task did not exceed its limits. c. there were no costs bc spatial attention is not a limited-capacity system. d. there were costs bc the eyes had moved to the misled location and had to move back. FEEDBACK: the costs appear bc of attention, not bc of eye movements. costs arise when the attention has to shift from the misled place to the actual target. 12) which of the following statements on how people direct the "beam" of attention is FALSE? a. there are some gender differences in how people attend to info. b. events or items that are especially rare are unlikely to be notice (ex. motorcycles in traffic are esp. likely to be missed in areas where there are few motorcycles). c. there are cultural differences in how people direct attention such that East Asians spend more time looking at individual people than Americans do. d. people are more likely to attend to new and interesting information than they are to attend to old and familiar information. FEEDBACK: East Asians and others from collectivist cultures spend less time focusing on individuals than Americans. 13) fire alarms are designed to control attention ____, but outside such demanding stimuli, one can often control his or her own attention ___. a. endogenously; exogenously b. exogenously; externally c. exogenously; endogenously d. endogenously; internally FEEDBACK: exogenous control of attention is directed by outside sources; endogenous control of attention means that one chooses what to attend to. 14) what do patients suffering from unilateral neglect syndrome demonstrate about visual attention? a. we primarily pay attention to objects and are only loosely guided by space and location. b. the brain damage is unilateral-neglect patients make them noncomparable to people with healthy brains. c. people have both space-based and object-based attention. d. if the brain is damaged in a certain way, the focus of attention cannot move into a previously ignored visual space. FEEDBACK: space-based attention is part of neglect and is independent of object-based attention. 15) evidence suggests that... a. early brain activity in response to attended input is indistinguishable from brain activity for unattended input. b. unattended stimuli are more fully processed if the attended input is particularly simple. c. unattended stimuli are processed fully and made into consciousness and then forgotten. d. unattended stimuli are more fully processed if the attended input is particularly complex. FEEDBACK: simple stimuli do NOT require resources and can hence be processed easily and w/o much attention. 16) patients with unilateral neglect resulting from damage to the right hemisphere will... a. read only the right half of the words shown to them. b. disengages from a visual stimulus as it moves from the left to right visual field c. only complete half of everything they set out to do d. fail to perceive anything in the right visual field. FEEDBACK: they have intact attention on their right, and thus they will only be able to read the right half of the word. 17) divided attention requires enough mental resources to attend to both tasks. these limited mental resources include all of the following EXCEPT a. task-general tools like executive control b. task-specific resources c. task-general storage spaces like LTM d. task-general resources that act like a bank account FEEDBACK: LTM actually has a great deal of space and is not limited in scope like WM. 18) which of the following is NOT a reason why performance might improve with practice? a. as each aspect of a response is automatized, more resources become available for the next aspect. b. practice allows us to find the best choice among competing responses. c. memorization is facilitated by repeated exposure. d. with practice, individual elements of a task draw more on our resources. FEEDBACK: with practice, elements of a task become more automatic and hence require fewer resources. 19) which of the following findings does NOT support the existence of task-specific mental resources? a. two simple tasks are easy to do simultaneously, while two hard tasks are not. b. listening to spoken words and having a quick motor response to visual input are easy to do simultaneously bc they do not rely on the same resources. c. listening to two sets of words simultaneously is harder than listening to one set while reading another. d. it is more difficult to combine two verbal tasks than one verbal task and one spatial task. FEEDBACK: difficulty is the only characteristic determining if a task can be performed. if these tasks are different, they would not draw on task-specific resources. 20) which of the following is true of ADHD? a. it involves multiple attention systems, including "alerting", "orienting" and "executive" systems. b. it only happens in children c. it is a sample disorder that is highly localized in the brain. d. it is more severe than unilateral neglect syndrome. FEEDBACK: ADHD involves a complex pattern of symptoms and brain areas. 21) some resources are task-specific, and others are task-general. which of the following is a task-specific resource? a. an energy supply needed for mental tasks. b. verbal resources for tasks involving words. c. executive control to override habitual responses. d. memory FEEDBACK: verbal resources cannot be used for visuospatial tasks. 22) reading simple words is an example of a(n) __________ task and saying the color of the ink in which that word is printed is an example of a(n) __________ task. a. controlled; automatic b. automatic; controlled c. controlled, interference d. automatic; interference. FEEDBACK: reading is habitual and does not require resources. reading the ink color involves having to ignore the word and say the color of the ink, which is a novel task. 23) what is the main reason why both late and early selection models can be true? a. the cock-tail party effect no longer appears in modern life. b. it has to do with visuospatial helper systems. c. it involves neglect-like behavior in unimpaired adults. d. some tasks require lots of resources, while other tasks require fewer. FEEDBACK: when the message in the unattended channel is simple, people can perform basic process on this information, leading to later selection. however, a complex message in the unattended channel may be more difficult to process.