Cognitive Psychology: Attention and Consciousness Flashcards

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering key definitions, theories, models, and empirical phenomena from Unit 3: Attention and Consciousness.

Attention

The means by which we actively process a limited amount of information from the enormous amount of information available through our senses, stored memories, and other cognitive processes.

Consciousness

The subjective awareness of various things such as visual objects, events, thoughts, and emotions, including both the feeling of awareness and the content of awareness.

Signal-Detection Theory (SDT)

A framework used to explain how people pick out the few important stimuli when they are embedded in a wealth of irrelevant, distracting stimuli.

Hits

An outcome in signal-detection theory (also called true positives) where an individual correctly identifies the presence of a target.

False Alarms

An outcome in signal-detection theory (also called false positives) where an individual incorrectly identifies the presence of a target that is actually absent.

Misses

An outcome in signal-detection theory (also called false negatives) where an individual fails to observe the presence of a target.

Correct Rejections

An outcome in signal-detection theory (also called true negatives) where an individual correctly identifies the absence of a target.

Vigilance

A person's ability to attend to a field of stimulation over a prolonged period, during which the person watchfully waits to detect the appearance of a particular target stimulus of interest.

Search

A scan of the environment for particular features, actively looking for something when you are not sure where it will appear.

Distracters

Nontarget stimuli that divert our attention away from the target stimulus during a visual search.

Display Size

The number of items in a given visual array.

Display-Size Effect

The degree to which the number of items in a display hinders or slows down the search process.

Feature Search

A search process where an individual scans the environment for an item with a single distinct feature, such as color or shape.

Conjunction Search

A search process where an individual looks for a particular combination or joining together of features, requiring mental integration.

Feature-Integration Theory

Treisman's model proposing that individual features are represented automatically in parallel feature maps, while conjoining features requires sequential processing using attentional resources as mental glue.

Similarity Theory

Duncan and Humphreys' view proposing that search difficulty increases as the similarity between target and distracter stimuli increases, regardless of the number of features to be integrated.

Guided Search Theory

A model by Cave and Wolfe suggesting all searches involve two consecutive stages: an initial parallel stage that simultaneously activates target features, followed by a serial stage that sequentially evaluates activated elements.

Cocktail Party Problem

The process of tracking one conversation in the face of the distraction of other conversations, as identified by Colin Cherry.

Shadowing

An experimental task devised by Colin Cherry in which a participant listens to two different messages via dichotic presentation and repeats back only one target message as soon as possible.

Dichotic Presentation

An experimental setup where a separate auditory message is presented to each ear simultaneously.

Broadbent's Model

An early-filter theory proposing that multiple channels of sensory input reach an attentional filter right after being noticed at the sensory level, allowing only one channel to reach perceptual processing.

Selective Filter Model

Moray's model proposing that while the selective filter blocks out most information at the sensory level, highly important personal messages (such as one's name) can burst through the filter.

Attenuation Model

Anne Treisman's theory of selective attention proposing that the filter weakens (attenuates) the strength of unattended stimuli rather than blocking them out completely.

Late-Filter Model

Deutsch and Deutsch's model proposing that incoming stimuli are filtered out only after they have been analyzed for both their physical properties and their meaning.

Pre-attentive Processes

Automatic, rapid, and parallel processes that notice physical sensory characteristics of unattended messages without discerning meaning or relationships.

Attentive, Controlled Processes

Serial processes executed later that consume time and working memory resources to observe relationships among features and synthesize fragments into mental representations.

Divided Attention

The prudent allocation of available attentional resources to coordinate performance of more than one task at a time.

Attentional-Resources Theory

A theory positing that people have a fixed amount of attention (either from a single pool or multiple modality-specific pools) that they allocate according to task requirements.

Alerting

An attentional network function defined as being prepared to attend to an incoming event and maintaining this attention, involving the right frontal/parietal cortexes, locus coeruleus, and norepinephrine.

Orienting

An attentional network function defined as the selection of stimuli to attend to, involving the superior parietal lobe, temporal parietal junction, frontal eye fields, superior colliculus, and acetylcholine.

Executive Attention

An attentional network function involving processes for monitoring and resolving conflicts among internal processes (thoughts, feelings, responses), involving the anterior cingulate, prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and dopamine.

PASS Model

The Planning, Attention, and Simultaneous-Successive Process Model of Human Cognition based on Luria's theory, asserting that intelligence consists of three distinct processing units.

Inspection Time

The amount of time it takes an individual to inspect items and make a decision about them during concentrated bursts of focused attention.

Reaction Time

The time it takes an individual to select one answer from among several possibilities in a focused attentional task.

Habituation

A psychological process involving becoming accustomed to a familiar stimulus so that we gradually pay less and less attention to it.

Dishabituation

A process in which a change in a familiar stimulus prompts an individual to start noticing the stimulus again.

Sensory Adaptation

A direct sense organ phenomenon involving a lessening of attention to a stimulus that is not subject to conscious control.

Automatic Processes

Parallel cognitive processes performed without conscious awareness, which demand little or no conscious effort or intention.

Controlled Processes

Serial cognitive processes that require conscious control, occur step-by-step, and consume attentional resources over a relatively long time.

Automatization

The process (also called proceduralization) by which tasks that initially require controlled processing gradually become automatic through practice.

Instance Theory

Logan's theory proposing that automatization occurs because individuals gradually accumulate knowledge about specific responses to specific stimuli in memory.

Preconscious Processing

Cognitive processing of information that currently lies outside conscious awareness but is stored and accessible when prompted.

Priming

A phenomenon where exposure to an initial stimulus affects the recognition or processing of a subsequent stimulus.

Tip-of-the-Tongue Phenomenon

An experience where an individual tries to remember preconscious information stored in memory that cannot readily be retrieved, though partial features like initial letters or syllable counts may be accessible.