ATTENTION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

• Attention - Actively process a limited amount of information from the enormous amount of information.
• Consciousness - both feeling of awareness and content of awareness.
• 3 PURPOSE OF CONSCIOUS ATTENTION

  • Monitoring our interactions with the environment
  • Assist us in linking our past (memories) and our present (sensations) to give us a sense of continuity of experience.
  • Controlling and planning for our future actions.
• Signal Detection and Vigilance - try to detect the appearance of a particular stimulus.
• Search - we try to find a signal amidst distractors.
• Divided Attention - trying to do two or more tasks at once.
• Selective attention - focusing on one thing while ignoring others
• SIGNAL DETECTION THEORY (SDT) - used to measure sensitivity to a target’s presence.
• Vigilance - detect the appearance of a particular target stimulus of interest.
• Burst: Hyperpolarization
• Tonic: Depolarization
• Search - Scan of the environment.
• Distracters - Non-target stimuli that divert our attention away.
• Feature Search - scan the environment for that feature.
• Conjunction Search - Look for a particular combination.
• FEATURE - INTEGRATION THEORY - Explains relative ease and relative difficulty of conducting conjunction searches.
• Similarity theory - similarity between the target and distractor.
• Guided Search - May sinusunod na guide or following one another.
• Parallel Stage - the individual simultaneously activates a mental presentation of all potential targets.
• Subsequent Serial Stage - The individual sequentially evaluates each of the activated elements, according to the degree of activation.
• Cocktail party problem (Colin Cherry) - process of tracking one conversation in the face of the distraction of other conversations.
• Shadowing - you listen to two different messages.
• Dichotic Presentation - separate message to each ear.
• Broadbent - sensory information may be noticed by an unattended ear.
• Selective Filter - Blocks out most information.
• Attenuation Model - Analyze the meaning of the stimuli and their relevance to us.
• Late-filter model - allow people to recognize information entering the unattended ear.
• Attentional - Resources Theory - amount of attention available to perform cognitive tasks that require effort.
• Resource Theory - How people limit their resources to achieve goals.
• Inspection - Inspect and make decisions.
• Reaction - Neural - processing speed.
• Habit - accustomed to a stimulus.
• Dishabit - a change in a familiar stimulus.
• Automatic processes- like writing your name involve no conscious control.
• Controlled processes - are accessible to conscious control and even require it.
• Automatization- Many tasks that start off as controlled processes eventually become automatic ones as a result of practice.
• Stroop Effect - effect demonstrates the psychological difficulty in selectively attending to the color of the ink and trying to ignore the word that is printed with the ink of that color.