Chapter 3 Flashcards
A concentration of mental activity that allows you to take in a limited portion of the vast stream of information available from both your sensory world and your memory
Attention
Concentrate our mental activity because of an interesting stimulus in the environment has captured our attention is an example of
Bottom Up Processing
An object in your peripheral vision might suddenly move and you turn your head to see it more clearly is an example of
Bottom Up Processing
Concentrate our mental activity because we want to pay attention to some specific stimulus
Top Down Processing
You searching for a particular friend in the cafeteria
Top down Processing
You try to pay attention to two or more simultaneous task. (you cannot attend to two things accurately simultaneously)
Divided Attention
Responding selectively to one kind of information while ignoring the other. (trying to focus your attention)
Selective attention
You try to pay attention to two or more simultaneous messages and respond appropriately to both (in many cases your speed and accuracy suffer)
Divided attention Task
Trying to accomplish two or more tasks at the same time. (doing this people strain the limit of attention, the limits of working memory and long term memory)
Multi task
What are the four kinds of Selective attention tasks
Dichotic Listening
The Stroop Effect
Visual Search
Sarccadic Eye Movement
A laboratory technique in which one message is presented to the left ear and a different message is presented to the right ear. (used to investigate Selective attention)
Dichotic Listening
In attention research focusing on dichotic listening and they are instructed to listen to only one message and then repeat it after the speaker.
Shadow
The phenomenon of noticing one’s own name when it is mentioned in a neaby conversation even when paying close attention to another conversation. ( People with low working memory tend to pay attention to their name more than those with high working memory it is assumed that those with low working memory have a difficulty blocking out irrelevant info.
Cocktail Party Effect
People take a long time to name the ink color when the color is used in printing an incongruent word(the word blue in red ink ) in contrast they can quickly name the same ink color when it appears as a solid patch of color (a red circle)
Stroop Effect
task activates two pathways at the same time. One pathway is activated by the task of naming the ink color and the other pathway by reading the word. Interference occurs when two competing pathways are active at the same time.
Explains Stroop Effect
People are instructed to name the ink color of words that could have strong emotional significance to them (ex. people with phobias naming the colors of worlds like crawl and hairy) they require more time to name the color because of emotional destress of reading the word
Emotional Stroop Task
describes a situation in which people pay more attention to some stimuli or some feature (pay less attention to the ink color than the word)
Attention Bias
The observer must find a target in a visual display that has numerous distractions.
Visual Search
People can typically locate an isolated feature more quickly than a combined feature.
Isolated Feature Effect/Combined Feature
People can typically locate a feature that is present more quickly than a feature that is absent.
Feature Present/Feature Absent
The purpose of ____ during reading is to bring the center of your retina into position over the words you want to read.
Saccadic Eye Movement
this small region in the center of the retina known as The ___ has better acuity than other retinal regions.
Fovea
During each___ your visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful for reading. (occurs between two saccadic movements.
Fixation
Refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during a fixation.
Perceptual Span
moving the eyes backwards to earlier material in the sentence. People often do this when they realize that they have not understood the passage they are reading. (good readers make larger jumps and are less likely to regress.
Regression
Congitive system Generally responsible for the kind of attention required for visual search in which you must shift your attention around to various spatial locations located on the Parietal lobe. (choosing things in the environment and choosing where you are)
Orientation Attention Network
Looking for a contact lens that fell on the sink is an example of what attention network?
Orientation Attention Network
when a person ignores part of his or her visual field. (usually occurs after a lesion on the brain) if they have damage to the right parietal lobe they have problems noticing visual stimulus that appears on the left
Unilateral Spacial Neglect
A women with a lesion in the ____ parietal region may have trouble noticing the food on the right side of her plate is an example of what? what what side of the parietal lobe?
right/ unilateral spacial neglect
what attention network develops in the early years in life around 4 months?
Orientation Attention Network
a cognitive system that is responsible for the kind of attention on uses when a task focuses on conflicting information (ex. stroop effect) it is located on your prefrontal cortex (what am i looking at, what do i have to pay attention to helps learn new ideas)
Executive Attention Network
what attention network is primarily active during top down processing
Executive Attention Network
what attention network develops much later in life around the age of 3
Executive Attention Network
early theories about attention, the proposal that a narrow passageway in human information processing limits the quantity of information to which on can pay attention to.
information passes or it’s lost, attention as may separable processes, information lost at just one phase of attention process (if one message is passing the other message must be left behind)
Bottle Neck Theory
what are the problems with bottle neck theory?
- inflexible
- information is lost throughout many phases of attention from the beginning through later processing.
This theory of attention developed by anne treisman proposes two elements 1) distributed attention processing all parts of the scene at the same time and 2) focused attention processing each item in the scene one at a time.
Feature-Integrated Theory
Allows you to register features automatically; you use parallel processing across the field and you register all the features simultaneously (quick and effortless)
Distributed Attention
requires slow serial processing and processing each feature on object at a time. this is more demanding and needed when objects are more complex.
Focused Attention
Is an inappropriate combination of features perhaps combining one objects shape with a nearby object. when you see it they may overlap. (red circle and a green square) you might see it as green circle.
Illusory Conjunction
A characteristic of the visual system in which characteristics such as color and shape can be registered separately as a result the visual system may not represent these important features of an object as a unified whole
Binding Problem
what kind of attention allows binding processes to operate?
focused attention
what has been modified in the feauture integration theory of attention
-rather than two clear cut categories (distributed and focused attention) now we see it as a continnium sometimes distributed attention resemble focused attention
what attention helps you gather the information of a scene?
Distributed Attention
A person’s awareness of the external world and of her or his own perception, mages thoughts, memories and feelings.
Consciousness
What is generally associated with focused attention?
Consciousness
what are the 3 interest concerning consciousness?
How thoughts come in(inability to let sertain thoughts into consciousness)
how thoughts leave (our inabillity to let certain thoughts escape)
blindsight (vision withough awareness)
During_____ your eyes may move forward but you do not process the meaning of the material
Mindless Reading
occurs when your thoughts shift from the external environment in favor for internal processing.
Mind Wondering
Where is consciousness located?
Everywhere
try to eliminate the thoughts, ideas and images that are related to an undesirable stimulus.
Thought suppression
describes how our efforts can backfire when we attempt to control the content of our consciousness
Ironic effect of mental control
an unusual kind of vision without awareness. People with a damaged visual cortex claim not to see an object however he or she can accurately report some characteristics of an object such as its location.
Blindsight
