Week 10 Flashcards
Sensory interaction
The working together of different senses to create the flavour we experience in food
Experience of nausea
Can occur when the sensory information being received from the eyes and body does not match information from the vestibular system
Synthesia
An experience in which one sensation creates experiences in another
Selective attention
The ability to focus on some sensory inputs while tuning out others. Allows us to focus on a single talker at a party while ignoring other conversations
Cocktail party phenomenon
Shows us that although selective attention is limiting what we process, we are nevertheless simultaneously doing a lot of unconscious monitoring of the world around us
Sensory adaptation
A decreased sensitivity to a stimulus after prolonged and constant exposure.
After prolonged exposure to the same stimulus, our sensitivity toward it diminishes and we can no longer perceive it
Perceptual constancy
The ability to perceive a stimulus as constant despite changes in sensation
How do our expectations influence our perception, resulting in illusions and potentially inaccurate judgments
Illusions occur when the perceptual processes that normally help us correctly perceive the world around us are fooled by a particular situation, so that we see something that does not exist or that is incorrect
Optical illusions
A result of brightness constancy and colour constancy presents two situations in which our normally accurate perceptions of visual constancy have been fooled
Mueller-Lyer illusion
Line segment in the bottom looks longer compared to the one on top, even though they are the same length.
Failure of monocular depth cues-bottom line looks like an edge that is normally farther away and the top one looks like an edge that is normally closer
Moon illusion
Refers to the fact that the moon is perceived to be 50% larger when it is near the horizon than when it is seen overhead, despite the fact that in both cases the moon is the same size
Monocular depth cues of position and aerial perspective create the illusion that things are lower and more hazy
Ponzo illusion
top yellow bar seems longer than the bottom one, but if you measure them, they’re the same.
Monocular depth cue of linear perspective leads us to believe that, given two similar objects, the distant one can only cast the same size retinal image as the closer object
What do illusions demonstrate
Our perception of the world around us may be influenced by our prior knowledge. Our emotions, mindset, expectations, and the contexts in which our sensations occur all have a profound influence on perception. Our perception is influenced by our desires and motivations
spatial attention
Refers to how we focus on one part of our environment and how we move attention to other locations in the environment
Divided attention tasks
Allow us to determine how well individuals can attend to many sources of information at once
Selective attention
The ability to select certain stimuli in the environment to process, while ignoring distracting information
Why can we hear our name being called when we are not paying attention
We have the ability to select and track one voice, visual object, etc, even when a million things are competing for our attention, but at the same time, we seem to be limited in how much we can attend to at one time, which suggested that attention is crucial in selecting what is important
Habituation
Brain receives signal but ignores it
Dichotic listening
Refers to the situation when two messages are presented simultaneously to an individual, with one message in one ear.
Shadowing
A task in which the individual is asked to repeat an auditory message as it is presented
Many studies have shown that people in a shadowing tasks were not aware of a change in language of the message, and they didn’t even notice when the same word was repeated in the unattended ear more than 35 times
Boradbent’s filter model
Investigated how selection occurs and what happens to ignored information
Based on dichotic listening tasks as well as other types of experiments
Found that people select information on the basis of physical features: the sensory channel that message was coming in, the pitch of the voice, the colour or font of a visual message
Limited capacity
The notion that humans have limited mental resources that can be used at a given time
Tresiman’s Attenuation model
Carried out a number of dichotic listening experiments in which she presented two different stories to the two ears. As the stories progressed, she switched the stories to the opposite ears.
Found that individuals spontaneously followed the story, or the content of the message, when it shifted from left ear to right ear
We do monitor the unattended information to some degree on the basis of its meaning
Suggested that selection starts at the physical or perceptual level, but that the unattended information is blocked completely, it is just weakened or attenuated
Human factors
The field of psychology that uses psychological knowledge, including the principles of sensation and perception, to improve the development of technology
Divided attention
The ability to flexibly allocate attentional resources between two or more concurrent tasks
Late selection/ response selection model
Proposed by Deutsch and Deutsch. Suggests that all information in the unattended ear is processed on the basis of meaning, not just the selected or highly pertinent information.
