AP Psychology: Forgetting and Intelligence (Drill 12)

Question 1. Ravi studied Spanish vocabulary intensively in high school. Now in college, he is trying to learn Italian and keeps accidentally using Spanish words when he means to use Italian ones. The interference he is experiencing is best described as:

• A) proactive interference ✓
• B) retroactive interference
• C) source amnesia
• D) encoding failure

Explanation: When previously learned material, in this case, Spanish, disrupts the learning or recall of newer material, that is proactive interference (the old moves forward in time to disrupt the new). (B) would be the reverse: if learning Italian were making him forget Spanish. (C) is a true-but-irrelevant distractor: source amnesia is a genuine memory phenomenon, but it concerns forgetting where you learned something, not having one body of knowledge intrude on another. (D) would mean the Italian never got into memory in the first place, but Ravi has clearly encoded some Italian; the problem is that Spanish keeps winning the retrieval competition. [Practice 1, Concept Application]

Question 2. At her 40-year high school reunion, Olivia is certain she remembers a classmate telling a hilarious joke at prom. Her classmate insists he was not even at that prom; he transferred schools before senior year, and it turns out Olivia had seen the joke in a movie that same year. Olivia's error is best described as:

• A) the misinformation effect
• B) retrograde amnesia
• C) source amnesia ✓
• D) repression

Explanation: Olivia remembers the content (the joke) accurately but attributes it to the wrong origin, a classic case of source amnesia, in which memory for what is intact but memory for where/when/who is confused. (A) requires that someone else supplied misleading information that reshaped her memory, which is not what happened here; her confusion comes from her own mixing of sources. (D) refers to the psychodynamic idea of unconsciously burying threatening memories, which has limited empirical support and does not describe a benign mix-up about who told a joke. (B) would mean she had lost memories from before a specific event, which is not the issue. [Practice 1, Concept Application]

Question 3. A student memorizes a list of vocabulary terms and is then tested for retention at several time points afterward. Her retention scores: 20 minutes, 58% retained; 1 hour, 44% retained; 1 day, 33% retained; 6 days, 25% retained; 1 month, 21% retained. Which curve shape and conclusion are most directly supported by these data?

• A) A linear decline, forgetting occurs at a roughly constant rate over time.
• B) A flat line after the first hour, information becomes permanent once it survives short-term memory.
• C) An upward curve, retention improves with time due to consolidation.
• D) A negatively accelerating curve, most forgetting happens soon after learning, and the rate of loss slows over time. ✓

Explanation: The numbers show a steep drop in the first hour and day (58 → 44 → 33) and then much smaller losses after that (25 at six days, 21 at a month), the classic negatively accelerating shape of the forgetting curve. (A) is directly contradicted by the decelerating pattern. (B) overgeneralizes: retention keeps dropping (33 → 25 → 21), just more slowly, so it does not flatten. (C) is the opposite of what the data show. The true-but-irrelevant trap here is the temptation to invoke outside concepts like distributed practice or consolidation to interpret the data; the stem only provides time-since-learning and retention, so only a claim about the shape of forgetting over time is directly supported. [Practice 3, Data Interpretation]

Question 4. A school district is considering adopting a new intelligence test. Before using it to guide placement decisions, the district's psychologists want to verify that the test produces consistent scores when the same students take it a month apart and that the test actually predicts the academic performance it is intended to predict. The two properties they are examining are, respectively:

• A) reliability and validity ✓
• B) standardization and cultural fairness
• C) content validity and construct validity
• D) norming and stereotype threat

Explanation: Consistency across administrations is test-retest reliability, and the degree to which a test actually predicts the outcome it is designed to predict is criterion-related validity, so the district is evaluating reliability and validity together. (B) is the true-but-irrelevant distractor: standardization and cultural fairness are genuinely important features of any good intelligence test, but they are not what "consistent across two administrations" and "predicts academic performance" are describing. (C) names two subtypes of validity but leaves out reliability entirely, so it cannot capture the first property. (D) mixes a norming concept with a social-psychological threat, and stereotype threat is a real concern in testing but is not a psychometric property of the test itself. [Practice 2, Research Methods]

Question 5. A 9-year-old student struggles on a standard verbal IQ test but shows remarkable ability composing original music, reading other people's emotions, and navigating complex social situations at school. A psychologist comments that the student's traditional IQ score alone does not capture his abilities. Which theoretical perspective on intelligence is most consistent with the psychologist's comment?

• A) Spearman's g-factor theory, which holds that a single general intelligence underlies all cognitive abilities.
• B) Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, which argues that distinct intelligences operate somewhat independently of one another. ✓
• C) Sternberg's triarchic theory, which emphasizes analytical, creative, and practical intelligence as three aspects of a unified intelligence.
• D) The Flynn effect, which documents rising average IQ scores across generations in developed countries.

Explanation: The student's standout abilities are specifically musical and interpersonal, exactly two of Gardner's proposed intelligences, which he treats as domain-specific and largely independent from linguistic ability. (C) is the hard trap: Sternberg's triarchic theory is a legitimate competing theory, but his three categories, analytical, creative, practical, are broad problem-solving styles, not specific domains like music or social perception, so Gardner's framework fits the scenario more directly. (A) represents the opposite view, one general factor explains everything, which is what the psychologist is pushing back against. (D) names a real and important finding but is a true-but-irrelevant distractor: generational IQ gains have nothing to do with whether one student's abilities are captured by his own IQ score. [Practice 1, Concept Application]