Go to: Answers to Section 4-2 Quiz Questions

1. When an external event occurs, information about it FIRST goes to _____ memory, and then, if we _____ the information, it goes to _____ memory.

A. short-term; attend to; sensory
B. sensory; encode; long-term
C. short-term; encode; long-term
D. sensory; attend to; short-term

2. Which of the following statements about short-term memory is FALSE?

A. Short-term memories involve reconstructions of fragments of stored information.
B. Short-term memories are lost through the rapid disappearance of engrams.
C. Short-term memories consist of everything you are paying attention to right now.
D. Short-term memories are lost when new information pushes out older information.

3. When a person shows better memory for items depending upon where these items are located in a list, the person is showing something called

A. a habit.
B. controlled processes.
C. semantic encoding.
D. the serial-position effect.

4. As you listen to a show on television, the information that you are attending to is being held in

A. sensory memory.
B. short-term memory.
C. long-term memory.
D. all three memory systems.

5. Sensory memories are encoded

A. phonemically.
B. semantically.
C. as reproductions of the sensory stimulus.
D. as cognitive representations of the sensory stimulus.

6. Which of the following statements about short-term memories is TRUE?

A. Short-term memories are encoded as reproductions of the sesnory stimulus.
B. Short-term memories are lost when they are transferred to sesnory memory.
C. Short-term memories are can be explicit and implicit.
D. Short-term memories are limited by the small capacity of the short-term store.

7. Unrehearsed short-term memories disappear within 20 seconds because the _____ that are their physical bases in the brain decay rapidly.

A. frontal lobes
B. neurons
C. engrams
D. dendrites

8. If you learn a word list and misremember the word "fan" as "tan," this shows that you encoded the word "fan"

A. phonemically.
B. semantically.
C. perceptually.
D. structurally.

9. Which of the following is an example of an iconic memory?

A. a visual image held in the short-term memory store.
B. a visual image held in the sensory-memory store.
C. a sound held in the short-term memory store.
D. a sound held in the sensory-memory store.

10. Subjects in a study are given the following list of numbers to memorize:

55  34  98  53  23  76  82  45  13  21  95  68  26

If they remember best the numbers 95, 68, and 26, they are showing a ___ effect; if they remember best the numbers 55, 34, 98, they are showing a ___ effect.

A. primacy; processing
B. primacy; recency
C. recency; primacy
D. processing; recency

11. Which of the following levels of awareness is NOT involved in perceptual defense?

A. conscious
B. preconscious
C. unconscious
D. all the above

12. Because the first items in a list tend to be rehearsed more than other items in the list, they are more likely to be in the ___ store.

A. sensory
B. short-term
C. long-term
D. all the above

13. Forgetting from short-term memory is BEST explained by which of the following theories?

A. dissociation theory
B. displacement theory
C. reconstruction theory
D. interference theory

14. Which of the following is NOT a type of memory storage in the Atkinson and Shiffrin "standard model of memory"?

A. sensory
B. cognitive
C. short-term
D. long-term

15. Which theory explains the forgetting of sensory memories AND short-term memories?

A. displacement theory
B. engram theory
C. defensive theory
D. decay theory

16. The explanation that states that forgetting is due to the disappearance over time of a physiological "memory trace" is called

A. decay theory.
B. interference theory.
C. displacement theory.
D. reconstruction theory.

17. A student asked me a question during lecture. Just after she finished asking the question, my attention was distracted by another person who stood up, walked to the front of the room, sharpened his pencil, and then sat down again. My attention came back to the question; but now I no longer could remember what I was asked just 40 seconds earlier. This was probably due to the fact that the memory was lost from the ___ because I was not able to ___.

A. short-term store; rehearse the information
B. short-term store; retrieve the information
C. long-term store; rehearse the information
D. long-term store; retrieve the information

18. Displacement theory explains forgetting when a memory subsystem is limited in terms of its

A. duration.
B. level of awareness.
C. capacity.
D. encoding.

19. Which of the following is an example of an echoic memory?

A. a visual image held in the short-term memory store.
B. a visual image held in the sensory-memory store.
C. a sound held in the short-term memory store.
D. a sound held in the sensory-memory store.

20. Attention is the mental process that transfers information from

A. sensory memory to long-term memory.
B. long-term memory to short-term memory.
C. long-term memory to sensory memory.
D. short-term memory to working memory.

21. The LONGEST duration of unrehearsed information in the short-term store is about

A. 1-5 seconds.
B. 5-10 seconds.
C. 15-20 seconds.
D. 10 minutes.

Go to: Answers to Section 4-2 Quiz Questions