Only the information that is relevant for the task response gets into conscious awareness
Multimode model
Addresses the apparent inconsistency, suggesting that the stage at which selection occurs can change depending on the task. Johnson and Heinz demonstrated that under some conditions, we can select what to attend to at a very early stage and we do not process the content of the unattended message very much at all
Decrease in performance for divided attention tasks
Suggests that even if attention can be divided or switched between the tasks, the cognitive demands are too great to avoid disruption of performance
Cognitive distractions
Can produce inattentional blindness, or a lack of awareness of what is right before your eyes
General concern with Braodbent’s filter model, Treisman’s Attenuation model, and late selection models
They lacked the ability to account for all the data
Percentage of peole who can truly perform cognitive tasks without impairing their driving performance
2%
Selective listening
A method for studying selective attention in which people focus attention on one auditory stream of information while deliberately ignoring other auditory information
Inattentional blindness
The failure to notice an unexpected object or even when attention is focused on something else
Crucial influence on noticing
The effort you put into the attention-demanding task
Auditory distractions
Can induce real world failures to see
The ways in which focused attention affects the detection of unexpected objects falling outside that focus
The greater the demands on attention, the less likely people are to notice objects falling outside their attention
The more likely the ignored elements of a scene are, the less likely the people are to notice
The more distracted we are, the less likely we are to be aware of our surroundings
Under conditions of distraction, we effectively develop tunnel vision
Inattentional deafness
People fail to notice an unexpected sound or voice when attention is devoted to other aspects of a scene
Explanation for mistaken inutition
Our experiences mislead us
Given the limits on attention coupled with our mistaken impression that important events will capture our attention, how has our species survived?
Our ability to focus attention intently might have been more evolutionarily useful than the ability to notice unexpected events. Most events don’t require our immediate attention, so if attentional blindness delays our ability to notice the events, the consequences could well be minimal. For an event to be unexpected, it must occur relatively infrequently
Focused attention
Crucial to our powers of observation, making it possible for us to zero in on what we want to see or hear while filtering out irrelevant distractions. We can miss what would otherwise be obvious and important signals
Types of memory
Explicit memory and implicit memory
Memory stages
Sensory, short term, and long term
Long-term memory
Encoding, storage, and retrieval
Explicit memory
Knowledge or experiences that can be consciously remembered
Episodic memory
The ability to learn and retrieve new information or episodes in one’s life. Firsthand experiences that we’ve had
Semantic memory
The more or less permanent store of knowledge that people have. Facts and concepts about the world
How is explicit memory assessed
Using measures in which the individual being tested much consciously attempt to remember the information
Recall memory test
A measure of explicit memory that involves brining from memory information that has previously been remembered.
Multiple choice test
An example of a recognition memory test, a measure of explicit memory that involves determining whether information has been seen or learned before
Relearning
Assess how much more quickly information is processed or learned when it is studied again after it has already been learned, by then forgotten.
Allows for us to measure memory for procedures like driving a car or playing a piano piece, as well as memory for facts and figures
Implicit memory
A type of long-term memory that does not require conscious thought to encode. It’s the type of memory one makes without intent
Three general types of implicit memory
Procedural memory, classical conditioning effects, and priming
Procedural memory
Our often unexplainable knowledge of how to do things. Allows us to perform complex tasks, even though we may not be able to explain to others how we do them
Classical conditioning effects
We learn, often without effort or awareness, to associate neutral stimuli, which creates a naturally occurring response, such as enjoyment or salivation
Priming
The activation of certain thoughts or feelings that make them easier to think of and act upon. Refers to the activation of knowledge and to the influence of that activation on behaviour
Word fragment test
Person is asked to fill in missing letters to make words. Once a concept is primed, it influences our behaviours
Memory in terms of stages that describe the length of time that information remains available to us
Information begins in sensory memory, moves to short term memory, and eventually moves to long term memory. Not all information makes it through all three stages; most of it is forgotten
Sensory memory
The brief storage of sensory information
Iconic memory
Visual sensory memory
Echoic memory
Auditory sensory memory. Can last as long as four seconds
Eidetic imagery
People can report details of an image over long periods of time
Short term memory
The place where small amounts of information can be temporarily be kept for more than a few seconds but usually for less than one minute
Working memory
The form of memory we use to hold onto information temporarily, usually for the purposes of manipulation
Central executive
The part of working memory that directs attention and processing
Purpose of sensory memory
To give the brain some time to process the incoming sensations, and to allow us to see the world as an unbroken stream of events rather than as individual pieces
Iconic memory
Visual sensory memory
Maintenance rehearsal
The process of repeating information mentally or out loud with the goal of keeping it in memory
How are we able to expand our ability to remember things in STM
Using a memory technique called chunking
Chunking
The process of organizing information into smaller groupings, thereby increasing the number of items that can be held in STM
