Chapter 3 - Attention and Consciousness Flashcards
Attention and Consciousness
Attention
concentration of mental activity that allows you to take in a limited portion of the vast stream of info available from your sensory world and memory
divided attention
paying attention to 2+ things simultaneously - e.g. listening to lyrics and writing an email
multitask
accomplishing 2+ tasks at the same time
selective attention
paying attention to certain info while ignoring other info
dichotic listening
one message coming in one ear (phone up to ear) and someone whispering to you in the other ear - asked to focus on one only. hardly notice anything unless message is relevant (says their name - cocktail party effect - picking up something relevant from across a room) - or speaker switches from male to female or initial message isn’t equally challening
stroop effect
reading a word of colour written in a different colour - hard to identify the colour because the brain reads the word first
emotional stroop test
name ink colour of words that have emotional significance - take longer to react
attentional bias
paying extra attention to certain aspects of a stimulus
ptsd and stroop test
extra time to identify colours related to combat related words
visual search
finding a target in a visual display that has many distractors
isolated feature / combined feature effect
easier to pick out something singularly different among fewer or more other things - the only thing that’s different (isolated feature) x in a sea of 0’s, or black x in a sea of grey x and o - but requires more time to do serial processing if there are more distractors black x in a series of grey and black xs and os - need to identify one by one
feature present feature absent
feature present faster than feature absent - basically easier to notice something in an environment that is less complex - that look most different from the others - which is usually feature present being faster
saccadic eye movement
bring the centre of the retina into position over the words you want to read - moving the eye forward 7-9 letters
fovea
in the center of retina - better visual acuity
perceptual span
number of characters (letters and spaces) we perceive during a fixation - 4 positions to the left and 15 to the right of that central letter
fixation
pause between the saccadic movements where info is acquired / absorbed – 200ms for each fixation for english words
orienting attention network
looking for contact lens - looking around various spatial locations
unilateral spatial neglect
person ignores part of their visual field - deficits in certain areas
orienting network develops when
1st year of life
executive attention network
inhibits your automatic responses to stimuli - like stroop test - top-down control of attention - develops at age 3 - helps you learn new ideas
feature integration theory
sometimes look at a scene using distributed attention - parallel processing, registering features simulataneously – and sometimes using focused attention - serial processing - going back and forth - continuum of types of attention
theory of attention and perceptual processing
sometimes we use distributed attention and sometimes focused attention - processing is on a continuum - varying depending on the needs
feature-present/feature-absent - distributed attention -
low level, so that we only see things that really pop out / dissimiliar, but when focused you have to check one-by-one
illusory conjunction
inappropriately combining features of nearby things (blue table and black chair nearby - interpret that the chair is blue)
