chapter 8 psych revision

• Attention

  Actively focusing on particular information/stimuli while simultaneously ignoring other information/stimuli
• By attending to information, we become aware of it
• Attending to our sensory experiences is essential for perception
• What we do not attend to, we can't perceive
• Types of information sources we can pay attention to

  • Internal stimuli (information or sensations that originate from within the body)
  • External stimuli (information or sensations that originate from outside the body)
• Factors that influence attention

  • Arousal (different states of arousal can reduce or enhance attention. eg. fatigue reduces level of attention)
  • Task difficulty (new or challenging tasks require more attentional resources)
  • Anxiety (can reduce cognitive resources that we have available)
  • Skill development (practice can improve attentional tasks)
• Sustained attention

  Focusing on one stimulus or task across a prolonged, continuous period of time eg. watching a movie
• Divided attention

  Focusing on multiple stimuli or tasks simultaneously. It works better when dividing different modalities (eg. verbal/visual) compared to the same modality
• Selective attention

  Focusing on specific information while ignoring other information
• Distractions are internal or external stimuli that draw attention away from the current task
• Sustained attention involves the maintenance of attention even in the presence of distractions
• stages of sustained attention

  1. focuses on the stimuli they want to attend to
  2. continue to focus on the stimuli for as long as wanted
  3. releasing sustained attention
• characteristics of attention - LSC

  • Limited - certain amount of attention that can be utilised at any given time ( we can't attend to all sensory stimuli so we filter relevant components)
  • Selective - we can direct our attention to certain stimuli at the exclusion of the other
  • Controllable - however, our attention often shifts without us being aware of it
• Selective attention

  • required to respond to new stimuli and completing difficult tasks
  • when selective attention is used, we tend to perceive and complete tasks accurately and quickly.
• Perception

  The set of processes by which we organise, recognise and meaningfully interpret sensory experience.

  • The process of making sense of the data collected from our sense organs
• sensations

  The process of capturing stimuli from the environment by our sense organs
• Types of processing

  • bottom up processing
  • top down processing