Human Cognition Flashcards
What is Sensation?
The functioning of our sensory system (e.g. the process of stimulating our sensory receptors)
Biological process
What is Perception?
Interpretation of sensory input, organising the input, and assigning meaning
Cognitive process
What is the process of sensation/perception?
- Environmental Stimuli —->
- Transduction of stimulus vis sensory receptors —–>
- Transmission of action potential in CNS ——>
- Interpretation
What factors influence our perception of internal or external stimuli?
Attention
The ability to select salient sensory inputs to attend to
Information processing systems
Recognition – assign stimulus to a meaningful category.
Knowledge – processing of stimulus based on pre-existing contextual knowledge “top-down processing”.
Why is attention limited?
There are restrictions to the amount of sensory inputs that we can attend to, process, and assimilate.
Particularly when processing simultaneous cues of the same sensory origin.
Information is processed by parallel sensory channels.
What is Sensory store/buffer?
Determines what sensory inputs are transmitted for further processing.
How would you describe attention?
Conscious and voluntary
Choosing to remain focussed on learning a new skill
Monitoring physiological states during illness/worsening health
AND
Unconscious and involuntary
Loud noise promotes the deployment of attentional resources in direction of noise.
What happends to the attention system in a stressful situation?
- When exposed to a stressful situation (e.g. hospital) we default to survival mode
- Attentional system becomes hypervigilant, tune into threatening inputs
- Distract a patient’s attentional resource away from threatening context
Short term memory uses examples in medicine?
Example in medicine:
* First learning a patients history
* Making a diagnosis
* Calculating drug doses
Clinical implications:
* Giving information to patients
* Important information at beginning and end
* Chunk
* Write-down
* Check-back
What is Long-term memory
Stores information for future retrieval
Memory structures are created through process of encoding
Semantically meaningful categories (schemas) are generated
Different types:
Declarative knowledge
Procedural knowledge
What is Declarative knowledge?
What is the Procedural knowledge?
- “Knowing how” —->
- Cognitive/Problem solving skills
- Perceptual skills
- Motor skills
- Repetition
- Classical conditioning —->
- Implicit memory
(unconscious retrieval)
What are the different health behaviours?
Risky
Increase chance of morbidity and mortality
Promoting/Protective
Enhance health and prevent disease
Illness related
Aimed at managing and acute/chronic illness
What are different adaptive theories of behaviour?
Capability:
Psychological capacity (knowledge, skills, & confidence)
Physical capacity
Motivation:
Voluntary (conscious rational decision making)
Involuntary (habits, emotions, impulse)
Need to adapt the COM-B model when specific health behaviours are targeted
