Cognitive Psychology Finals

Chapter 4: Attention and Consciousness

The Nature of Attention and Consciousness

Attention is the 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.

— William James, Principles of Psychology.

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

  • It includes both conscious and uncon- scious processes. In many cases, conscious processes are relatively easy to study. Unconscious processes are harder to study, simply because you are not conscious of them.

Consciousness - includes both the feeling of awareness and the content of aware- ness, some of which may be under the focus of attention.

Conscious attention serves three purposes in playing a causal role for cognition:

  1. it helps in monitoring our interactions with the environment.

  2. it assists us in linking our past (memories) and our present (sensations) to give us a sense of continuity of experience.

  3. it helps us in controlling and planning for our future actions.

Signal Detection: Finding Important Stimuli in a Crowd

Signal-detection theory (SDT) - is a framework to explain how people pick out the few important stimuli when they are embedded in a wealth of irrelevant, distracting stimuli.

  • often is used to measure sensitivity to a target’s presence.

When we try to detect a target stimulus (signal), there are four possible outcomes:

  1. First, in hits (also called “true posi- tives”), the lifeguard correctly identifies the presence of a target (i.e., somebody drowning).

  2. Second, in false alarms (also called “false positives”), he or she incorrectly identifies the presence of a target that is actually absent (i.e., the lifeguard thinks somebody is drowning who actually isn’t).

  3. Third, in misses (also called “false nega- tives”), the lifeguard fails to observe the presence of a target (i.e., the lifeguard does not see the drowning person).

  4. Fourth, in correct rejections (also called “true nega- tives”), the lifeguard correctly identifies the absence of a target (i.e., nobody is drowning, and he or she knows that nobody is in trouble).

attention — paying enough attention to perceive objects that are there;

perception — perceiving faint signals that may or may not be beyond your perceptual range (such as a very high-pitched tone)

memory — indicating whether you have/have not been exposed to a stimulus before, such as whether the word “champagne” appeared on a list that was to be memorized.

Vigilance: Waiting to Detect a Signal

Vigilance - refers to a person’s ability to attend to a field of stim- ulation over a prolonged period.