AP Psychology: Introduction to Memory and Encoding — Drill 9

About This Drill

AP Psychology: Introduction to Memory and Encoding — Drill 9 is a Multiple Choice practice drill covering Unit 2: Cognition. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.

AP Psychology practice questions on introduction to memory and encoding, covering semantic vs. acoustic encoding, short-term and long-term memory, the serial position effect, experimental vs. correlational designs, and interpreting correlation coefficients. Five AP exam prep multiple-choice questions with full explanations.

Questions in This Drill

1. During a review session, Maya reads a long list of vocabulary terms once and then tries to recall them an hour later. She remembers almost none of them. A classmate suggests she instead connect each term to a personal experience and explain in her own words how the term applies to her life. When she tries this, her recall improves dramatically. Which type of encoding best explains her improvement?
2. A student claims that because she can remember a phone number perfectly for 5 seconds after hearing it, she has an excellent long-term memory. Which of the following best evaluates this claim?
3. A researcher presents participants with a list of 20 words and asks them to recall as many as possible immediately afterward. She then graphs the probability of recall against the position of each word in the list and finds a U-shaped curve: words at the beginning and end are recalled better than words in the middle. Which of the following conclusions is best supported by this pattern?
4. Two researchers are studying encoding. Researcher A randomly assigns participants to either repeat a list of words aloud or judge whether each word describes them personally, then measures recall. Researcher B asks participants to report how good their memory is and correlates their self-rating with their recall score. Which of the following is an accurate comparison of the two studies?
5. A cognitive psychologist is evaluating a study that reports a moderate positive correlation (r = 0.42) between the number of self-generated examples a student produces while studying and that student's score on a later recall test. The study had 200 participants. Which of the following is the most defensible conclusion?