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Psychology > Consciousness and attention > Flashcards

Consciousness and attention Flashcards

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1
Q

Conscious

A

Wakefulness or awareness

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2
Q

Defining characteristics of consciousness

A

Intentionality - directed towards something
Unity - resistant to division
Selectivity - only contains a fraction of the info it could
Transience - content subject to change in/voluntarily

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3
Q

Change detection paradigm - Vogel

A

Requires participants to identify whether a change occurs in an image of abstract objects. Performance rapidly declined when number in visual store exceeds 4

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4
Q

Sperling partial-report task

A

Consciousness can hold much more info
Difference is change detection paradigm is a measure of working or ST memory
Partial report-task is a measure or sensory memory, much higher-capacity by shorter-lived

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5
Q

Inattention blindness demonstrations - Carrasco

A

We are effectively blind to a stimulus change is our attention is diverted elsewhere.
Carrasco shown that when our attention is engaged in a particular object, our conscious experience of it changes - appears clearer to us

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6
Q

Posner - pre-cueing paradigm

A

Participants must identify some property of a visual target that can appear in one of several spatial locations. Prior to the target’s appearance, attention is diverted in the form of a transient peripheral cute (flash of light) or a central symbol cue (arrowhead). Engage attention

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7
Q

Exogenous

A

Transient peripheral cue

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8
Q

Endogenous

A

Central symbolic cue

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9
Q

Attentional blink paradigm

A

Attentional resources distributed temporally as well as spatially
2 targets are presented in quick succession in a series of distractors, the second target can go completed unnoticed due to attentional resources being take up by the recognition of the first target.

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10
Q

Global Workspace theory, Baars 1988-1998

A

Theatre metaphor
Working memory competes for access to the conscious spotlight
Unconscious processes are behind the scenes
Once reached level of consioucness - broadcast to several specialised modules

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11
Q

Pre attentive and automatic

A

Describe perceptual processing that can occur in the absence of attention or prior to attention being distrubuted

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12
Q

Dichotic listening task

A

Measure of pre attentive processing
Participants listen to 2 septette auditory streams and shadow one of them. Gross physical characteristics of stimuli can be retrieved from unattended stream - cocktail party effect when you become aware of your own name - suggest even semantic content can be processed to some extent

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13
Q

Bottleneck theory of attentional selection

A

Unattended info is filtered out quite high up in processing stream

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14
Q

Visual search task - Treisman and the feature integration theory

A

Determining which characteristics of visual stimuli are processed pre attentively.
A single object amongst a set of distractors will immediately capture our attention if it differs in a single visual feature. Does not happen if the target different in terms of a conjunction of 2 or more features
Theory posits that attention is required in order to bind the separate 2 features of an object into a coherent whole

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15
Q

Disorder of attention: neglect

A

Damage to the parietal lobe, results in patient being unable to attend to the left-side of space, making the patient unaware of things appearing on this side

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16
Q

Disorder of attention: extinction

A

Mild form of neglect, patients can be aware of stimuli on left but only when not accompanied by a competing stimulus on the right. Semantic info about neglected item still processed

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17
Q

McGurk effect and the rubber hand illusion

A

Examples of how our mental representation of the world can be altered by the presence of competing sensory info from different modalities.

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18
Q

Delay of formation of representation

A

In order to achieve multi sensory integration

Information from different modalities can be combined

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19
Q

Compartmentalisation of function, even within a single modality

A

e.g. vision - colour and motion processed spatially separately. Perception of each of these can be selectively deleted - achromatopsia and akinetopsis.

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20
Q

Neural synchrony

A

Neurons that represent the same object fire in a synchronous pattern of activity, whereas those that represent different objects do not

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21
Q

Balint’s syndrome

A

Fail to integrate information as a coherent whole. Fail to see global arrangement of small details and make more conjunction errors, but not intrusion errors in tasks where there have to report the correct combination of colours and letters.
Shows evidence of the classic Stroop effect - on some level, binding is taking place, but lack consciousness access to it

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22
Q

Goals of neuroscientific understanding of consciousness

A

Determine Neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) and create neural models of consciousness

23
Q

NCC

A

The minimal set of neuronal events sufficient for a conscious experience - detectable pattern of neural activity that indicates a person is having a conscious experiences.

24
Q

Binocular rivalry and bistable images

A

Valuable in identifying NCCs as they can induce a dramatic change in the contents of someones conscious experience without having to interfere with the stimulus or the person.

