Week 14 Flashcards
1
Q
Selective attention
A
- our brain is only able to focus on one specific aspect of a situation clearly (allows us to not be too overwhelmed by there and therefore have consciousness!)
- usually beneficial but can be dangerous (e.g. focusing on a phone screen when crossing the road)
- we have some degree of divided attention (multi-tasking)
2
Q
Broadbent’s filter model
A
- attentional selection symbolised as Y-shaped tube with chunks of sensory information represented as balls
- lower part of Y tube only accepts one ball at a time, with a hinged flap acting as a filter (early stage)
- shows how unattended information is largely filtered
and blocked out (responds to free will as you can choose what you want to focus on, but not both!) - e.g. dichotic listening task - showed that participants are almost entirely unaware of information presented to unattended ear (selective attention)
3
Q
Cocktail party phenomenon
A
- highly pertinent stimuli (e.g. your name) can suddenly capture your attention even in a noisy environment
- even in unattended ear, in dichotic listening experiment, high priority words can catch your attention
4
Q
Treisman’s attenuation model
A
- suggestion that attention acts as a selective filter but unattended information is not blocked completely
- first, physical properties of sensory information are analysed involuntarily (e.g. voice)
- knowledge about words is accessed, through mental lexicon, and are stored in terms of frequency, relevance etc. relating to their recognition threshold
- threshold can be temporarily lowered based on current priorities/environment to allow some words to be triggered more easily
- if signal passes both filters, its meaning is analysed
- due to cocktail party phenomenon + observation that fragments from the unattended ear are reported if they are of the same context as the attended message (i.e. unattended information must have been processed to some extent)
5
Q
Late selection theories (Deutsch & Deutsch)
A
- claim that all sensory information is processed non-selectively and in parallel
- output of sensory processing is placed in STM (if not rehearsed or saved, loss from STM is what acts as attentional bottleneck)
- selection of information regarding conscious awareness only occurs after analysis of meaning
6
Q
Subliminal perception
A
- suggests that words are semantically processed and might affecting processing speed of subsequent words (if they are semantically related they are “primed” to be detected)
- e.g. brief flashing of prime word (doctor) lead to later related word (nurse) being detected more quickly
7
Q
Negative priming
A
- participants are instructed to actively attend to one display and ignore the other one
- noted that naming times to target objects are slower if it was the unattended object on a previous trial (ignoring a stimulus slows down subsequent redirecting of attention to it)
- suggests that unattended information is not simply discarded but actively suppressed (deeper processing of unattended info)
8
Q
Capacity theory (Kahneman)
A
- moves away from attentional bottleneck idea but rather that people have a limited capacity pool of attention to carry out mental activities
- if an activity is easy, very little attentional capacity is used up (so you may be able to multitask), whereas if it is difficult, it uses up more resources
- e.g. dual task experiment - illustrated that there is a pool of limited attention capacity as selective attention to multiple tasks make them individually take longer
9
Q
What does attentional capacity depend on?
A
- task demands (e.g. takes up more capacity if you are learning something new for the first time)
- arousal (alertness, fatigue etc.)
- individual differences (some people have a longer attention span than others in general)
- momentary intentions (e.g. generally more focused in an exam environment)
- individuals have substantial control over how they allocate their attention but performance will decline if attentional demand exceeds supply
10
Q
Automaticity (not attention demanding)
A
- complex activities are intially intensely attention-demanding but, with increasing skill and practice, we can move into more automatic processing mode
- e.g. for professional musicians
- automatic processing generally occurs without intention and conscious decision so consumes few resources of attention capacity; also occurs much more rapidly
11
Q
Conscious processing (attention demanding)
A
- only occurs with deliberate attention
- open to awareness and introspection
- uses conscious resources (i.e. drains pool of conscious attentional capacity)
- much slower
- e.g. Stroop conflict - demonstrates that reading is so automatic to us that it conflicts with more attention-demanding conscious task (e.g. naming the colour of the word rather than reading it) –> means tasks take longer and are more prone to error
12
Q
Consciousness
A
- a person’s subjective experience of the world and the mind
- what makes us uniquely human
- each person’s consciousness is subjective and individual
13
Q
Four properties of consciousness
A
- intentionality (the fact that consciousness is often about something, also limited by attention)
- unity (resistance to division of attention)
- selectivity (capacity to include some objects and not others, e.g. dichotic listening, idea of filtering of attention)
- transience (its tendency to change, may be due to limited capacity of working memory so focus of your attention keeps changing)
14
Q
Phenomenology
A
how things seem to the conscious person, in their understanding of mind and behaviour
15
Q
Materialism
A
the philosophical idea that mental states are the product of physical systems alone, dispensing any need to explain consciousness in terms of some additional property that resides in our brain (e.g. mini-us)
16
Q
Anthropomorphism
A
the tendency to attribute human qualities to nonhuman things
17
Q
Choice blindness
A
when people are unaware of their decision-making processes and justify a choice as if it were already decided (explained by the after-the-fact interpretative role of consciousness)
18
Q
Change blindness
A
unawareness of significant events changing in full view reveals that, without attention, we miss much of what is happening in the world (we may fill in missing portions of experience by making assumptions)
19
Q
Inattention blindness
A
reveals that the scope of our consciousness is limited, affecting what we notice around us, especially when we divide our attention
20
Q
Unilateral visual neglect
A
- patient fails to notice stimuli appearing on the side of space contralateral to the side of a hemispheric lesion
- not due to blindness but due to attention deficits!
21
Q
Balint’s syndrome
A
- attentional disorder where patient loses the ability to voluntarily shift visual attention to new locations, associated with damage to both sides of the brain
- issues perceiving multiple objects in visual field simultaneously
- more generalised form of visual neglect disorder (e.g. difficulty distinguishing between overlapping figures)
22
Q
Blindsight
A
- residual vision in the absence of cortical processing (visual blindness but still able to detect a target present in affected region)
- patients say they are guessing as they do not believe they can perceive visual images but they get answers correct
- proves that there are multiple visual processing areas in addition to area V1 that could support unconscious vision
23
Q
Short-term memory (STM)
A
- holds information only very briefly and has severely limited capacity
- useful for any complex cognitive task that requires short term storage (or buffering) of information, e.g. arithmetic, language and vision
- used lots in day to day life
