Week 7-Neuroscience 3

Question 1

Evaluate what it means to be conscious

Answer 1

Whether someone is able to have experiences, no matter how divorced they are from the environment, and the patient is still alive in a meaningful way
patient must be aware of mental processes (exists in addition to our perceptions, memories, thinking, planning)

Question 2

Describe how attention relates to consciousness

Answer 2

attention=allows us to focus on a certain thing (ex. change blindness: failure to detect change when vision is interrupted by rapid eye movement)
selective attention determines/controls what we become conscious of

Question 3

Describe the differences between parallel and serial search (parts of visual search)

Answer 3

Visual search: participants look for a certain object in an array of objects
Parallel: items are identified simultaneously
Serial: items are identified individually (one at a time)

Question 4

Describe parallel search (singleton search)

Describe serial search (conjunction search)

Answer 4

Parallel search (singleton search): target differs from distractions in more than one way (ex. have to look for tilted green bar when there are tilted red bars and there are red and green bars which are straight, considers color and slant)
Serial search (conjunction search): target differs from distractions in one way (ex. look for green bar that is tilted in place where all other bars are straight, considers only slant)

Question 5

Describe inattentional blindness, change blindness, attentional blink

Answer 5

inattentional blindness: failure to perceive an event when attention is diverted elsewhere (ex. women in gorilla suit waking through bball game)
change blindness: people don’t notice significant changes if visual displays are artificially changed (ex. activities where you have to spot the difference between two
scenes)
attentional blindness: unable to process any visual information just after processing a visual stimulus (ex. people asked to identify 2 stimuli but have no awareness of 2nd stimuli after first is presented

Question 6

Distinguish among disorders of consciousness, and how brain imaging can help differentiate these (isolation aphasia, visual agnosia)

Answer 6

Isolation aphasia: cant comprehend or produce meaningful speech but can repeat speech and learn new word sequences
Visual agnosia: you are not blind but you cannot recognize objects visually, only can recognize them if you touch them (ex. cant recognize someones face)

Question 7

Describe the stages of sleep, indicate how they are measured

Answer 7

stage 1: presence of theta activity (transition between wakefulness and sleep)
stage 2/3: EEG gets lower in frequency and higher in amplitude
stage 4: mainly delta activity (stages 3+4=slow-wave sleep, reached in less than an hour)
REM sleep: characteristics of stage 1 sleep
-eyes dart rapidly, twitching, dreaming occurs during shit sleep
-EEG looks like awake person
-first episode 20-30 mins, followed by hour of slow wave sleep (REM sleep gets longer in time and slow-wave sleep gets shorter in time during sleep)

Question 8

Identify and evaluate how well psychology contributes to our understanding of conciousness

Answer 8

Attention is related to consciousness, the more conscious the more attention you potentially have
sometimes attention forms selection of intake of some information over intake of other information (inattentional, attentional and change blindness)

Question 9

Explain the possible functions of sleep (including REM sleep)

Answer 9

Restoration theory: sleep gives the body and mind time to recover from daily use and stress
Preservation and protection theory: sleep reduces amount of energy used when there is no need to use it (no predators in past humans, and now, we do not work at night, but in the day so we do not need to use minds at night)
Helps consolidate memory