Consciousness Flashcards
Explain the two proposed levels of consciousness
The phenomenal (basic) consciousness refers to feelings, sensations and orienting to the present moment.
Higher consciousness refers to the ability to reason, reflect on one’s experiences, and have a sense of self.
Discuss the attentional strategy underlying visual search
Selective attention consists of a few steps. First, you fixate your eyes on different parts of the visual scene. They then saccade to different parts of the scene. We accumulate evidence as we conduct this fixate investigation. Eventually, we narrow down the scene and identify what we were looking for.
This strategy is fallible, especially when the environment is dynamic and when we are focusing on a specific aspect of the scene.
Define selective attention and discuss it in terms of the ‘cocktail party’ problem
Selective attention is the process in which one message is selected for conscious processing, the rest is suppressed.
in therm of the ‘cocktail party’ problem, we want to focus on one speaker in a room full of speakers. However, if we notice when something important is said by someone else, we shift our focus on them. This is called sound segregation.
Discuss the filter model of selective attention and its limitations
Multiple inputs are filtered based on physical properties, to select the most relevant one. Meaning is processed after filtering.
The limitations are that it predicts that you should not be able to detect important information from ignored channels, Yet, you are able to shift attention if an ignored speaker is saying something interesting.
Explain how top-down modulation can account for selective attention.
Top-down modulation enhances input based on:
- relevance: e.g. to a task such as conversing with an individual at a party, distracting input is suppressed
- expectation: expected physical features of the other person’s voice, the content of their sentences etc.
Identify common impairments to visual perception and discuss how they relate to conscious awareness
Visual agnosia means that there is a deficient object recognition. Visual information cannot be bound together. Patients cannot visually perceive the shape, size or orientation of objects.
Prosopagnosia means face blindness. Patients can recognize objects, but not faces. They show autonomic arousal to familiar faces, without awareness.
Both relate to the topic of conscious awareness by the fact that the brain processes information without us being aware/conscious of it.
Define priming and discuss how it relates to consciousness.
Priming is an effect where the presentation of a subliminal stimulus influences subsequent behaviour.
Priming likely induces top-down modulation by activating perceptual circuits that bias subsequent bottom-up signals. Attentional priming may similarly activate associative brain networks, biasing bottom-up perceptions for similar objects.
Define the major stages of sleep and explain how they are measured
The major stages of sleep refer to the fact that typical human sleep patterns progress through various stages, which are characterised by their EEG variations.
They are measured using electrophysiological measures, such as EEG (electro-encephalo-gram), measuring brain activity, EMG (electro-myo-gram) measuring muscle activity, and EOG (electro-oculo-gram) measuring eye activity.
Discuss how sleep is related to memory consolidation
Our brain is likely replaying the activation patterns of our recent experiences, and embedding them into existing associative networks. This process may also be important for forgetting existing memories or associations.
We may become conscious of this while dreaming. although dreams are typically not consolidated.
Identify the neural patterns of sleep stages
see scheme
prefrontal lobe, primary motor cortex, association areas near primary visual cortex, hypothalamus, amygdala, thalamus
