Chapter 6 Flashcards
Consciousness
everything you experience. It’s the tune stuck in your head, the sweetness of chocolate cake, the throbbing pain of a toothache, the fierce love for your child and the. Bitter knowledge that eventually all feelings will end.
Selective Attention
The process that focuses awareness on some stimuli to the exclusion of others.
The Freudian Viewpoint: proposes that there are 3 levels of awareness:
The conscious mind – thoughts and perceptions
The preconscious – mental events outside current awareness, but can easily be recalled under certain conditions. For example, not thinking about a movie for years, but when someone mentions it, all the good memories come back.
Unconscious events – cannot be brought into conscious awareness under ordinary circumstances. - unacceptable sexual and aggressive urges etc..
The Cognitive Viewpoint
cognitive psychologists reject the notion of an unconscious mind driven by instinctive urges and repressed conflicts. - They rather view conscious and unconscious mental life as different, but complementary, forms of information processing that work together.
Controlled (conscious, or explicit) processing
the conscious use of attention and effort
Example: studying
Automatic (unconscious, or implicit) processing
can be performed without conscious awareness or effort.
Example: reading
Divided attention
the ability to respond, seemingly simultaneously, to multiple tasks or demands.
Example: talk and walk
Visual Agnosia
an inability to visually recognize objects. People with Visual Agnosia may be able to see objects, they just have difficulty processing and identifying the visual information effectively.
Example: tea pot
Blindsight
a condition where people are blind in part of their visual field yet in special tests respond to stimuli in that field despite reporting that they cannot see those stimuli.
Example: be able to catch or avoid a ball, despite claiming not to see the ball.
Priming
exposure to a stimulus influences (I.e., primes) how you subsequently respond to that same or another stimulus.
Example: advertising
Implicit memory
when memory influences our behaviour without conscious awareness.
Example: Riding a bike.
WHY DO WE HAVE CONSCIOUSNESS?
Conscious awareness provides a summary – a single mental presentation – of what is going on in your world at each moment, and it makes this summary available to brain regions involved in planning and decision-making.
A Neural basis of consciousness
basically describes a neurological state that correlates with a particular state of consciousness, or one that directly generates consciousness.
Window to the brain
A particular pattern of brain activity does not allow us to infer anything about a particular experience. Careful investigation can provide us with evidence that the person is experiencing a particular kind of experience. Then scan allows us to infer things about general concepts, not the individual experiences themselves.
Consciousness as a Global Workspace
The mind is a collection of largely separated but interacting information-processing modules that perform tasks related to sensation, perception, memory, planning, problem solving, emotion, and so on.
In essence, of the many brain modules and connecting circuits that are active at any instant, a particular subset becomes joined in unified activity that is strong enough to become a conscious perception or thought.
Neural States of Consciousness – A Different View
It is not the brain that provides us with consciousness; it is our actions and our behaviour that generate our consciousness.
Window to the brain
A particular pattern of brain activity does not allow us to infer anything about a particular experience. Careful investigation can provide us with evidence that the person is experiencing a particular kind of experience. Then scan allows us to infer things about general concepts, not the individual experiences themselves.
Consciousness as a Global Workspace
The mind is a collection of largely separated but interacting information-processing modules that perform tasks related to sensation, perception, memory, planning, problem solving, emotion, and so on.
In essence, of the many brain modules and connecting circuits that are active at any instant, a particular subset becomes joined in unified activity that is strong enough to become a conscious perception or thought.
Neural States of Consciousness – A Different View
It is not the brain that provides us with consciousness; it is our actions and our behavior that generate our consciousness.
“Everyone knows what attention is”
William James (Principles of Psychology)
Attention
the process of concentrating on some feature(s) of the environment to the possible exclusion of others.
FOCUSED ATTENTION
The second world war had a great effect on the research around focus.
Selective Attention
maintaining a focus of attention on a specific item even when faced with alternatives and distractions
Example: jenter på byen
Cocktail party phenomenon
highlights the remarkable capacity of the human brain to process and prioritize information in complex, noisy environments.
Automaticity
state reached when a task no longer requires conscious control
Divided Attention
the ability to respond, seemingly simultaneously, to multiple tasks or demands.
Circadian Rhythms
daily biological cycles. Sleep-wake cycle +++
Support a readiness for sleep by decreasing alertness, but don’t directly regulate sleep.
Suprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN)
region of the brain in the hypothalamus responsible for controlling circadian rhythms.
Melatonin
hormone that has a relaxing effect on the body
All-cause mortality
death by any cause
