Cognitive Psychology Chapter 3 Flashcards

Attention is defined as a 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.

A divided-attention task is a task in which the subject is asked to simultaneously focus attention on two or more stimuli.

To multitask means to try to accomplish two or more tasks at the same time.

<p>A selective-attention task requires people to pay attention to certain kinds of information while ignoring other ongoing information.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Dichotic listening is a task in which people wearing headphones hear different messages presented to each ear.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Shadowing the message means to listen to a message and repeat it after the speaker.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The cocktail party effect refers to the phenomenon where you can pay close attention to one conversation while noticing if your name is mentioned in a nearby conversation.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Working memory is the brief, immediate memory for material that we are currently processing.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The Stroop effect is when people take a long time to name the ink color when that color is used in printing an incongruent word.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The emotional Stroop task indicates that naming the color takes longer for emotional words, capturing more attentional resources.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A phobic disorder is characterized by excessive fear of a specific object.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Attentional bias describes a situation in which people pay extra attention to some stimuli or features.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The cognitive-behavioral approach asserts that psychological problems arise from inappropriate thinking and inappropriate learning.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>PTSD is a disorder characterized by chronic physiological arousal, recurrent unwanted thoughts or images of the trauma, and avoidance of stimuli that remind one of the traumatic event.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The MEG technique records magnetic field fluctuations produced by neural activity during the processing of stimuli.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Visual search is when the observer must find a target in a visual display that has numerous distractors.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The isolated-feature/combined-feature effect suggests that if a target differs from irrelevant items in a simple feature, it can be detected quickly.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The feature-present/feature-absent effect indicates that people can usually locate a present feature quicker than an absent one.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A saccadic eye movement is a rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The fovea is a very small region in the center of the retina.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Fixation is when the visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Perceptual span refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during a fixation.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Parafoveal preview occurs when readers can access information about upcoming words while fixating on a word to the left.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The orienting attention network is generally responsible for the attention required for visual search, shifting focus to various locations.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A brain lesion refers to specific brain damage caused by strokes, accidents, or other traumas.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Unilateral spatial neglect occurs when a person ignores part of his or her visual field.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>A PET scan involves injecting individuals with a mildly radioactive substance and monitoring changes in blood flow to different regions of the brain.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The executive attention network is responsible for managing attention when a task focuses on conflict.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Bottleneck theories propose that a narrow passageway in human information processing limits the quantity of information to which one can pay attention.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Distributed attention allows you to register features automatically through parallel processing across the field, registering all features simultaneously.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Feature-integration theory, developed by Anne Treisman, proposes a sequence of stages in which features are first analyzed and then combined to result in the perception of an object.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Focused attention is serial processing, in which you identify one object at a time.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>An illusory conjunction is an inappropriate combination of features, possibly combining one object's shape with a nearby object's color.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The binding problem occurs when the color and the shape of two objects become switched.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Consciousness is the awareness that people have about the outside world and their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Mindless reading is when your eyes may move forward, but you do not process the meaning of the material.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Mind wandering is when thoughts shift from the external environment in favor of internal processing.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Thought suppression is the attempt to prevent certain thoughts from entering consciousness.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Ironic effects of mental control refer to our efforts that can backfire when we attempt to control the contents of our consciousness.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Blindsight occurs when an individual with a damaged visual cortex claims not to see an object but can accurately report some characteristics of that object, like its location.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>The two components are (a) distributed attention, which registers single features automatically, and (b) focused attention, which requires slower serial processing for searching combinations of features.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Divided attention</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>When people pay attention to one task, they typically notice little about other tasks.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>People are required to pay selective attention to the color of the stimulus, rather than the name of the stimulus.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Easier to detect a Q in an array of Os than to detect an O in an array of Qs.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>You are using bottom-up processing.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Primarily activates the prefrontal part of the cortex.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>People are not able to use focused attention.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>When we try to avoid a particular thought, it may be even more likely to enter consciousness.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Some information from the retina travels to regions of the cortex outside the visual cortex.</p> Signup and view all the answers

<p>Consciousness.</p> Signup and view all the answers