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PSYC 330 > Week 1 > Flashcards

Week 1 Flashcards

1
Q

What is the psychological version of physicists’ “theory of everything”?

A

The theory that your life is the sum of what you focus on

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2
Q

What is the key to controlling one’s experience and well-being?

A

The ability to focus on one thing and suppress others

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3
Q

When you focus on something, your brain ____

A

Registers that target, which enables it to affect your behaviour

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4
Q

According to Gallagher, what happens when you stay focused on the right things?

A

Your life would stop feeling like a reaction to things that happen to you and become something that you create

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5
Q

What did Gallagher discover about attention in childhood?

A

If you concentrate on an enjoyable activity, you could make time simultaneously race and stand still

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6
Q

What did Gallagher discover about attention in midlife?

A

After a cancer diagnosis, the disease wanted to control her attention instead of letting her focus on life

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7
Q

How did Gallagher prevent cancer from taking over her life?

A

Choosing to focus on things such as family and friends, and block out negative things

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8
Q

In the 1800s, the human brain was _____, so their insights were _____

A
  • 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

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9
Q

Who is credited as being the first to discover attention, and who remains its “philosopher king”?

A
  • Wilhelm Wundt

- William James

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10
Q

What shaped behavioural science in James’s era?

A

Important cultural developments (theory of evolution) and growing conflict between religion and reason

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11
Q

Before becoming a psychologist, James was a ____

A

Philosopher - became a pragmatist

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12
Q

When did James offer his first definition of attention?

A

The Principles of Psychology (1890)

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13
Q

When were the first modern efforts to explore attention made, and why?

A
  • During WWII (1939)

- Attention was a life-and-death matter for radar operators/pilots who had to monitor multiple signals

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14
Q

What type of experiment was used in the 1940s to track attention?

A

Putting two different inputs in both subjects’ ears, telling them to listen to just one, and see what they remembered from both ears

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15
Q

In the 1950s researchers paid attention to _____

A

Situations such as the cocktail party effect

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16
Q

What revolutionized the study of behaviour?

A

1960s - National Institutes of Health developed a way to record electrical signals in the brains of primates as they performed tasks

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17
Q

Most experiments for attention involve _____

A

Vision and hearing

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18
Q

What is a visual search experiment?

A

Subjects are timed on how fast they can find a target among distractions

19
Q

How is attention represented among brain regions?

A

A mix of alerting, orienting, and executive networks work to point towards an appropriate response - especially in the frontal and parietal cortexes

20
Q

What was psychology’s groundbreaking insight into attention?

A

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

21
Q

What is the first step towards behavioural change/self-improvement?

A

Skilful management of attention

22
Q

What are three different methods of improving attention?

A
  • Coffee/stimulants such as Ritalin
  • James - tricks such as taking a new perspective
  • Meditation
23
Q

What sets humans apart from animals?

A
  • Knowing that we must die

- Must find something engaging to pass the time

24
Q

Why can depression rates be surprisingly low among people going through tragedies?

A

They choose to focus on the inner experience

25
Q

In general, attending means _______

A

Mentally focusing or concentrating on a stimulus or event in order to process it as efficiently as possible

26
Q

What did Hatfield do in 1998?

A

Examined the concept of attention ranging from Greek philosophers to the 19th century

27
Q

What is the current consensus for the definition of attention?

A

Attention is a concentration of mental effort in order to emphasize sensory or mental events

28
Q

Why is it easier to find a single object in a field of view rather than one surrounded by other objects?

A

There is no need to attend to the other objects to determine whether it’s what we’re looking for

29
Q

What is one of the goals of experiments testing what makes objects easy or hard to find?

A

To describe the nature of visual search processes

30
Q

What is one way to study visual search performance in the laboratory?

A

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

31
Q

How does practice affect the amount of one’s attention needed to perform a task, and why?

A

Less attention needed, as the task becomes automatic

32
Q

What is the Stroop effect?

A

The delayed time needed to name a colour name when it is written in a different colour of ink

33
Q

What does location cueing do?

A

Help us focus attention at a particular location in a visual scene in readiness for an event

34
Q

What is Posner credited for?

A

Creating the first experiment that tests how location cueing affects a person’s response time

35
Q

What is attentional focal point commonly referred to as?

A

The spotlight of attention

36
Q

How do we study the psychological mechanisms that mediate the operations involved when we pay attention?

A
  • Examining task performance of humans with brain damage

- Examining task performance of animals after a brain lesion or chemical injection

37
Q

How does ERP monitor brain activity?

A

Measures activity patterns across different regions of the scalp

38
Q

What does a PET scanner do?

A

Tracks the oxygen uptake of radioactive glucose in order to measure blood flow patterns across brain regions

39
Q

What does fMRI do?

A

Measures the electromagnetic fields of different brain regions

40
Q

What role does the thalamus play in attention?

A

The attentional emphasis of stimuli

41
Q

What role does the posterior parietal cortex play in attention?

A

Sustaining attention and disengaging it when a task has been completed

42
Q

What role does the midbrain play in attention?

A

Guiding focused attention from one location to another

43
Q

What questions are modern researchers asking about attention?

A
  • 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?

PSYC 330 (8 decks)

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