Chapter 13

Question 1

Blindsight

Answer 1

A condition in which patients with damage to the primary visual cortex are able to make accurate judgments about objects presented to their blind area even though they report no conscious experience of the object and believe they are only guessing.

Question 2

Anoetic; noetic; and autonoetic

Answer 2

Three levels of consciousness corresponding to the procedural, semantic, and episodic memory systems.

Question 3

Prefrontal leucotomy (lobotomy)

Answer 3

A surgical procedure, now abandoned, in which the connections between the prefrontal lobes and other parts of the brain were severed, also known as prefrontal lobotomy.

Question 4

Chronesthesia

Answer 4

Our subjective sense of time.

Question 5

Non-conscious

Answer 5

The level of consciousness that operates without our attention, continuously monitoring and changing the contents of thought, and tracking and changing behaviour to address goals.

Question 6

Conscious

Answer 6

The basic level of awareness.

Question 7

Meta-conscious

Answer 7

The level of consciousness at play when you direct your attention to your own state of mind.

Question 8

Encoding

Answer 8

The process of transforming information into one or more forms of representation.

Question 9

Subliminal or unconscious perception

Answer 9

Perception without awareness; occurs when the stimulus is too weak to be consciously recognized, but still has an impact on your behaviour.

Question 10

Limen

Answer 10

Threshold; subliminal is below the threshold of awareness.

Question 11

Backward masking

Answer 11

Presenting a stimulus, called the target, to the participant and then covering, or masking, the target with another stimulus. The inferior temporal cortex processes the first stimulus and sends it back to the primary visual cortex via the reentrant connection and it interferes with the mask that the primary visual cortex is now processing. The first stimulus isn’t consciously perceived because of this but is still perceived without awareness.

Question 12

Direct vs. indirect measures

Answer 12

Participants’ reports that they have seen a stimulus, as opposed to the effects of an undetected stimulus on a subsequent task.

Question 13

Ecologically valid

Answer 13

Generalizable to conditions in the real world.

Question 14

Dissociation paradigm

Answer 14

An experimental strategy designed to show that it is possible to perceive stimuli in the absence of any consciousness awareness of them.

Question 15

Objective and subjective thresholds

Answer 15

The point at which participants can detect a stimulus at a chance level versus the point at which they say they did not perceive it.

Question 16

Process dissociation procedure

Answer 16

An experimental technique that requires participants not to respond to items they have observed previously.

Question 17

Implicit perception

Answer 17

The effect on a person’s experience, thought, or action of an object in the current stimulus environment in the absence of, or independent of, conscious perception of that event.

Question 18

Change blindness

Answer 18

Failure to consciously detect an obvious change in a scene.

Question 19

Grand illusion of conscious perception

Answer 19

The illusion that what we see in our visual field is a clear and detailed picture of the world.

Question 20

Retinal blur

Answer 20

The blurring of information on the retina that occurs during fast eye movements.

Question 21

Saccadic suppression

Answer 21

The halting of visual processing during an eye movement.

Question 22

Blink suppression

Answer 22

The halting of visual processing during an eye blink.

Question 23

Blind spot

Answer 23

A region in the eye that does not contain any photoreceptors; therefore the visual system cannot process visual stimuli that fall in that region.

Question 24

Perceptual completion (fill-in)

Answer 24

The incorrect impression that a stimulus occupies a section of the visual scene when in fact it occupies only the region around it. Think our blind spot.

Question 25

Meta-consciousness

Answer 25

Conscious awareness of what is occurring in one’s consciousness.

Question 26

Mind-wandering

Answer 26

The state in which your thoughts wander from a particular task without your realizing that this has occurred; also referred to as zoning out.

Question 27

Self-caught method

Answer 27

A technique used to catch episodes of mind-wandering in which participants are asked to monitor their consciousness and report anytime their mind has wandered.

Question 28

Probe-caught method

Answer 28

A technique used to catch episodes of mind-wandering by presenting participants with a probe asking them whether they were mind-wandering just before the probe was presented.

Question 29

Experience sampling

Answer 29

The general technique of asking people to comment on the contents of their consciousness at specific moments.

Question 30

Temporal dissociation

Answer 30

The temporary disengagement of meta-consciousness, resulting in lack of awareness of the contents of consciousness.

Question 31

Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep

Answer 31

The stage characterized by dreaming, increased brain activity relative to other stages of sleep, and the inhibitor of motor activity except in the eyes, which move rapidly back and forth.

Question 32

Lucid dreaming

Answer 32

A dream state in which we are aware that we are dreaming.

Question 33

Electrooculogram (EOG)

Answer 33

A record of the changes in electrical potentials generated by the movements of the eye.

Question 34

Electromyogram (EMG)

Answer 34

A record of the changes in muscle activity of the body.

Question 35

Easy problems of consciousness

Answer 35

Understanding what types of conscious states relate to what types of neural activity.

Question 36

Hard problems of consciousness

Answer 36

Understanding why the brain gives rise to subjective experiences that have the specific qualities they have.

Question 37

Binocular rivalry

Answer 37

When a different image is presented to each eye, the viewer becomes conscious of only one of the images at a time.

Question 38

Panpsychism

Answer 38

The view that everything has some form of consciousness.

Question 39

Flash suppression

Answer 39

When different images are presented to each eye and one of the images is replaced, the new image enters consciousness and the image presented to the other eye is suppressed from consciousness.

Question 40

Epilepsy

Answer 40

The uncontrolled overactivity of neurons in the brain that can cause mental disruptions and uncontrolled muscle contractions.

Question 41

Theory of microconsciousness (Zeki)

Answer 41

The view that each individual has “many different visual consciousnesses that are distributed over time and space”.

Question 42

Gamma frequency

Answer 42

Spikes in the electroencephalogram that occur at roughly 40 cycles per second.

Question 43

Visual hemispatial neglect

Answer 43

Lack of visual awareness of objects located in the contralesional field. An injury to the right parietal lobe will render unawareness of the entire region of space on the left (contralateral) side.

Question 44

Phantom limb

Answer 44

The feeling, following the sudden loss of a body part, that it is still present.

Question 45

Body schema

Answer 45

The individual’s schematic representation of his or her body.

Question 46

Penfield homunculus

Answer 46

A map of the sensory cortex that shows where the various parts of the body are represented; the size of each part is proportional to the area of the cortex that represents it.

Question 47

Plasticity

Answer 47

Flexibility. As used here it refers to the notion that brain areas typically used for one function can be recruited and used for other purposes, like how neurons close to an amputated limb can be recruited and feel sensory input as if it is coming from the amputated limb when it isn’t even there anymore.