Chapter 13 Flashcards
Blindsight
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.
Anoetic; noetic; and autonoetic
Three levels of consciousness corresponding to the procedural, semantic, and episodic memory systems.
Prefrontal leucotomy (lobotomy)
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.
Chronesthesia
Our subjective sense of time.
Non-conscious
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.
Conscious
The basic level of awareness.
Meta-conscious
The level of consciousness at play when you direct your attention to your own state of mind.
Encoding
The process of transforming information into one or more forms of representation.
Subliminal or unconscious perception
Perception without awareness; occurs when the stimulus is too weak to be consciously recognized, but still has an impact on your behaviour.
Limen
Threshold; subliminal is below the threshold of awareness.
Backward masking
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.
Direct vs. indirect measures
Participants’ reports that they have seen a stimulus, as opposed to the effects of an undetected stimulus on a subsequent task.
Ecologically valid
Generalizable to conditions in the real world.
Dissociation paradigm
An experimental strategy designed to show that it is possible to perceive stimuli in the absence of any consciousness awareness of them.
Objective and subjective thresholds
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.
Process dissociation procedure
An experimental technique that requires participants not to respond to items they have observed previously.
Implicit perception
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.
Change blindness
Failure to consciously detect an obvious change in a scene.
Grand illusion of conscious perception
The illusion that what we see in our visual field is a clear and detailed picture of the world.
Retinal blur
The blurring of information on the retina that occurs during fast eye movements.
Saccadic suppression
The halting of visual processing during an eye movement.
Blink suppression
The halting of visual processing during an eye blink.
Blind spot
A region in the eye that does not contain any photoreceptors; therefore the visual system cannot process visual stimuli that fall in that region.
Perceptual completion (fill-in)
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.
Meta-consciousness
Conscious awareness of what is occurring in one’s consciousness.
Mind-wandering
The state in which your thoughts wander from a particular task without your realizing that this has occurred; also referred to as zoning out.
Self-caught method
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.
Probe-caught method
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.
Experience sampling
The general technique of asking people to comment on the contents of their consciousness at specific moments.
Temporal dissociation
The temporary disengagement of meta-consciousness, resulting in lack of awareness of the contents of consciousness.
Rapid eye movement (REM) sleep
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.
Lucid dreaming
A dream state in which we are aware that we are dreaming.
Electrooculogram (EOG)
A record of the changes in electrical potentials generated by the movements of the eye.
Electromyogram (EMG)
A record of the changes in muscle activity of the body.
Easy problems of consciousness
Understanding what types of conscious states relate to what types of neural activity.
Hard problems of consciousness
Understanding why the brain gives rise to subjective experiences that have the specific qualities they have.
Binocular rivalry
When a different image is presented to each eye, the viewer becomes conscious of only one of the images at a time.
Panpsychism
The view that everything has some form of consciousness.
Flash suppression
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.
Epilepsy
The uncontrolled overactivity of neurons in the brain that can cause mental disruptions and uncontrolled muscle contractions.
Theory of microconsciousness (Zeki)
The view that each individual has “many different visual consciousnesses that are distributed over time and space”.
Gamma frequency
Spikes in the electroencephalogram that occur at roughly 40 cycles per second.
Visual hemispatial neglect
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.
Phantom limb
The feeling, following the sudden loss of a body part, that it is still present.
Body schema
The individual’s schematic representation of his or her body.
Penfield homunculus
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.
Plasticity
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.
