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.
