The Emphasis of the final exam is on the last four chapters, but there will be some questions from the rest of the class. Only highlights from the previous chapters will be queried. If you studied for the previous exams, read the book, or attended classes and paid any attention at all, and remember anything, you should do reasonably well with the highlights section of the exam. The latter part of the exam will be covered in somewhat more detail, but there will be an attempt to write questions as broadly as possible. The exam will consist of multiple choice questions. As a exam taker, you should be aware that you should read each question and the alternatives carefully. If you know the material tested it should be possible in most cases (I try for all, but I am not perfect) to see that one answer is clearly better than the others. Every attempt is made to make the questions all straight-forward and unambiguous, with one answer correct and the others all incorrect.

The questions on the exam will be on these topics

1. What is information? (pattern of stimulation)
2. What is information processing? (the successive transfer, storage and modification of information as activity progresses from one place to another)
3. What are neurons? (brain cells; the functional components of nerves and neural tracts; the basic units of the nervous system that transmit information from one part of the nervous system to another)
4. About how many synapses are there on each neuron in the Central Nervous System? (From 1000 to 10,000 and maybe more)
5. How is information regulated by properties of neurons? (different levels of neurotransmitters in the synapses; activation of varying numbers of synapses; having both excitatory and inhibitory synapses connected to a given neuron)
6. How does the size of the cerebral cortex in humans compare to that of most other organisms? (It is larger absolutely and a greater percentage of brain weight)
7. What are some of the major differences of function associated with different brain areas? (Visual perception, short term memory, motor activity, sensory reception, language comprehension, planning, analytic reasoning, holistic perception)
8. What is the Church-Turing Thesis all about? (computational systems with relatively simple sets of operators seem to be able to be programmed to do any specifiable reasoning task)
9. What theoretical limitations are there on computers that show that humans can solve problems computers cannot? (there are no known ones)
10. What are some of the principles by which sensory stimuli are organized? (groupings by common fate, similarity, proximity, good continuation, simplicity, and other Gestalt propertes)
11. By what kind of mechanism might you recognize a letter in a word context better than in a random letter context? (Top-down processing--Partial word identification helps recognition of its component letters)
12. What are some examples of the influence of stimulus context on perceptual identification? (Eyes, noses, mouths in face context; H in 'THE' context and A in 'CAT' context)
13. Give an example of attention inhibiting some perception. (Cocktail party phenomena; dichotic listening tasks)
14. Give an example of attention and/or expectation inhibiting or directing perceptual memory. (Neisser's study of following a basketball game superimposed on a child's hand game on a TV screen)
15. How does research on identifying a T in a Y context support the reality of perceptual features? (T is identified faster among I's and Y's than among I's and Z's because the feature 'horizontal' can guide the search.)
16. What is automaticity in perceptual processing? How does the Stroop effect illustrate this? (Subjects cannot avoid reading the word in attempting to identify the ink color)

Properties of visual representations
17. What is some evidence that visual imagery is really similar to visual perception? (Activation of the same brain regions; selectively interfered with by visual tasks)
18. What is some evidence that visual imagery is not like a photograph, it can be transformed? (mental rotation in third dimension,
19. What is some evidence that visual imagery is not like a photograph, it is meaningfully parsed? We forget meaningful components rather than physical parts of the image)

Properties of sentential representations
20. What is some evidence that sentences are remembered more for meaning than for form? (Recognize variations in form that alter meaning better than variations in form that do not)
21. What is some evidence that separate sentences that are meaningfully related are remembered as integrated units? (Bransford experiment that different sentences such as "The ant ate the jelly" and "the jelly was sweet" are remembered as a single unit.)
22. What is some evidence that schemata (schemas [sic]) help shape memory for verbal input? (Bartlett's indian war party story, Dooling's Christopher Columbus story, Pompi and Lachman's cancer operation story, Bransford's minstrel story, etc.)
23. What evidence is there that categories have internal structure? (Rosch's latency differences in categorization tasks; Labov's categorization of cups and bowls differing as a function of what is in them)
24. What evidence is there that meaning can affect Short Term Memory? (Wicken's Recovery from proaction)
25. What evidence is there that STM and LTM are different phenomena? (limited capacity, differentially affected by brain damage and psychiatric syndromes)
26. What evidence is there that we have some memory even when there is no recall? (Savings or relearning rate is less than the original learning rate)
27. What evidence is there that implicit and explicit memory are different? ( One can show improvement in performance on certain tasks based on previous experience when there is no evidence of awareness of the previous experience, even among Korsikoff and other amnesic patients)
28. How does priming studies support the claim that memory is organized? (words that are associated with one another or meaningfully related will lead to faster recognition of the related words)
29. What are the components of a problem space? (Initial state, goal state, intermediate states, and operators (rules of transition from state to state))
30. Why is random trial and error often a bad strategy in problem solving? (Most problems have many states so the likelihood of finding the right path to the goal by random trial and error is very small)
31. What is the most likely initial strategy used by novice problem solvers when given a problem? (Hill climbing or difference reduction)
32. What is the major limitation of hill climbing as a heuristic or strategy? (There are often local maxima in a problem. When they are reached the strategy is at an impasse)
33. What is means-ends analysis? (The attempt to find sub-goals from which the goal of the problem can be reached and then work backwards to find successive subgoals until there is one that can be reached from the initial state)
34. Why is the specific representation of a problem important? (If the initial state, the goal state and the operators do not have appropriate structural relations the problem will be difficult if not impossible to solve. With the right representation sometimes the solution to the problem jumps out at the problem solver (insight problems))
35. How do novices and experts tend to differ in categorization of problems? (Novices categorize based on superficial properties of the problems whereas experts categorize based on deeper relationships)
36. What are some principles of developing expertise that seem to be essentially universal? (One must go through a novice stage, a large amount of deliberate practice, strong commitment, good guidance or support, self-confidence)

Questions on the last section
37. What is essential for an argument to be valid? (If the premises are true, the conclusion must be true)
38. What is essential for an argument to be sound? (The argument must be valid and the premises must be true)
39. What is the essence of formal logic? (The form of the premises and conclusion have to be right. The content of the propositions in the argument is irrelevant for formal logic)
40. What is the 'atmosphere effect? (The quantifiers 'all' 'not' or 'some' in the premises bias the reasoner to accept the same quantifier in the conclusion)