Consciousness Flashcards
Consciousness
Moment-to-moment awareness of ourselves and our environment
‘Versions’ of consciousness
- Phenomenal (basic) consciousness
- Higher consciousness (only in humans?)
Phenomenal (basic) consciousness
Feelings, sensations and orienting to the present moment
Higher consciousness
Ability to reason to reflect on one’s experiences, and have a sense of self
Why is consciousness hard to investigate?
- It cannot be directly observed/measured
- It is difficult to describe
- It is poorly defined
Easy problems of consciousness
Measurable stuff: sensory input, motor output, verbal reports, neural correlates
Hard problems of consciousness
Linking these measured quantities to conscious experience (qualia)
2 levels of processing
- Controlled (conscious or explicit) processing
- Automatic (unconscious or implict) processing
Controlled processing
The conscious use of attention and effort
Slower, but more flexible (learning a new task, such as learning to drive)
Automatic processing
Activities that can be performed without conscious awareness or effort
Fast, routine actions
Facilitates divided attention
Divided attention
The capacity to attend and perform more than one activity at the same time
Limitation of the filter model
It predicts that you should no be able to detect salient information fro, ignored channels
Yet you are able to shift attention if an ignored speaker is saying something interesting (such as your name)
Priming
Priming is an effect where presentation of a subliminal stimulus influences subsequent behaviour (e.g. judgements)
When does associative priming occur?
When a subliminally presented object (such as a word) improves recognition of a subsequent object
REM sleep
Stands for rapid eye movement
Characterized by eye movement, high arousal (similar to waking state) and frequent dreaming
