Chapter 3 - Attention and Consciousness

Question 1

Attention

Answer 1

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

Question 2

divided attention

Answer 2

paying attention to 2+ things simultaneously - e.g. listening to lyrics and writing an email

Question 3

multitask

Answer 3

accomplishing 2+ tasks at the same time

Question 4

selective attention

Answer 4

paying attention to certain info while ignoring other info

Question 5

dichotic listening

Answer 5

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

Question 6

stroop effect

Answer 6

reading a word of colour written in a different colour - hard to identify the colour because the brain reads the word first

Question 7

emotional stroop test

Answer 7

name ink colour of words that have emotional significance - take longer to react

Question 8

attentional bias

Answer 8

paying extra attention to certain aspects of a stimulus

Question 9

ptsd and stroop test

Answer 9

extra time to identify colours related to combat related words

Question 10

visual search

Answer 10

finding a target in a visual display that has many distractors

Question 11

isolated feature / combined feature effect

Answer 11

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

Question 12

feature present feature absent

Answer 12

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

Question 13

saccadic eye movement

Answer 13

bring the centre of the retina into position over the words you want to read - moving the eye forward 7-9 letters

Question 14

fovea

Answer 14

in the center of retina - better visual acuity

Question 15

perceptual span

Answer 15

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

Question 16

fixation

Answer 16

pause between the saccadic movements where info is acquired / absorbed – 200ms for each fixation for english words

Question 17

orienting attention network

Answer 17

looking for contact lens - looking around various spatial locations

Question 18

unilateral spatial neglect

Answer 18

person ignores part of their visual field - deficits in certain areas

Question 19

orienting network develops when

Answer 19

1st year of life

Question 20

executive attention network

Answer 20

inhibits your automatic responses to stimuli - like stroop test - top-down control of attention - develops at age 3 - helps you learn new ideas

Question 21

feature integration theory

Answer 21

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

Question 22

theory of attention and perceptual processing

Answer 22

sometimes we use distributed attention and sometimes focused attention - processing is on a continuum - varying depending on the needs

Question 23

feature-present/feature-absent - distributed attention -

Answer 23

low level, so that we only see things that really pop out / dissimiliar, but when focused you have to check one-by-one

Question 24

illusory conjunction

Answer 24

inappropriately combining features of nearby things (blue table and black chair nearby - interpret that the chair is blue)

Question 25

consciousness

Answer 25

awareness of one’s outside world and their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories feelings - can include beliefs - unfolding story we tell ourselves moment by moment about what we’re doing and interpetations of what others are doing / how they might perceive us

Question 26

consciousness - accurate or not accurate

Answer 26

not

Question 27

thought suppression

Answer 27

trying NOT to think of something causes the opposite effect

Question 28

blindsight

Answer 28

damage to the visual cortex - don’t see something but can give details about it

Question 29

mindless reading

Answer 29

not processing the material

Question 30

mind wandering

Answer 30

thoughts shift from the external to the internal