Cog chap 4

• Consciousness


  • Helps perceive what the person is sensing
  • Links sensation with memories
  • Plans/organizes an action based on the associated memory and present sensations
• Conscious attention


  Includes both the feeling of awareness and the content of awareness
• Unconscious


  Part of the psyche that contains repressed ideas and images, as well as primitive desires and impulses that have never been allowed to enter the conscious mind
• Preconscious


  Includes information that is currently outside our conscious awareness and still may be available to consciousness or at least to cognitive processes
• Priming


  1. Presence of a primer and another stimulus, followed by an assessment on the consciousness about the first stimuli

  2. A memory can be directly accessible
• Tip of the tongue phenomenon

  • Attempt to remember something that is stored in memory but that can not readily be retrieved
  • It remains elusive and just outside of mental reach
• Attention


  • Taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts
  • It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others
• Attention


  • Means by which we actively select and process a limited amount of information from all of the information captured by our senses, our stored memories, and our other cognitive processes
• Four main functions of attention

  • Signal detection & vigilance
  • Search
  • Selective attention
  • Divided attention
• Signal detection theory


  • Framework to explain how people pick out the important stimuli (target) embedded in a wealth of irrelevant, distracting stimuli
  • Used to measure sensitivity to a target's presence (signal)
• Vigilance


  • Person's ability to attend to a field of stimulation over a prolonged period, during which the person seeks to detect the appearance of a particular target stimulus of interest
  • Amygdala and thalamus are involved
• Search


  • A scan of the environment for particular features—actively looking for something when you are not sure where it will appear
  • Made more difficult by distracters
• Types of search


  • Feature search - look for a feature that may look different from all others
  • Conjunction search - combine different features to find the target stimulus
• Feature-Integration Theory (Treisman)


  • Explains why it is relatively easy to conduct feature searches and relatively difficult to conduct conjunction searches
  • Integrates searched features together
• Similarity Theory (Duncan & Humphreys)

  • The more similar target and distracters are, the more difficult it is to find the target
• Selective attention


  Choosing to attend to some stimuli and to ignore others
• Selective attention


  • Cocktail party problem (Colin Cherry) - process of tracking one conversation while distracted by other conversations
  • Dichotic Presentation - two separate messages = shadowing - follow one message and ignore the other
• Early Filter Model (Broadbent)


  • We filter information right after we notice it at the sensory level
  • Information requiring higher perceptual processes is not noticed if not attended to
• Selective Filter Model (Moray)


  • Blocks most information at the sensory level
  • Messages that are high importance to a person may break through the filter of selective attention
• Attenuation (Treisman)


  • Instead of blocking out stimuli, the filter (attenuator) merely weakens (attenuates) the strength of all stimuli other than the target stimulus
• Late-Filter Model (Deutsch & Deutsch)


  • Stimuli are filtered out only after they have been analyzed for both their physical properties and their meaning
  • Hypothesized that improvements in performance eventually would have occurred as a result of practice
• Divided attention


  Anytime you are engaged in two or more tasks at the same time, your attention is divided between those tasks
• Factors that influence our ability to pay attention

  • Anxiety
  • Arousal
  • Task difficulty
  • Skills
• Network model - areas associated with attention


  • Alerting - being prepared to attend to some incoming event, and maintaining this attention (frontal and parietal cortexes, norepinephrine)
  • Orienting - selection of stimuli to attend to (parietal and temporal lobes, acetylcholine)
  • Executive attention - involves processes for monitoring and resolving conflicts that arise among internal processes (prefrontal cortex, dopamine)
• Automatic cognitive processes


  Involve no conscious control or demand little or no effort or even intention, performed in parallel
• Controlled cognitive processes


  Accessible to conscious control and even require it, performed serially
• Automatization


  The process of making a cognitive process automatic
• Attention deficits


  • Linked to lesions in frontal lobe, basal ganglia, posterior parietal cortex, thalamus, and midbrain areas related to eye movements
• Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

  • Have difficulties in focusing their attention in ways that enable them to adapt in optimal ways to their environment
  • Primary symptoms: inattention, hyperactivity & impulsiveness
  • Three main types: hyperactive-impulsive, inattentive, and a combination of the two types
• Change blindness


  An inability to detect changes in objects or scenes that are being viewed
• Inattentional blindness


  People are not able to see things that are actually there
• Spatial neglect/Hemi-neglect


  Attentional dysfunction in which participants ignore the half of their visual field that is contralateral to (on the opposite side of) the hemisphere of the brain that has a lesion