Cognitive psychology worksheet with answers

Free printable Cognitive psychology worksheet: 8 problems from easy to exam level, with an answer key. Print it or save it as a PDF.

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Name: ____________________   Date: ____________

1.Easy

Remembering what you did at your tenth birthday party relies mainly on:

  1. AProcedural memory
  2. BEpisodic memory
  3. CSemantic memory
  4. DIconic memory
2.Easy

Which method records the brain's electrical activity through electrodes on the scalp and has excellent temporal resolution?

  1. ACT
  2. BEEG
  3. CfMRI
  4. DPET
3.Easy

Riding a bicycle without thinking about it relies mainly on:

  1. AEpisodic memory
  2. BProcedural memory
  3. CSemantic memory
  4. DIconic memory
4.Medium

Encoding specificity means that recall is best when:

  1. ALearning happens just before sleep only
  2. BInformation is learned in one long session
  3. CThe material is learned in a noisy room
  4. DThe context at retrieval matches the context at learning
5.Medium

People recall more words from a list of short words (e.g. "cat, sun") than from a list of long words. The usual explanation is that:

  1. ALong words cause retroactive interference with earlier items
  2. BShort words are held in iconic memory as well as acoustically
  3. CLong words are processed more deeply and so crowd each other out
  4. DShort words take less time to rehearse in the phonological loop
6.Medium

In the Brown–Peterson task, participants count backwards by threes after seeing a trigram such as "KTR". The main finding was that:

  1. ARecall fell sharply within about 18 seconds without rehearsal
  2. BOnly the first letter of each trigram tended to be forgotten
  3. CRecall stayed almost perfect even after 18 seconds of counting
  4. DCounting backwards made the trigrams easier to remember
7.Hard

H.M. practised mirror drawing over several days. His performance improved steadily, yet each day he said he had never done the task before. What does this show?

  1. AHis improvement came from rehearsal in short-term memory
  2. BH.M. was only pretending not to remember the sessions
  3. CMirror drawing depends mainly on the hippocampus
  4. DSkills can be learned without remembering the practice
8.Hard

Which finding supports a reconstructive view of memory (Bartlett)?

  1. APeople retelling an unfamiliar story change it to fit their own culture
  2. BShort-term memory holds about seven items
  3. CPeople can recall long lists of digits perfectly
  4. DMemories of emotional events never change

Answer key

  1. 1. B · Episodic memory
  2. 2. B · EEG
  3. 3. B · Procedural memory
  4. 4. D · The context at retrieval matches the context at learning
  5. 5. D · Short words take less time to rehearse in the phonological loop
  6. 6. A · Recall fell sharply within about 18 seconds without rehearsal
  7. 7. D · Skills can be learned without remembering the practice
  8. 8. A · People retelling an unfamiliar story change it to fit their own culture

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