Cognitive Processes and Attention

Stages of Cognitive Processing

• Input is the initial stage, receiving sensory information.
• Perception transforms sensory input into meaningful experiences.
• Learning and memory storage involve processing and retaining information.
• Retrieval is accessing stored knowledge.
• Thinking involves applying knowledge and reasoning.

Approaches to Studying Cognitive Psychology

• Experimental psychology: scientifically tests psychological processes on humans and animals.
• Computer modeling: simulates human cognitive processes using computers to test information processing mechanisms.
• Cognitive neuropsychology: studies cognitive processes in brain-damaged patients to understand brain activities.
• Cognitive neuroscience: investigates the link between brain structure and function, using brain-imaging techniques to understand human cognition.

Gestalt and Schema Theories

• Gestalt psychology emphasizes how components of perception are grouped and integrated into patterns and whole figures.
• Schema is a mental pattern, usually derived from past experiences, that helps interpret new perceptual input.

Key Terms

• Schema: A mental pattern derived from past experience used to interpret new information, e.g., recognizing familiar shapes.
• Top-down processing: Processing that uses existing knowledge and schemas to interpret new stimuli.
• Bottom-up processing: Processing that is directed by the information contained within the stimulus itself.
• Selective filter: Focuses on important input while filtering out unnecessary information.
• Broca's area: A region of the brain controlling motor speech production.
• Wernicke's area: A region of the brain concerned with speech perception and comprehension.

Key Terms(cont.)

• Double dissociation: A method to investigate different functions by demonstrating that impairment in one function occurs independently of another.
• Neurotransmitter: A chemical substance secreted across synapses to enable communication between neurons.
• Synapse: The gap between the axon of one neuron and the dendrite of another.

Key Terms(cont.)

• Cell assembly: A group of linked neurons forming a functional network, proposed as a possible biological mechanism for memory trace.
• Controlled processing: Processing under conscious control that is slow & voluntary.
• Automatic processing: Fast, unconscious and not subject to capacity limitations which are not always appropriate behaviour.
• Blindsight: The ability of some functionally blind people to detect visual stimuli unconsciously, even without conscious awareness.

Key Terms(cont.)

• Perception: The subjective experience of sensory information that has been processed cognitively, including how our past experiences shapes our perception.
• Visual illusions: Misperceptions where our perception does not reflect the outside world accurately, which is useful to help us understand different levels of perception.

Key Terms(cont.)

• Sensory conspicuity: How easily an object is detected by our senses, based on the object's properties (like shape, color, and brightness).
• Attention conspicuity: the ease with which a stimulus is detected and takes precedence to our attention, which includes our ability to select the object.
• Visual search: Searching for a target object within a set of other objects, which involve methods such as directing attention to make judgements and the mechanisms involved in identifying an object.
• Constructivist approach: Perception is actively built from incomplete sensory information and stored knowledge.
• Perceptual hypothesis: Predictions about what we might be seeing to be investigated.
• Masking: Disruption of processing of a stimulus when followed by another stimulus, an early or late in the brain processing stage.

Key Terms(cont.)

• Re-entrant processing: Interconnected communication between different brain areas, going in one direction only or both ways.
• Ventral stream: Visual pathway involved in object recognition.
• Dorsal stream: Visual pathway involved in spatial location processing (such as how to react to an object).
• Auditory perception: How our brain processes sounds.
• Auditory localisation: Identifying the location of a sound source .
• Motion parallax: A visual depth cue where nearby objects appear to move faster than distant objects, which also applies to sound.

Key Terms(cont.)

• Phantom word illusions: Perceptions of sounds different or not from what is presented, due to listener experiences & biases.
• Mental model: A representation that interprets the understanding of particular problems.
• Sensory overload: Too much sensory information for processing capabilities.
• Proprioception: The sense for body position and movement.
• Kinesthesis: The sense of body position and movement.
• Attention: Selection and prioritisation of information processing, linked intrinsically to perception and memory.

Key Terms(cont.)

• Selection for action: Attention that allows for controlling, planning and executing responses.

• Selection for perception: Attention towards encoding and interpreting sensory data.

• Binding problem: The need to combine different properties of an object (e.g., color, shape) into one unified perceptual experience.

• Controlled attention: Purposeful, intentional attention that is under our conscious control.

• Exogenous attention: Attention triggered by an external stimulus (i.e. bottom-up).

• Endogenous attention: Attention that is under our conscious control (top-down)

• Stroop effect The difference in processing time between naming colours when they are represented with a word related to that color and when a word that's not related to that color is represented in a color.

• Slips of actions Errors made during the execution of intended actions which are caused by automaticity or conscious control, which has similar principles to the Stroop effect.

• Early selection: Initial selection of information based on physical properties/ features.

• Late selection: Processing information for meaning before selective attention.

• Subliminal stimuli: Stimuli that are detectable by sensory receptors but not consciously reported.

• Masking: Disrupting stimulus processing with other stimuli, used to investigate the processing stages of perception.

• Early selection theory Unselected stimuli are lost due to high capacity fast-decay processing.

• Late selection theory Information is processed for meaning prior to selection.

Key Terms(cont.)

• Breakthrough: The unattended message can sometimes be heard or noted consciously.

• Selective filtering and Selective set: Two different task demands that show how attention is affected by the nature of the task (as opposed to external factors like visual cues).

• Visual search: searching for a specific object within complex visual displays.

• Conjunction search: Finding an object that has a combination of two or more features that differs from other objects.

• Pop-out: Fast search for a distinctive feature among a collection of features.

• Covert attention: Focusing attention without moving the eyes

• Overt attention: Focusing attention by moving the eyes

• Gaze-mediated orienting: Attention gets pulled to the gaze or location of others.

• Contention scheduler A part of our brain that creates order and prioritization for semi-automatic control of schemas.

• Frontal lobe syndrome. A deficit exhibited by patients with frontal lobe damage related to difficulty with behaviour, goal-setting, and sequential planning.

• Cross-modal cuing: When attentional cueing is elicited by cues from different sensory modalities.

• Local -global processing - When multiple levels of details need to be processed.