Chapter 3 - Attention and Consciousness

Attention

concentration of mental activity that allows you to take in a limited portion of the vast stream of information available from both your sensory world and your memory; known as the 'gatekeeper'

Bottom-up processing

Way of processing where mental activity is concentrated because an interesting stimulus in the environment has captured our attention; exogenous attention, involuntary & momentary, stimulus driven

Top-down processing

Way of processing where mental activity is concentrated because we want to pay attention to some specific stimulus; endogenous attention, voluntary & sustained, goal-driven

Divided-attention task

you try to pay attention to two or more simultaneous messages, responding appropriately to each message; paying equal attention to two or more stimuli; speed and accuracy suffer when the task is challenging

Multitask

accomplishment of two or more tasks at the same time; shifting our attention from one task to another, less efficient; is a myth

Selective-attention task

requires people to pay attention to certain kinds of information while ignoring other ongoing information

Dichotic listening, Stroop Effect, Visual Search

three different kinds of selective-attention tasks

Dichotic Listening

The procedure of presenting one message to the left ear and a different message to the right ear; 2 messages are simultaneously presented in each ear

Shadow

participant listens to the message and is asked to repeat it after the speaker

(1) both messages are presented slowly; (2) the main task is not challenging; (3) the meaning of the unattended message is immediately relevant

people are more likely to process the unattended message when (1), (2), and (3)

Cocktail Party Effect

phenomenon when you hear your name from the unattended stimuli or message and you become attentive

Working Memory

brief, immediate memory for material that we are currently processing

Stroop Effect

psychological phenomenon that demonstrates the interference in reaction time when the brain processes conflicting information; occurs when the color of the ink conflicts with the color name; people take longer to pay attention to a color when they are distracted by another feature of the stimulus

Emotional Stroop Task

individuals often require more time to name the ink color of words that could have strong emotional significance to them

Phobic Disorder

excessive fear of a specific object

Attentional Bias

a situation in which people pay extra attention to some stimuli or some features

Eating Attitudes Test

standardized test that assesses whether people are at risk for developing eating disorders

Cognitive-Behavioral Approach

psychological problems arise from inappropriate thinking (cognitive factors) and inappropriate learning (behavioral factors)

Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

anxiety disorder characterized by repeated re-experiencing of an extremely traumatic event

Magnetoencephalography (MEG)

records magnetic field fluctuations produced by neural activity during the processing of stimuli

Visual Search

general area of selective attention where the observer must find a target in a visual display that has numerous distractors

Isolated-feature or Combined-feature effect

people can typically locate an isolated feature more quickly than a combined feature

Feature-present or Feature-absent effect

people can typically locate a feature that is present more quickly than a feature that is absent

Vergence

cooperative movement that keep both eyes fixed on the same target

Saccadic

rapid eye movement of the eyes from one spot to the next

Saccadic Eye Movement

purpose is to bring the center of your retina into position over the words you want to read

Fovea

the central focal point in the retina, around which the eye's cones cluster

Fixation

occurs during the period between two saccadic movements where your visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful for comprehending the written text

Perceptual Span

refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during a fixation

Parafoveal Preview

readers can access information about upcoming words even though they are currently fixated on a word to the left of those words (in English); can cause shorter fixation durations on a nearby word when information about the properties of the text is available

Regressions

in reading, moving one's eyes backward to words that appear earlier in a sentence; often made when people realize that they have not understood the passage they are reading

Orienting Attention Network

generally responsible for the kind of attention required for visual search, in which you must shift your attention around to various spatial locations; develops during first year of life

Parietal Lobe

location of the two important components of the orienting attention network

Brain Lesion

specific brain damage caused by strokes, accidents, or other traumas

Unilateral Spatial Neglect

when a person ignores part of his or her visual field

Positron Emission Topography (PET) Scan

researchers measure blood flow in the brain by injecting the participant with a radioactive chemical just before he or she performs a cognitive task

Executive Attention Network

responsible for the kind of attention we use when a task focuses on conflict; inhibits your automatic responses to stimuli; primarily involved during top-down control of attention; begins development at about age 3

Prefrontal Portion of the Cortex or Anterior Part of the Cingulate Gyrus

region of the brain where the executive attention network is especially active

Bottleneck Theories

the proposal where a narrow passageway in human information processing limits the quantity of information to which one can pay attention

Feature-Integration Theory

According to Anne Treisman, this theory tells us that we sometimes look at a scene using distributed attention, and we process all parts of the scene at the same time; on other occasions, we use focused attention, and we process each item in the scene one at a time

Distributed Attention

allows us to register features automatically; the use of parallel processing across the field and the registration of all features simultaneously

Focused Attention

attending to a particular stimulus while ignoring others; it requires a high level of awareness; more demanding kind of processing is necessary when the objects are more complex

Illusory Conjunction

an inappropriate combination of features, perhaps combining one object's shape with a nearby object's color

Binding Problem

the problem faced by the human visual system when it does not always represent the important feature of an object as a unified whole

Consicousness

awareness that people have about the outside world and about their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings; associated with the kind of controlled, focused attention that is not automatic

Mindless Reading

your eyes may move forward, but you do not process the meaning of the material

Mind Wandering or Daydreaming

occurs when your thoughts shift from the external environment in favor of internal processing

Repression

unconscious forgetting

Thought Suppression

conscious elimination of the thoughts, ideas, and images that are related to an undesirable stimulus

Dorso frontoparietal system

responsible for endogenous attention

Ventral frontoparietal system

responsible for exogenous attention

Ironic Effects of Mental Control

term used to describe how our efforts can backfire when we attempt to control the contents of our consciousness

Blindsight

condition in which an individual with a damaged visual cortex claims not to see an object but is able to accurately report some characteristics of that object, such as its location