What Do You Know About the Theory of Attention and Consciousness Flashcards

- concentration of mental energy that must be used to process incoming information- selective focus on & processing of a subset from a vast amount of stimulus info- both conscious and preconscious attention (we can attend/process some info w/o awareness)- monitors our interaction with the environment -provides a sense of continuity (links past & present)- important for planning future actions

Limited; selectivity

- attending to items that lie outside our conscious awareness. some items can be made conscious, some cannot.- Ex: stored memories? sensations? reading? driving? subliminal messages?

- occurs when recognition of a certain stimuli is affected by prior presentation of the same or similar stimuli- most priming is positive (facilitiates recognition) - sometimes is negative (makes recognition more difficult because we are stuck in our preconception)

A given stimulus increases the likelihood that a subsequently related/identical stimulus will be processed (e.g. retrieved from ltm) - Ex: target word BUTTER is processed faster if preceded by a related word BREAD

A given stimulus hinders the likelihood of processing the next related stimulus - Ex: target stimuli PINE is processed slower if preceded by a word related to the target's alternate meaning PALM

- Priming stimuli were words having more than one meaning (depending on context)- Condtition 1: Ppl are consciously aware of the priming word- Condition 2: Ppl are not consciously aware of the priming word because it was presented too quickly then masked -Results: Awareness of the priming stimuli can either facilitate or inhibit one pathway for the meaning of the target;When not consciously aware of the priming word, both pathways for meaning are activated.

- Triad A(Basket, Room, Foot)- Triad B(Swan, Army, Mask)-Triad A is coherent because we know that the word BALL can be paired with each one -we use EXPERIENCE- even if participants could not generate the 4th word, (BALL) they still selected the coherent triad!- results demonstrate PRECONSCIOUS processing

- you know that you know the word but cannot fully retrieve the word

1) Show pics of famous people or politicians and have participants name them2) ask general knowledge questions to generate TOT

-Person cannot consciously see a certain portion of their visual field but still behave in some instances as if they can see it-Being aware of doing something is distinguishable from doing something

-When forced to guess about a stimulus in the "blind" regions, they correctly guess locations and orientations of objects at above chance levels- Cortically blind patients, when asked to reach for objects in the blind area will preadjust their hands appropriately to size, shape, orientation and 3D location of that object in the blind field- yet, they FAIL TO SHOW VOLUNTARY BEHAVIOR such as reaching for a glass of water in the blind region even when thirsty- this shows that some visual processing seems to occur even when participants have no conscious awareness of visual sensations

-requires no conscious control- outside awareness- parallel processing (all at once)- no intention or attention-relatively fast -consume negligible attentional resources-for familiar and highly practiced tasks with largely stable task characteristics- relatively low levels of cog. processing (minimal analysis or synthesis)- usually for easy tasks, but even complex tasks can become automated given sufficient practice

- requires conscious control- processed serially (one step at a time)-takes effort, attention, work-time consuming-used in novel and unpracticed tasks with many variable features-relatively high level of cognitive processing- usually difficult tasks- with practice, controlled processes can become automatic!

1) Integrated Components Theory (Anderson)2) Instance Theory (Logan)