U07 - Consciousness Flashcards
1
Q
Consciousness
A
- moment-by-moment awareness of ongoing experiences occurring internally (e.g., thoughts, emotions) and externally in the world around us
- subjective, central to the experience of being “you”
- the conscious mind can step in and take control of behavior when the unconscious mind makes mistakes or encounters something threatening
2
Q
Arousal
A
- level of wakefulness or alertness
3
Q
Awareness
A
- focus on and recognition of some experience
4
Q
Self-awareness
A
- focus on and awareness of oneself as a distinct entity from other aspects of the environment
5
Q
Spotlight effect
A
- conviction that others are paying more attention to oneself than they actually are
- we tend to over-estimate how much attention is on us
Study:
- Gilovich et al., 2000
- wear embarrassing shirt into a room full of people
- only 25% of ppl remembered the embarrassing shirt
6
Q
Selective attention
A
- act of focusing one’s awareness onto a particular aspect of one’s experience while ignoring irrelevant stimuli
- awareness is very limited, needs to be rationed
7
Q
Inattentional blindness
A
- failure to perceive information outside the focus of one’s attention
- recall invisible Gorilla study, 50% of participants fail to see gorilla
8
Q
Change blindness
A
- form of inattentional blindness in which a person fails to observe a change in a visual stimulus
9
Q
Perceptual decoupling
A
- shift in attention from external environmental stimuli to internal stimuli or thoughts
10
Q
Mind-wandering
A
- spontaneous, “stimulus-independent” thought (also referred to as daydreaming)
- eg. fantasizing, remembering the past, thinking about the future
cons:
- studies show that ppl are less happy when mind-wandering, regardless of activity
- unhappier when thinking about neutral or unpleasant topics vs current activity, no happier when thinking about pleasant topics vs current activity
- content of thoughts better predictor of happiness than current activity
pros:
- can be used as a strategy for escaping a boring situation
- help us with creative thinking, problem solving, organizing and structuring plans, allows us to plan for the future
11
Q
Automaticity
A
- ability to perform a task without conscious awareness or attention
- Complex activities like driving or reading can become automatic with practice
- Allows us to focus our attention elsewhere
12
Q
The unconscious mind: the freudian perspective
A
- Sigmund Freud, 1856-1939
- Neurologist working with patients with hysteria (outdated term for conditions characterized by physical symptoms without known physical cause)
- Speculated that the mind comprised several elements and that hysteria stemmed from repressed emotions and traumatic experiences buried in the unconscious level of the mind
- proposed that the mind is composed of several components, conscious, preconscious, and dynamic unconscious
13
Q
Conscious
A
- focus of current awareness
14
Q
Preconscious
A
- thoughts, feelings, and memories that are not in current awareness but are consciously accessible
15
Q
Dynamic unconscious
A
- Inaccessible memories, instincts, and desires
- Sigmund Freud:
- Postulated that dynamic unconscious actively influences thoughts, feelings, and behaviors (even though individuals may lack awareness of it)
- repressed thoughts and memories may manifest through dreams, slips of the tongue, etc
- there’s an ongoing conflict with the conscious mind
- modern psychology: unconscious mental processes influence behavior, but views unconscious mind as collaborator vs. competitor of the conscious mind
16
Q
Cognitive unconscious (just unconsciousness)
A
- mental processes that occur outside of conscious awareness but still influence thoughts, feelings, and behavior
17
Q
Implicit memories
A
- such as skills and tasks we perform automatically, learned associations between stimuli and responses
18
Q
Cocktail party phenomenon
A
- ability to pick important information (e.g., someone saying your name) while focusing on other information (e.g., conversation with someone at a party)
- suggests that information is being unconsciously processed on another channel
19
Q
Dichotic listening task
A
- Participants wear headphones
- Presented with different messages to each ear
- Asked to shadow (repeat) one message
- Appear to be unaware of message in unattended ear, BUT
- Pay attention to salient information (e.g., one’s own name)
- Slower to repeat words from attended ear if words in unattended ear are synonyms
20
Q
Subliminal perception
A
- processing of sensory information that occurs below the threshold of conscious awareness (sub= “below, limen= “threshold”)
- does subliminal advertising work?
- lab studies: may work, but only under certain conditions (so you can’t control someone to drink coke, they have to be thirsty first, or just small effects)
- outside of the lab, advertisers cannot control the environment well enough for subliminal messages to work very well
21
Q
Mere exposure effect
A
- tendency to like stimuli more after repeated exposure to them
22
Q
Reticular formation
A
- regulates arousal and alertness
- raises or lowers the threshold of conscious awareness
- damage to this region may result in coma
23
Q
Reticular formation and thalamus
A
- Works with reticular formation to regulate arousal and wakefulness
- serves as “relay station of the brain”
- thalamic lesions also lead to profound loss of consciousness (like Unresponsive Wakefulness Syndrome)
- These regions are necessary but not sufficient for producing consciousness (like unplugging a TV)
24
Q
Awareness in the brain
A
- No single part of the brain that makes conscious awareness possible
- Some form of consciousness tends to persist after various local lesions, although specific content and quality of awareness may change, like spatial hemi-neglect
