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Cognition, Sixth Edition: Chapter 04

Instructions: For each question, click on the radio button beside your answer. When you have completed the entire quiz, click the Submit my answers button at the bottom of the page to receive your results.

Question 1:


a) James was correct.
b) Defining attention is very difficult; “attention” has a variety of meanings.
c) Although his initial definition was flawed, we now know what attention is.
d) The majority of researchers agree with James.

Question 2:


a) Dichotic listening
b) Late selection
c) Selective attention theory
d) Early selection theory

Question 3:


a) It was called the shadowing task and required people to shadow one of two messages presented over headphones.
b) It was called selective looking and required people to choose amongst two simultaneously presented visual events.
c) It was called the cocktail party effect.
d) It involved the presentation of simultaneous auditory messages with the task to attend to both of them.

Question 4:


a) The early selection view of attention
b) The ability to attend to one conversation in a crowded room where many other conversations are going on
c) The part of the brain responsible for recognizing colours
d) The distinction between controlled and automatic processes

Question 5:


a) DLPFC
b) Nystagmus
c) ACC
d) V1

Question 6:


a) It showed that people fail to perceive task-irrelevant events when attention is directed to another task.
b) It showed that the unnoticed stimulus can still modulate behaviour, despite a lack of conscious perception.
c) It showed that faces capture attention in situations where other stimulus categories such as simple circles do not.
d) All of the above

Question 7:


a) Face processing is involuntary.
b) Participants “gave up” on attending to faces when the task became too difficult.
c) We can more easily ignore faces than other distractor items.
d) Face processing occurs in a different part of the brain than processing of other distractor items.

Question 8:


a) Central bottlenecks do not exist.
b) Central bottlenecks can be avoided in practised tasks when the stimulus and response phases of each process involve the same modality.
c) Practice has no effect on central bottlenecks.
d) A central bottleneck can be overcome with practice.

Question 9:


a) Omission errors
b) Commission errors
c) Omission and commission errors
d) Default network errors

Question 10:


a) Listening to music while you work out
b) Listening to music during the attentional blink task
c) Failing to stop quickly while driving because you were talking on your phone
d) Cooking turkey in the oven while simultaneously preparing the gravy on the stove

Question 11:


a) we have limited attentional resources
b) vigilance tasks have high attentional demands
c) we become bored with the task
d) there is no cost to sustained attention in vigilance tasks

Question 12:


a) the attention as a spotlight hypothesis
b) the sequential attention hypothesis
c) the structural limits hypothesis
d) the domain-specific hypothesis

Question 13:


a) DLPFC
b) ACC
c) FFA
d) PFC

Question 14:


a) the central cueing effect
b) the stimulus onset asynchrony
c) attention capture
d) inhibition of return

Question 15:


a) 0.0025%
b) 0.025%
c) 2.5%
d) 25%

Question 16:


a) Our attention is regulated by top-down processes.
b) Our attention is regulated by bottom-up processes.
c) There is very little cost to performance when we task-switch.
d) We are consciously aware of the cognitive operations required to switch tasks.

Question 17:


a) 6 to 9
b) 10 to 13
c) 17 to 20
d) 33 to 36

Question 18:


a) we initially fixate our eyes on the periphery of the face
b) we initially fixate our eyes on the face and mouth
c) we initially fixate our eyes on the nose; then move them to the eyes; and then to the periphery of the face
d) our eye fixations are randomly distributed across the face

Question 19:


a) focusing the eyes on the optimal location of the target
b) maintaining eye focus on the target as action is initiated
c) ending eye focus on the target as action is initiated
d) holding the eyes on the optimal location for an extended period of time

Question 20:


a) bottom-up; top-down
b) top-down; bottom-up
c) goal-directed; voluntary
d) involuntary; stimulus-directed



True or False Questions

Question 21:


a) True
b) False

Question 22:


a) True
b) False

Question 23:


a) True
b) False

Question 24:


a) True
b) False

Question 25:


a) True
b) False

Question 26:


a) True
b) False

Question 27:


a) True
b) False

Question 28:


a) True
b) False

Question 29:


a) True
b) False

Question 30:


a) True
b) False