Psychology 4a - Attention & Perception Flashcards
Define sensation
- The stimulus detection system by which our sense organs respond to and translate
environmental stimuli into nerve impulses that are sent to the brain - Is there anything out there?
Define perception
- The active process of organising the stimulus output and giving it meaning
- What is it, where is it, what is it doing?
Compare top down and bottom up perception
- Top down is processing in light of existing knowledge, and interpretation (motives, expectations, experiences, culture)
- Bottom up is where individual elements are combined (assembled) to make a unified perception (eg. vibration of tympanic membrane activating the auditory cortex)
- These two work together to make best interpretation of the stimulus
What is backmasking?
The idea that when you have an expectation you have altered perception of information
List the factors affecting perception
Top down factors:
- Attention
- Past experiences (poor children and adults overestimate the size of coins compared to
affluent people)
- Current drive state (e.g. arousal state. Hunger: when hungry, more likely to notice food-related stimuli)
- Emotions (Anxiety increases threat perception in PTSD)
- Individual values & expectations (telling people a stimulus might be painful makes them more likely to report pain in response to it)
- Environment
- Cultural background
What are Gestalt Laws?
- Rules that people use to perceive the world around us
- The sum of the parts is more than the whole (top-down processing)
- Figure-ground relations (our tendency to organise
stimuli into central or foreground and a background, where the focus of attention becomes the figure and all else is background) - Continuity (when the eye is compelled to move through one object and continue to another object)
- Similarity (similar things are perceived as being grouped together)
- Proximity (objects near each other are grouped together)
- Closure, things are grouped together if they seem to complete some entity
What is visual agnosia?
- Basic vision spared, but inability to recognise things (cannot look at an object and name it)
- Primary visual cortex can be mostly intact
- Patient not blind
- Knowledgeable about information from other senses (e.g. if they touch an object then naming is typically
simple) - Associated with bilateral lesions to the occipital, occiptotemporal, or occipitoparietal lobe
What are the types of visua agnosia?
Apperceptive and associative
What is apperceptive agnosia?
- A failure to integrate the perceptual elements of the stimulus (eg. cannot copy down a picture of a triangle or match two objects)
- Individual elements perceived normally
- May be able to indicate discrete awareness of parts of a printed word but cannot organised into a whole
- Damage to lower level occipital regions
What is associative agnosia?
- Associative Agnosia: A failure of retrieval of semantic
information - Shape, colour, texture can all be perceived normally (eg. can copy down a picture of a triangle but could not say this is a triangle)
- Typically sensory specific e.g. if object touched, then recognised
- Damage to higher order occipital regions
List stages of object recognition, and where agnosia occurs
Apperceptive agnosia
- Visual perceptual analysis
- Viewer centred representation
Associative agnosia
- Visual object recognition
- Semantic system
- Name retrieval
Define attention
Attention is the process of focusing conscious awareness, providing heightened sensitivity to a limited range of experience requiring more intensive
processing
What are the two processes of attention?
- Focus on a certain aspect
- Filter out other information
What are the two components of attention?
- Focused attention - the spotlight
- Divided attention - paying attention to more than one thing at once
List the factors affecting attention
Stimulus
- Intensity
- Novelty
- Movement
- Contrast
- Repetition
Personal factors
- Motives
- Interests
- Threats
- Mood
- Arousal
List qualities of attention
- Intertwined with other cognitive processes (e.g. memory and
perception) - Sensory buffers register information for a few seconds which can be used to select which information to focus on.
- Limited capacity for short term memory
- But, there is evidence that we can unconsciously perceive
information not attended to
Extental stimuli > sensory buffers > limited capacity short-term memory > long-term memory > responses
What is the cocktail part effect?
- We can focus our attention on one person’s voice in spite of all the other conversations • But, when someone says your name nearby you notice
What are the stages of learning?
- Cognitive stage (developing mental resources, learning through instruction and demonstration)
- Associative stage (a motor programme has been developed to carry out the broad skill but lacks ability to fluidly perform finer subtasks with fluency)
- Autonomous stage (The skill is largely automatic, relies on implicit knowledge and motor coordination, rather than instruction)
What is the issue with autonomous stage of learning?
- Less conscious control
- Increased risk of mistakes due to lack of attention
- Over half of patient deaths due to unconscious errors that could be direct consequence of automatic behaviour
What is medical student syndrome?
- Medical students learning about multiple conditions results in anxiety about health issues
- Normal body sensations are interpreted as symptoms for other conditions
- Anxiety can result in physical symptoms
- 60% of medical students develop this (however, heath anxiety the same in law students and other non-medical students)
How can perception of bodily symptoms be affected?
- By focus of attention
- Eg. one study had patients jog on a treadmill. Everyone ran with no sound. One group then heard their own breathing, and the other heard street sounds. The group that heard breathing sounds perceived significantly more bodily sensations.
How can acute pain be influenced by expectation?
- If told something would be painful, people report more pain than those told it will be pleasant or not told anything
- If told it was pleasant, they perceived it as the least painful
What is chronic pain?
- Pain is usually a sign of body damage
- Chronic pain is when pain has been present for greater than 3 months
- At this point, it is
likely that original
damage has healed - 28 million people in
UK have chronic pain
What is the multidimensional model of pain?
- Tissue damage
- Pain sensation
- Thought and emotions
- Suffering and pain behaviours
- Pain sensation even after tissue damage is repaired
What is gate theory of pain?
- When experiencing pain, the signals compete to get through a gate in the dorsal horn
- Painful information can be inhibited, or can be perceived as painful when there is loss of mental control
- Links between pain and memory
- The more we think of pain the more the pain is felt, therefore patients can use mindfulness
List areas important in pain
- Prefrontal cortex (lights up when we are thinking)
- Emotional parts (insula cortex, thalamus and limbic system such as amygdala) are involved in chronic pain
- Not just a pure sensory precess, through anterior cingulate cortex and somatosensory cortex are involved
What is fear avoidance model of chronic pain?
- Patients who experience a lot of pain may do less to attempt to avoid the pain being simulated
- However, this increases time patients have to think about pain, low mood, and stress about the pain causing a cycle of long term pain
