Week 1 Flashcards
What is the psychological version of physicists’ “theory of everything”?
The theory that your life is the sum of what you focus on
What is the key to controlling one’s experience and well-being?
The ability to focus on one thing and suppress others
When you focus on something, your brain ____
Registers that target, which enables it to affect your behaviour
According to Gallagher, what happens when you stay focused on the right things?
Your life would stop feeling like a reaction to things that happen to you and become something that you create
What did Gallagher discover about attention in childhood?
If you concentrate on an enjoyable activity, you could make time simultaneously race and stand still
What did Gallagher discover about attention in midlife?
After a cancer diagnosis, the disease wanted to control her attention instead of letting her focus on life
How did Gallagher prevent cancer from taking over her life?
Choosing to focus on things such as family and friends, and block out negative things
In the 1800s, the human brain was _____, so their insights were _____
- A black box that couldn’t be studied in an ethical way
- Largely descriptive and limited to inferences from brain-injured patients and observations of behaviour
Who is credited as being the first to discover attention, and who remains its “philosopher king”?
- Wilhelm Wundt
- William James
What shaped behavioural science in James’s era?
Important cultural developments (theory of evolution) and growing conflict between religion and reason
Before becoming a psychologist, James was a ____
Philosopher - became a pragmatist
When did James offer his first definition of attention?
The Principles of Psychology (1890)
When were the first modern efforts to explore attention made, and why?
- During WWII (1939)
- Attention was a life-and-death matter for radar operators/pilots who had to monitor multiple signals
What type of experiment was used in the 1940s to track attention?
Putting two different inputs in both subjects’ ears, telling them to listen to just one, and see what they remembered from both ears
In the 1950s researchers paid attention to _____
Situations such as the cocktail party effect
What revolutionized the study of behaviour?
1960s - National Institutes of Health developed a way to record electrical signals in the brains of primates as they performed tasks
Most experiments for attention involve _____
Vision and hearing
What is a visual search experiment?
Subjects are timed on how fast they can find a target among distractions
How is attention represented among brain regions?
A mix of alerting, orienting, and executive networks work to point towards an appropriate response - especially in the frontal and parietal cortexes
What was psychology’s groundbreaking insight into attention?
The discovery that its basic mechanism is a process of selection - a two-part system that allows you to focus by enhancing the most salient stimuli and blocking out the rest
What is the first step towards behavioural change/self-improvement?
Skilful management of attention
What are three different methods of improving attention?
- Coffee/stimulants such as Ritalin
- James - tricks such as taking a new perspective
- Meditation
What sets humans apart from animals?
- Knowing that we must die
- Must find something engaging to pass the time
Why can depression rates be surprisingly low among people going through tragedies?
They choose to focus on the inner experience
In general, attending means _______
Mentally focusing or concentrating on a stimulus or event in order to process it as efficiently as possible
What did Hatfield do in 1998?
Examined the concept of attention ranging from Greek philosophers to the 19th century
What is the current consensus for the definition of attention?
Attention is a concentration of mental effort in order to emphasize sensory or mental events
Why is it easier to find a single object in a field of view rather than one surrounded by other objects?
There is no need to attend to the other objects to determine whether it’s what we’re looking for
What is one of the goals of experiments testing what makes objects easy or hard to find?
To describe the nature of visual search processes
What is one way to study visual search performance in the laboratory?
The target-detection task - measures response times of subjects seeing just nontargets versus nontargets plus the target to see what features make a target stand out in a visual search
How does practice affect the amount of one’s attention needed to perform a task, and why?
Less attention needed, as the task becomes automatic
What is the Stroop effect?
The delayed time needed to name a colour name when it is written in a different colour of ink
What does location cueing do?
Help us focus attention at a particular location in a visual scene in readiness for an event
What is Posner credited for?
Creating the first experiment that tests how location cueing affects a person’s response time
What is attentional focal point commonly referred to as?
The spotlight of attention
How do we study the psychological mechanisms that mediate the operations involved when we pay attention?
- Examining task performance of humans with brain damage
- Examining task performance of animals after a brain lesion or chemical injection
How does ERP monitor brain activity?
Measures activity patterns across different regions of the scalp
What does a PET scanner do?
Tracks the oxygen uptake of radioactive glucose in order to measure blood flow patterns across brain regions
What does fMRI do?
Measures the electromagnetic fields of different brain regions
What role does the thalamus play in attention?
The attentional emphasis of stimuli
What role does the posterior parietal cortex play in attention?
Sustaining attention and disengaging it when a task has been completed
What role does the midbrain play in attention?
Guiding focused attention from one location to another
What questions are modern researchers asking about attention?
- What are the underlying mechanisms of attention?
- How are these mechanisms combined when we perform difficult attentional tasks?
- How are the operations represented and carried out in the brain?
