Chapter 3: Attention And Consciousness Flashcards
Attention
A concentration of mental activity that allows you to take a limited portion of the vast stream of information available from both your sensory world and your memory
Divided attention
Trying to attend to more than one thing
Multitask
Trying to accomplish two or more tasks at the same time
Selective-attention task
Requires people to pay attention to certain kinds of information, while ignoring other ongoing information
Dichotic listening
Selectively attending to one thing over another, screening out almost all of the unintended conversation
Cocktail party effect
Even if you are paying close attention to one conversation, you may notice if your name is mentioned in a nearby conversation
Stroop effect
People take a long time to name the ink color when that color is used in printing and incongruent word
Emotional stroop task
People are instructed to name the ink color of words that could have strong emotional significance to them
Attentional bias
Describes a situation in which people pay extra attention to some stimuli or some features
Cognitive behavioural approach
Psychological problems arise from inappropriate thinking and inappropriate learning
Visual search
Ignoring irrelevant items as you look for something specific
Isolated-feature/combined feature effect
People can typically locate an isolated feature more quickly than a combined feature
Feature-present/feature absent effect
People can typically locate a feature that is present more quickly than a feature that is absent
Saccadic eye movements
Systematic eye movements that bring the centre of your retina to the thing you are focusing on or paying attention to
Fixation
Occurs during the period between two saccadis movements; your visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful
Perceptual span
Refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during fixation
Regressions
Moving one’s eyes backward to earlier material in the sentence
Orienting attention network
Responsible for the kind of attention required for visual search, in which you must shift your attention around to various special locations
Unilateral spatial neglect
When a person ignores part of his or her visual field
Executive attention network
Responsible for the kind of attention we use when a task focusses on conflict
Bottleneck theories
Proposed a narrow passageway in human information processing; limits the quantity of information to which we can pay attention to
Feature-integration theory
We sometimes look at a scene using distributed attention, and we process all parts of the scene at the same time
Distributed attention
Allows you to register features automatically
Focussed attention
Requires slower serial processing, and you identify one object at a time
Illusory conjunction
An inappropriate combination of features, perhaps combining one object’s shape with a nearby object’s color
Binding problem
Looks at separate features rather than the unified whole
Consciousness
The awareness that people have about the outside world and about their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings
Mindless reading
Reading, but daydreaming so you aren’t actually aware that you are not reading. Your eyes may move forward, but you do not process the meaning of the material
Mind wandering
Occurs when your thoughts shift from the external environment in favour of internal processing
Thought suppression
When people try to eliminate the thoughts, ideas, and images that are related to an undesirable stimulus
Does thought suppression work?
No, it usually backfires and increases the frequency in which a person thinks of the thing they are trying to suppress (in other words, it leads to the rebound effect)
Ironic effects of mental control
Phrase used to describe how our efforts can backfire when we attempt to control the contents of our consciousness
Rebound effect
Suppression of certain thoughts can actually make you think about that thing even more than you initially would have before you started to try and suppress it
Blindsight
A condition in which an individual with a damaged visual cortex claims not to see an object; however, they can accurately report some characteristics of that object, such as its location
What factors affect eye movement during reading?
Saccadic eye movements: bring the center of your retina into position over the words
Fixation: visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful for reading
