Consciousness and Attention Flashcards
What is attention?
Attention is a part of consciousness that you are more focused on.
What is consciousness?
Consciousness is an awareness of your internal and external environment
What are the Four Functions of Attention?
Vigilance, Search, Divided Attention, and Selective Attention are four functions of attention.
What is vigilance? Are we good at it? What are applications?
Vigilance is waiting for the thing to change. The vigilance function is sustained attention, which involves focusing on field stimulation and waiting for the stimuli. We may not be good at it. An example will be lifeguard (waiting to help someone who drowns), fishing (waiting for the fish to pull the fishing pole), etc.
What is the function of Search? What are the theories of search? Are we good at it? What are applications? Can it be improved? How is the podcast connected?
Search is scanning the environment for target block out distractions.
Theories of search are target, distraction, feature search, and conjunction search.
To improve the search, we can read all the words carefully, looking at all the details in the scenes, and other ways.
The connection to the podcast (“All Things Cognition”) is that people have a difficult time detecting low-frequency hazards that impact their ability to detect them.
(1) looking for the target, and (2) blocking out the distractors. Search is used in some of the examples we talked about such as the TSA security looking through bags for dangerous weapons, or the podcast at searching for hazards while driving. The rarer it is, the worse we are at detecting it.
What is divided attention? Why is it important not to use divided attention?
The divided attention is whether we focus on two things at once. It is important not to use divided attention because we have one intentional focus and we cannot split our focus on two things. The spotlight theory shows why we are slower and make more mistakes. The reaction time and accuracy for this divided attention may be slower and we make mistakes because of divided attention. So that is why it is important not to use it.
ADHD struggles with divided attention more than people without it.
What does the research say about cell phones and attention when driving?
The researchers found that the usage of the mobile device during driving causes delayed reaction time and inattentional blindness when the drivers are behind the wheel. These two deficits mirror those associated with distracting present conversation. The research also found that distracted driving & learning can be connected with the cognitive costs of smartphones to their ability to attract the conscious orientation of attention. When people interact with or think about phones, their performance on tasks can suffer.
What does the research say about cell phones and attention when not driving?
For education, the research studied that using mobile devices and social media while learning new material can impact their academic performance and comprehension. It can impair academic performance and reduce comprehension. Also, another finding is that using a mobile device will not affect the performance of self-paced tasks that can allow humans to compensate for device-related distractions. These findings considered that many cognitive impairments associated with using mobile devices may represent the deleterious effects of diverting conscious attention away from a focal task. I found that 92% of younger adults, who are smartphone users, relied heavily on these smartphones. The cognitive functions of these users can have an outsized effect on long-term welfare. If mobile devices are present even when not used in educational situations, it can affect the learning and test performance of young adults.
On the attentional cost of receiving notifications from the phone in the research, the awareness of missing messages or calls can impair the task performance that requires sustained attention. Also, the research demonstrated that people hearing the phones ringing while being away from them leads to a reduction in their feelings of enjoyment of the focal tasks as a consequence of increased attention to phone-related thoughts. People with forced separation from their phone’s ringing increase anxiety and heart rate and the reduction of cognitive performance. This connects to the author’s hypothesis that the usage of smartphones and increased attention to the phone’s presence can lead to poor cognition and performance because phones are highly demanding for people’s attention.
What is the cognitive explanation of the research about cell phones and attention when driving or not driving?
It provided evidence that the consumers’ technology dependence on individual differences moderates the effects of smartphone salience on available working memory capacity. This experiment supported the claim that the owner’s smartphones reduce the availability of cognitive capacity.
It provides evidence that individual differences in dependence on these devices modulated the cognitive costs. The more consumers depend on their phones, the more they suffer from their presence or stand to benefit from their absence.
What is selective attention?
Selective attention is the process of deciding what to focus on.
How is selective attention different from divided attention?
Selective attention is the process of deciding to focus on something, while divided attention is the process of focusing on two things at once.
How do we use dichotic listening tasks to study what we choose to pay attention to?
Dichotic listening tasks block out something and pay attention to awareness.
What is a bottleneck theory and how does it explain what we choose to pay attention to?
Bottleneck theory is blocking out what you’re perceiving and before the awareness. It suggests that individuals have a limited amount of attentional resources that they can use at one time
What influences what we choose to pay attention to?
Vigilance and selective attention influence what we choose to pay attention to.
What does the brain tell us information about attention?
Parietal lobe - orienting attention network
Frontal lobe - executive attention network
– vigilance
– working memory
