Learning, Memory & Cognition Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the study technique of mixing several different kinds of problem or topic together within one session, rather than doing a long run of one kind before moving on, which makes practice feel harder and slower but improves the ability to tell problem types apart and to apply skills later?

Question 2

What is the name for the type of long-term memory for general knowledge, facts, concepts, the meanings of words and the rules of the world, held without any sense of when or where each item was learned?

Question 3

What is the name for the better recall of the items at the end of a list, thought to happen because those items are still being held in immediate memory at the moment recall begins?

Question 4

What is the name for a recollection of an event that never happened, or of details that were not part of a real event, held with as much confidence and vividness as a genuine memory?

Question 5

What is the name for the principle that performance rises as arousal increases up to a certain level and then falls off, and that the ideal level of arousal is lower for a difficult, complex task than for a simple, well-learned one?

Question 6

What is the name for the process, unfolding over hours, days and years and depending heavily on sleep, by which a fragile new memory is stabilised and gradually woven into long-term storage across the cortex, becoming less dependent on the inner-temporal-lobe structures that first formed it?

Question 7

What is the name for the learned ability to react to one particular conditioned cue but not to other, similar cues, developed by pairing only that specific cue with the reflex-triggering stimulus and presenting the similar ones without it?

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About Learning, Memory & Cognition

This quiz is about how we learn, how we remember and forget, and how we think: classical and operant conditioning and their terms, the schedules of reward, learning that goes beyond conditioning, the memory systems from the fleeting sensory store to lasting knowledge, the ways memory fails, and the machinery of concepts, problem-solving, language and mnemonics. Ninety questions in six packs, each describing a process, a term, a technique, a memory system, a failure of memory or a thinking phenomenon and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a knowledge quiz.

The first pack is classical conditioning: the basic idea and its four elements, acquisition and extinction, spontaneous recovery, generalising and discriminating, second-order conditioning, one-trial taste aversion and biological preparedness, and the phobia treatments built on the same principles.

The second pack is operant conditioning: reinforcement and punishment in their positive and negative forms, primary and learned rewards, shaping, the four schedules of reward and the pattern each produces, the extra staying power of partial reward, Grandma's rule, and the token economy.

The third pack is learning beyond conditioning: latent learning and the cognitive map, insight, learning by watching and vicarious reward, instinctive drift and superstition, how a reward can kill enjoyment, spacing and retrieval practice and interleaving, errorless learning, the arousal-performance curve, the practice curve, and transfer.

The fourth pack is memory systems: the sensory, short-term and working stores, the inner voice and inner eye and the executive that runs them, the magical number seven and chunking, shallow versus deep rehearsal and the levels-of-processing idea, and the divisions of long-term memory into conscious and unconscious, and into events, facts and skills.

The fifth pack is remembering and forgetting: the three stages of memory, consolidation, the serial-position curve with its primacy and recency, the forgetting curve, interference forward and backward, cue-dependent forgetting and encoding specificity, the tip-of-the-tongue state, the misinformation effect and false and flashbulb memories, and the amnesia that blocks new learning.

The sixth pack is cognition: concepts and prototypes and schemas, algorithms and heuristics, functional fixedness and mental set, means-end analysis, the Stroop effect, mental rotation, the memory palace, and the acquisition of language, from the proposed built-in device and the critical period to over-applied rules and the idea that language shapes thought.

The wrong answers are always other processes, terms, systems, failures or phenomena of the same kind. About thirty-six of the ninety questions carry a photograph of a neutral object, a maze, a stopwatch, a conditioning chamber, a model brain, an electrode cap or a microscope, chosen because every option is the same sort of thing and the picture cannot point to any of them. Facts have been checked against standard reference works.