Ch 3- Textbook Flashcards
(32 cards)
What is consciousness?
- Awareness of ourselves and our environment
- Awareness that we are aware
- This awareness allow us to assemble information that helps us act in our long- term interests, by considering consequences
What is cognitive neuroscience?
- The study of brain activity linked with mental processes/ cognition
What is dual- processing?
- The fact that perception, language, memory, and attitudes operate on 2 levels- a conscious, deliberate “high road”, and an unconscious, automatic “low road”.
What is blindsight?
- A condition in which a person can respond to a visual stimulus without consciously experiencing it
- People act as if they can see
- Occurs because the eye sends information simultaneously to different brain areas which support different tasks
What is the hollow face illusion?
- An example of the visual perception track (enables us to “think about the world” and plan future actions) and the visual action track (guides our moment- to- moment actions) conflicting
What is selective attention?
- Focusing our conscious awareness on a particular stimulus
Ex: The cocktail party effect
What is selective in attention?
- The fact that, at any level of conscious awareness, we are “blind” to all but a tiny sliver of visual stimuli
What is unintentional blindness?
- Failing to see visible objects when our attention is directed elsewhere
What does change blindness suggest?
- We fail to notice changes in the environment
Where does most information get processed during sleep?
- Outside of our conscious awareness
What are sleep stages?
- 4 distinct stages we cycle through every 90 minutes during sleep
What happens during REM sleep?
- Vivid dreams commonly occur
- Muscles are relaxed but other body systems are active
What are alpha waves and when do the occur?
- Relatively slow brain waves
- Occur in a relaxed state
What sleep stage do hallucinations and / or sensations of falling or floating occur in?
NREM- 1
What sleep stage do sleep spindles (bursts of rapid, rhythmic brain wave activity) occur in?
NREM-2
What are delta waves and what sleep stage are they most likely to occur in?
- Delta waves are large, slow waves associated with deep sleep
- Associated with NREM-3
What sleep stage do you spend 20-25% of your night in? What sleep stage do you spend about half of the night in?
- REM sleep= 20- 25%
- NREM2- 50% of the night
What do sleep theories state?
- Sleep protects
- Sleep helps us to recuperate
- Sleep helps restore and rebuild our fading memories of the day’s experiences (consolidates)
- Sleep builds creative thinking
- Sleep supports growth
What are night terrors and what sleep stage do they commonly occur in?
- A sleep disorder characterized by high arousal and an appearance of bring terrified
- Occur in stage 3
What are dreams?
- A sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts passing through a sleeping person’s mind
- Notable for their hallucinatory imagery, discontinuities and incongruities, and for the dreamer’s delusional acceptance of the content and later difficulty remembering it
Why did Sigmund Freud say we dream?
- To satisfy our own wishes
- He considered dreams to be the key to understanding out inner conflicts
Why do we dream?
- To file away memories
- To develop and preserve neural pathways
- To make sense of neural static
- To reflect cognitive development
What is REM rebound?
- When people are deprived of REM sleep after repeatedly being awakened, they return more and more quickly go the REM stage after falling back to sleep
What is hypnotic ability?
- The ability to focus attention totally on a task, to become imaginatively absorbed in it, to entertain fanciful possibilities
