Subconscious Quiz
Questions: 16 · 10 minutes
1. A person with specific visual-cortex damage says they cannot see an object but can guess its location at above-chance rates. What is this called?
Blindsight
Implicit memory
Change blindness
Synesthesia
2. While counting basketball passes, a viewer fails to notice an unexpected person walking through the scene. Which concept best explains the miss?
Sensory adaptation
Retroactive interference
Inattentional blindness
False-memory formation
3. In traditional psychological terminology, how does suppression differ from repression?
Suppression is unconscious, while repression is always a deliberate choice
Suppression is a deliberate attempt not to think about something, while repression is theorized as unconscious
Suppression concerns skills, while repression concerns factual knowledge
Suppression strengthens memories, while repression accurately erases them
4. A person uses an inactive cream described as soothing and then reports less discomfort. Which explanation is most consistent with the placebo effect?
Expectations and treatment context can influence perceived symptoms without conscious fabrication
The person must be intentionally pretending to feel better
The original condition must have been permanently cured
Placebos work only when people are explicitly told they are receiving one
5. In Freud’s historical psychoanalytic theory, what did the unconscious include?
Wishes, memories, and conflicts outside awareness that could influence behavior
Only behaviors shaped by rewards in the immediate environment
Information actively held and manipulated in working memory
A brief sensory record that disappears within moments
6. In modern psychology, what does the word “subconscious” most commonly refer to in informal usage?
Only childhood memories that a person has forgotten
Mental processes occurring outside current conscious awareness
Brain activity that happens exclusively during sleep
Thoughts a person deliberately chooses not to express
7. After hearing an unfamiliar but neutral melody several times, a listener begins to prefer it without knowing why. Which effect best fits this example?
Flashbulb memory
Operant conditioning through punishment
The mere-exposure effect
Repression
8. After seeing several news reports about home burglaries, someone judges burglary as much more common than before. Which mental shortcut may be influencing the judgment?
Sensory adaptation
The spacing effect
The availability heuristic
State-dependent memory
9. A student studies vocabulary, sleeps normally, and remembers more the next day. What is the most justified interpretation?
The subconscious mastered the entire language overnight
Sleep can support the consolidation of recently learned information
Sleep made further study or practice unnecessary
Dreams reproduced and stored every studied word exactly
10. After being startled by a harsh alarm, someone later feels their heart race when hearing a similar tone, even before identifying it consciously. Which process is the best explanation?
Classical conditioning of an automatic response
Habituation to repeated stimulation
Deliberate retrieval of an episodic memory
Cognitive dissonance caused by conflicting beliefs
11. In a Stroop task, someone is slower to name blue ink when the printed word says “red.” What does this most clearly demonstrate?
Information is recalled best in the same emotional state in which it was learned
Sensory receptors become less responsive after repeated stimulation
People remember unfinished future tasks better than completed ones
Reading a familiar word can occur automatically and compete with the instructed task
12. During a conversation, a door passes between two people and one speaker is secretly replaced. The other person fails to notice. What is this phenomenon called?
Blindsight
Retroactive interference
Change blindness
The mere-exposure effect
13. What can a result from an Implicit Association Test most reasonably indicate?
A clinical diagnosis of prejudice
A certain prediction of how the person will act in every situation
Definitive proof of a consciously hidden belief
Relative strengths of learned associations under the test’s conditions
14. Which statement best reflects psychological evidence about subliminal messages?
They can never affect any response under controlled conditions
They may produce limited, short-lived effects in some settings but do not reliably control complex choices
They reliably reveal a person’s deepest wishes
They guarantee persuasion whenever the viewer does not notice them
15. A skilled pianist can play a familiar piece while holding a conversation but cannot verbally describe every finger movement. Which concept best explains the performance?
Episodic memory for personal events
Semantic memory for facts and meanings
Working memory holding each movement in awareness
Implicit procedural memory for practiced skills
16. After briefly seeing the word “doctor,” a participant recognizes the word “nurse” faster than an unrelated word. Which process best accounts for this result?
Classical conditioning
Source amnesia
Confirmation bias
Semantic priming