AP Psychology UNIT 2 Cognition Practice Test 2026

Last Updated on March 13, 2026

AP Psychology UNIT 2 Cognition Practice Test 2026: The College Board’s Advanced Placement (AP) exam Psychology UNIT 2 (Biological Bases of Behavior) Questions and Answers. Try our free AP Psychology review practice test.

This unit focuses on some of the most important concepts in an introductory psychology class. These concepts are important because they represent a significant number of questions on the AP Psychology test and because concepts covered in this unit can help you study and learn more effectively.

In this chapter, you will learn about:
→ Thresholds
→ Perceptual theories
→ Principles of visual perception
→ Effects of culture on perception
→ Extrasensory perception

AP Psychology UNIT 2 Practice Test 2026

Test Name	Advanced Placement Exam
Subject	AP Psychology Practice Test
Unit 2	Biological Bases of Behavior
Section 1	Multiple Choice Question
Total Items	15 Sample MCQs
Time Limit	Untimed
AP EXAM WEIGHTING	15 to 25%

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AP Psychology UNIT 2 Practice Test
UNIT 2- Cognition
Total Items - 15
Time Limit - Untimed

1) If you had sight in only one eye, which of the following depth cues could you NOT use?

Texture gradient

Convergence

Linear perspective

Interposition

2) You are shown a picture of your grandfather's face, but the eyes and mouth are blocked out. You still recognize it as a picture of your grandfather. Which type of processing best explains this example of perception?

Bottom-up processing

Signal detection theory

Top-down processing

Opponent-process theory

3) Which of the following sentences best describes the relationship between culture and perception?

Our perceptual rules are inborn and not affected by culture.

Perceptual rules are culturally based, so rules that apply to one culture rarely apply to another.

Most perceptual rules apply in all cultures, but some perceptual rules are learned and vary among cultures.

Slight variations in sensory apparatuses among cultures create slight differences in perception.

4) Mr. Krohn, a carpenter, is frustrated because he misplaced his hammer and needs to pound in the last nail in the bookcase he is building. He overlooks the fact that he could use the tennis trophy sitting above the workbench to pound in the nail. Which concept best explains why Mr. Krohn overlooked the trophy?

Representativeness heuristic

Retrieval

Functional fixedness

Belief bias

5) In a perception research lab, you are asked to describe the shape of the top of a box as the box is slowly rotated. Which concept are the researchers most likely investigating?

Shape constancy

Feature detectors in the retina

Placement of rods and cones in the retina

Binocular depth cues

6) Which of the following is an example of the use of the representativeness heuristic?

Judging that a young person is more likely to be the instigator of an argument than an older person because you believe younger people are more likely to start fights

Breaking down a math story problem into smaller, representative parts in order to solve it

Judging a situation by a rule that is usually, but not always, true

Solving a problem with a rule that guarantees the right, more representative answer

7) Which of the following is the best example of the use of the availability heuristic?

Judging a situation by a rule that is usually, but not always, true

Making a judgment according to past experiences that are most easily recalled

Judging that a problem should be solved using a formula that guarantees the right answer

Making a judgment according to what is usually true in your experience

8) Simeon finds that when he crams for a test the night before, he usually does well but is almost completely unable to remember the material he studied a few weeks later. What best explains why this might happen?

The material he crams only makes it into his short-term memory.

Cramming the night before usually involves a shallow level of processing.

After a few weeks, he misremembers because memory is often constructed.

Simeon is suffering from retrograde amnesia.

9) A friend mentions to you that she heard humans never forget anything; we remember everything that ever happens to us. What concept from memory research most directly contradicts this belief?

Sensory memory

Selective attention

Long-term memory

Constructive memory

10) Paul takes a test in the army to see if he would make a good pilot. Such a test is a (an)

standardized test.

aptitude test.

intelligence test.

achievement test.

11) Mrs. Cho is careful to make sure that she fairly represents the whole year's work on the final exam for her American literature class. If Mrs. Cho achieves this goal, her test will have

test-retest reliability.

construct validity.

content validity.

split-half reliability.

12) Which is the best example of crystallized intelligence?

Tino uses his exceptional vocabulary to excel at Scrabble.

Susan quickly learns to use a computerized statistics program for her class.

Gina is always the first to finish class math tests.

Arjun changes jobs and adapts to the demands of the new environment.

13) Amelia wants to investigate the hypothesis that the more math classes people have taken, the less likely they are to believe that after a fair coin is tossed 3 times and comes up heads each time, the next coin toss will result in tails. She asks 30 people to report how many math classes they took in high school and college and then to rate the likelihood of the fourth coin toss coming up tails on a scale from 50 percent to 100 percent.

The best way for Amelia to display her findings would be with

a table that lists the number of classes and percent guessed by each person.

a bar graph that contrasts the percents guessed by people who took 3 or fewer math classes with those who took 4 or more math classes.

a sentence that states the mean number of math classes and the mean percentage guessed.

a scatterplot that plots the number of math classes on one axis and the percent guessed on the other.

14) Based on the description of her study, Amelia seems most interested in

algorithms.

the sunk-cost fallacy.

the gambler's fallacy.

representativeness heuristic.

15) The design of Amelia's study would best be described as

correlational.

a case study.

naturalistic observation.

experimental.

Your score is

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