Chapter Three

Question 1

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

Answer 1

attention

Question 2

trying to pay attention to more than one stimulus at a time, responding properly to both things

Answer 2

divided-attention task

Question 3

trying to accomplish two tasks at once

Answer 3

multitasking

Question 4

trying to pay full attention to one stimulus while ignoring other stimuli around you

Answer 4

selective-attention task

Question 5

having people wear headphones with them trying to focus on what’s being said in one ear and not the other

Answer 5

dichotomous listening

Question 6

in dichotomous listening, what is the message you’re not supposed to be listening to called?

Answer 6

shadow

Question 7

even when speaking to someone, you may notice when your name is mentioned in a nearby conversation

Answer 7

cocktail party effect

Question 8

the brief, immediate memory used when you are still processing information

Answer 8

working memory

Question 9

people take a longer time to name the ink color when that color is used in printing an incongruent word

Answer 9

Stroop effect

Question 10

people are instructed to name the ink color of words that could have a strong emotional significance to them, such as a phobia

Answer 10

emotional stroop task

Question 11

describes a situation in which people pay extra attention to some stimuli or some features

Answer 11

attentional bias

Question 12

psychological problems occur because of inappropriate thinking and inappropriate learning

Answer 12

cognitive-behavioral approach
(CBT therapy)

Question 13

the observer must find a target in a visual display that has numerous distractors

Answer 13

visual search

Question 14

people can typically locate a feature that is present quicker than a feature that is absent

Answer 14

feature-present/feature-absent effect

Question 15

people can locate an isolated feature more quickly than a combined feature
(green circle)

Answer 15

isolated-feature/combined-feature effect

Question 16

bringing the center of the retina into position over the words you want to read

Answer 16

saccadic eye movement

Question 17

the eye must be moved during reading so that the new words can be registered on the _____

Answer 17

fovea

Question 18

during a _____ the visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful for reading

Answer 18

fixation

Question 19

refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during a fixation

Answer 19

perceptual span

Question 20

moving your eyes to former words when reading

Answer 20

regression

Question 21

part of the brain responsible for visual search, or shifting your attention around to various spatial locations

Answer 21

orienting attention network

Question 22

when someone ignores part of their visual field

Answer 22

unilateral spatial neglect

Question 23

part of the brain responsible for the kind of attention we use when a task focuses on conflict, like the Stroop task

Answer 23

executive attention network

Question 24

theory that proposes that only a limited quantity of information can get through to us at once, the rest getting left behind

Answer 24

bottleneck theory

Question 25

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

Answer 25

treisman’s feature integration theory

Question 26

feature integration theory:

usually effortless, it allows you to register features automatically using parallel processing

Answer 26

distributed attention

Question 27

feature integration theory:

used with more complex objects, requires slower serial processing and you identify one object at a time

Answer 27

focused attention

Question 28

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

Answer 28

illusory conjunctions

Question 29

our visual system sometimes has a ______ _______, because it does not represent the important features of an object as a unified whole

Answer 29

binding problem