INTRO PSYCH EXAM 1 - SAMPLE QUESTIONS

These questions are intended only to familiarize you with the format of the multiple choice questions on
the exam. They do NOT cover all of the material you are expected to know. Studying these topics and
nothing else will not sufficiently prepare you for the exam.

1) Basic questions in neuroscience are relevant to which of Marrs levels of analysis?

a) Implementation
b) Algorithm
c) Computation
d) All of the above

2) Which of the following is a consequence of damage to the what pathway?

a) Object agnosia
b) Hemi-spatial neglect
c) Grasping deficits
d) The inability to identify objects by touching them

3) A researcher finds that getting deeper sleep at night is strongly positively correlated with
getting better grades on exams. Which of the following is definitely NOT true?

a) Sleeping more causes students to do better

b) Doing better in school causes students to get better sleep
c) Knowing how much sleep a person gets will NOT help you to predict their grades
d) Good overall health causes both better grades and better sleep

4) Consciousness is clearly involved in:

a) Object identification
b) Cognitive control
c) Word reading
d) Pattern detection

5) Austin Powers was frozen in time for several decades. When he was revived, he was no
longer so well suited for his environment. This example can help illustrate the concept of:

a) Nature versus nurture

b) Natural selection
c) Deterministic fallacy
d) Environment of evolutionary adaptation
6) In a study on the effects of subliminal persuasion, Bargh and colleagues (1996) found that
students exposed to words commonly associated with aging (for example, Florida, gray,
wrinkled) ________ than those not exposed to the aging words.

a) Walked more slowly down the hall as they were leaving the study
b) Talked more about their grandparents in the debriefing session following the study
c) Scored higher on depression following the study
d) Made more calls home

7) Which of the following is NOT one of the five foundations of psychology?

a) Modularity
b) Materialism
c) Evolution
d) Logic

8) A ___________ is a testable prediction while a ___________is a hypothetical account of

how and why something occurs.

a) Theory, causality
b) Causality, hypothesis
c) Hypothesis, theory
d) Correlation, causality

9) Psychological studies often involve relatively small samples, which might not be truly
representative of the whole population. Which of the following does NOT follow from this
state of affairs:

a) The effects of studies conducted on one sample should never be generalized to other
populations
b) Often times, generality maybe a good assumption, so effects will often (but not always)
generalize to larger populations
c) It can be important to test whether effects generalize to other populations, if there are
interesting reasons to suspect that they might not
d) Variability is always taken into account in analyses of psychological data

10)On average, women perform slightly higher than men on the writing section of the SAT, but
the distribution of scores received by male and female students overlap considerably. This
means that:

a) Most women do better than most men

b) If you select a high score at random, the odds are dramatically higher that it will be a
woman than a man.
 c) Women on average score slightly higher than men, but many individual males do better
than individual females
d) We cant determine whether the difference between male and female scores is
statistically reliable.

11) Which of the following pairings of brain location and function is incorrect?

a) Frontal-Reasoning
b) Occipital-Vision
c) Temporal-Executive Control
d) Parietal-Attention

12)What is perception?

a) A process by which changes in the state of the world create changes in the state of the
brain
b) A process by which we see the objects in the world
c) A process by which changes of the brain give rise to the changes in our experience
d) Awareness of the world

13)What is sensation?

a) The process by which changes in the brain produce changes in our conscious
experience.
b) The process by which the external environment affects our brain functioning.
c) The process by which we become more aware of our bodily functions.
d) The process by which changes in the environment create changes in the state of the
brain.