Chapter Three 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
trying to pay attention to more than one stimulus at a time, responding properly to both things
divided-attention task
trying to accomplish two tasks at once
multitasking
trying to pay full attention to one stimulus while ignoring other stimuli around you
selective-attention task
having people wear headphones with them trying to focus on what’s being said in one ear and not the other
dichotomous listening
in dichotomous listening, what is the message you’re not supposed to be listening to called?
shadow
even when speaking to someone, you may notice when your name is mentioned in a nearby conversation
cocktail party effect
the brief, immediate memory used when you are still processing information
working memory
people take a longer time to name the ink color when that color is used in printing an incongruent word
Stroop effect
people are instructed to name the ink color of words that could have a strong emotional significance to them, such as a phobia
emotional stroop task
describes a situation in which people pay extra attention to some stimuli or some features
attentional bias
psychological problems occur because of inappropriate thinking and inappropriate learning
cognitive-behavioral approach
(CBT therapy)
the observer must find a target in a visual display that has numerous distractors
visual search
people can typically locate a feature that is present quicker than a feature that is absent
feature-present/feature-absent effect
people can locate an isolated feature more quickly than a combined feature
(green circle)
isolated-feature/combined-feature effect
bringing the center of the retina into position over the words you want to read
saccadic eye movement
the eye must be moved during reading so that the new words can be registered on the _____
fovea
during a _____ the visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful for reading
fixation
refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during a fixation
perceptual span
moving your eyes to former words when reading
regression
part of the brain responsible for visual search, or shifting your attention around to various spatial locations
orienting attention network
when someone ignores part of their visual field
unilateral spatial neglect
part of the brain responsible for the kind of attention we use when a task focuses on conflict, like the Stroop task
executive attention network
theory that proposes that only a limited quantity of information can get through to us at once, the rest getting left behind
bottleneck theory
theory where we sometimes look at a scene using distributed attention and we process all parts at the same time; other times, we use focused attention and process each item in a scene one at a time
treisman’s feature integration theory
feature integration theory:
usually effortless, it allows you to register features automatically using parallel processing
distributed attention
feature integration theory:
used with more complex objects, requires slower serial processing and you identify one object at a time
focused attention
when were overwhelmed with too many simultaneous visual tasks, an inappropriate combination of features, maybe combining one object’s shape with a nearby object’s color
illusory conjunctions
our visual system sometimes has a ______ _______, because it does not represent the important features of an object as a unified whole
binding problem