25
Q

Pascual-Leone and Walsh used TMS

A

A technique that disrupts neural activity to show that neural activity in the form of feedback from high-level visual areas to low-level visual areas is necessary in order to experience a perception of motion.

26
Q

Implicit memory

A

When past experience of something influences cognition and/or behaviour without any associated conscious experience

27
Q

Patient HM

A

Improve mirror-drawing skills without remembering taking part in sessions. Shows a clear dissociation between conscious recollection and procedural memory due to different parts of the brain governing these different abilities.

28
Q

Priming

A

When exposure to a stimulus influences responses to a subsequent stimulus with or without conscious experience. Word fragment completion for example, participants more likely to fill in blanks of words they have already been exposed to, even though they don’t consciously remember the words.

29
Q

Jacoby-Whitehouse effect

A

Even words that aren’t consciously experienced are nonetheless processed at a high level

30
Q

Continuous flash suppression (CFS)

A

An extension of binocular rivalry and involves presenting one stimulus to one eye and a complex, dynamic stimulus to the other. Complex stimulus suppresses the other stimulus.
Brain can discriminate between stimuli that are faces and those that are not. Familiar faces break out of the flash suppression more quickly than unfamiliar faces, suggesting unconscious recognition of facial identity can occur

31
Q

Ego theories of self

A

There is a true unidentified and continuous self that is the subject of experiences and initiates decisions

32
Q

Bundle theories

A

The sense of self is in fact an illusion and a person is simply a constellation of separate experiences and states

33
Q

Proto self

A

Entirely unconscious and simply describes the neural patterns that map the state of an organism at any given time

34
Q

Core self

A

An event modifies the photo self and provides us with a sense of self from omomembt to moment

35
Q

Autobiographical self

A

Depends on memory and describes our representation of our extended self

36
Q

Corpus scallum severed patients

A

Split-brain - 2 functionally independent streams of consciousness
Object in left visual field ensures it is processed in the right hemisphere, but not name as no language production in right, but can draw it in left hand
More able to recognise a picture of themselves in the right visual fields and others in the left
Left = self-related concepts
Right = other-related concepts

37
Q

Agency

A

Important aspect of our self - ability to make a decision and act on it.

38
Q

Libet, EEF

A

Measured brain activity and found the conscious intention to make a decision is preceded by a neural signal by about 300ms

39
Q

Readiness potential

A

Develops from 500ms before an actions made, but decision to make that action only occurs 200ms before the action. Suggests our conscious sense of intentionality and free-will may in fact not be a casual factor in making decisions.

40
Q

Choice-blindness, Johannson et al

A

Participants have poor insight into their own decision and their motivations for them.
Participants had to judge which of 2 faces they preferred and given a closer look at their choice and asked to justify and explain. Affected their susbsequenct decisions in the task.

41
Q

Hypnogogic stage of sleep

A

Stage leading into sleep - transition from wakefulness to first stages of sleep, hallucinatory experiences common

42
Q

Hypnopompic stage of sleep

A

Stage leading out of sleep - transition from sleep to full wakefulness - reduced cognitive functioning: sleep inertia

43
Q

Stage I

A

Theta waves

44
Q

Stage 2

A

Sleep spindles and K-complexes

45
Q

Stage 3/4

A

Delta waves (1 hour to deep sleep)

46
Q

REM sleep

A

Beta waves and sawtooth waves

47
Q

Sleep deprivation

A

Poor immune system and metabilism

48
Q

Stickgold et al 2000

A

Perceptual task sleep deprived do not show performance advantage on subsequent testing

49
Q

Consolidation of declarative (episodic) memory

A

Deep sleep

50
Q

Consolidation of non-declarative (procedural) memory

A

REM sleep

51
Q

Dreams

A

About recent experiences. Surreal = result of the brain trying to consolidate random neural activity in the absence of a constant stimulus - activation synthesis model

52
Q

Coma

A

No outward signs of being awake

53
Q

Persistant vegetative state (PVS)

A

Sleep wake cycle - wakefulness without awareness

54
Q

fMRI by Owen et al 2006 on PVS

A

PVS patients have high cognitive ability that may be take as evidence for awareness. When read ambiguous words, greater activity than non-ambiguous words, suggesting some semantic processing.
Activity in posterior parietal complex when instructed to imagine walking through house
Activity in motor area when instructed to imagine playing tennis
Mental imagery
But not present when the word walk or tennis said, so not a simple priming effect

Psychology (4 decks)

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