Attention and Consciousness Flashcards
What is attention and how does it filter information?
Concentration of mental activity which filters information relevant to task, Goals and novelty and unexpectedness.
What is the cocktail party effect?
An example is dichotic listening. You are more likely to process an unattended message if Both messages are slow the main task is simple and the meaning of the Unattended message is relevant for example your name.
What is the stroop effect?
When your top down and bottom up processing interferes with one another.
Isolated vs combined feature
Simple features are easier to detect, conjunction of properties take longer to detect
How do we know attention takes place
We can measure through behaviors and experience - for example stroop effect and visual search
What is Selective attention
Attempting to respond to one source of information while ignoring the other
What is divided attention? Aka. Multitasking
Processing multiple sources simultaneously. The speed and accuracy decreases when using divided attention.
What are the two areas in the cerebral cortex that are related to attention?
Orienting an executive attention
What is unilateral visual Neglect?
When a person Cannot process half of their environment usually do to bring lesions which affects the parietal lobe. 
What is orienting attention?
Affects the parietal lobe, It develops early and is usually used for visual search tasks
What is executive attention?
Happens in the Frontal lobe and is a control system in which you choose what you want to pay attention to. It is usually used for goal oriented tasks.
What is the bottleneck theory?
Focuses on the restriction of sensory information And that you cannot process everything and information is lost During multiple processing stages
What is the feature integration theory?
Focuses on distributed and focused attention
What is distributed attention?
It is the first stage in which we process all information automatically and simultaneously
What is focused attention?
It is a later stage that happens slower and has a serial approach. It is involved with complex stimuli and feature conjunction.
What are saccades?
Little eye movement and jumps that direct relevant information to the fovea And seeks new information.
What are fixations?
How long do you focus on a word usually last about 200 to 250 MS. It also increases with difficulty
Fixations happen when a reader encounters a difficult word.
How do Saccades relate to reading?
Lands on center words, Predictable words are skipped making them short, Are small when the next words are unusual. 
What is a regression?
A regression happens after the reader doesn’t understand a word or a topic causing them to go back.
What is consciousness a.k.a. awareness?
Awareness is defined in three ways
The outside world and when they can jump from sleep to Awake states.
Currents sensations and perceptions in which They respond to the environment and can choose Whether to respond or not respond
Self-awareness when they attain Feelings memories thoughts And beliefs
What is a visual search task
Finding a target among distractors for example keys in the house or a friend in the crowd A.k.a. matching a mental image to the environment
What is some evidence for feature integration three
Rapid detection of pop outs a.k.a. distributed attention and conjunction searches are slower (Time to search increases with distracted array)
