Psychology Week 8: Attention

Week 8: Attention

• Selective Processing: Attention allows focusing on relevant stimuli while ignoring distractions.
• Cocktail Party Effect: Demonstrates selective attention, focusing on one conversation despite background noise.
• Flashbulb Memories: Vivid memories of emotionally significant events, but not necessarily accurate. Attention plays a role in their creation.
• Bottom-Up Processing: Stimulus-driven, automatic attention.
• Top-Down Processing: Goal-directed attention, influenced by prior knowledge.
• Measuring Attention: Includes orienting and cueing tasks, visual search (pop-out vs. conjunctive) to assess attention shifts and efficiency.
• Inattentional Blindness: Difficulty noticing unexpected stimuli.
• Change Blindness: Difficulty detecting changes in a visual scene.
• Automaticity & The Stroop Effect: Automatic processing becomes effortless with practice (e.g., reading); Stroop tasks demonstrate interference when word meaning conflicts with color.
• Spotlight Model: Attention highlighting stimuli within focusing areas.
• Filter Models:
• Early Selection: Filters based on physical characteristics before meaning.
• Attenuation Model: Unattended stimuli are dampened but can still capture attention.
• Late Selection: Filtering occurs after semantic processing.

Week 9: Memory

• Definition: Memory is reconstructive, shaped by current goals and context, not a perfect record.
• Stages of Memory: Encoding, storage, and retrieval. Attention is critical during encoding.
• Types of Memory:
• Sensory Memory: Brief holding of perceptual information (iconic and echoic).
• Short-Term Memory (STM): Temporary storage (chunking helps).
• Working Memory: STM with added components (phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, episodic buffer, central executive) for processing.
• Long-Term Memory (LTM): Stores past experiences and knowledge (declarative/explicit and nondeclarative/implicit).
• Principles of Memory:
• Levels of Processing: Deeper processing (semantic) enhances retention over shallow processing.
• Encoding Specificity: Retrieval is best when the context is similar to encoding.
• Transfer Appropriate Processing: Encoding and retrieval processes align for better retrieval.
• Forgetting:
• Decay Theory: Memory fades over time, especially in STM.
• Interference Theory: Proactive (old memories block new) and retroactive (new memories block old).
• Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve: Shows rapid initial forgetting followed by a gradual decrease.
• Memory Errors:
• Misinformation Effect: Distorting past memories with new misleading information.
• Source Confusion: Misattributing the origin of a memory.
• False Fame Effect: Mistaking familiarity for fame.

Week 10: Forming Impressions

• Social Perception: Impression formation driven by conscious and unconscious judgments.
• Attribution Theories:
• Covariation Theory (Kelley): Attributions are based on consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency of behavior.
• Correspondent Inference Theory: Dispositional attributions based on choice, expectations, and intended consequences.
• Attribution Errors:
• Fundamental Attribution Error: Overestimating dispositional factors.
• Actor-Observer Effect: Attributing one's own actions to situations but others' to dispositions.
• Self-Serving Bias: Successes attributed to internal factors, failures to external ones.
• Cultural Variations: Different cultures emphasize situational or dispositional factors differently.

Week 11: Influence of Others

• Social Influence: People's behavior is influenced by the presence and actions of others.
• Obedience: Milgram's experiment demonstrated high levels of obedience to authority, despite evident distress.
• Conformity: Sherif's and Asch's experiments show how group norms can influence individual judgments.
• Group Dynamics:
• Social Facilitation: Improved performance in the presence of others (for well-practiced tasks).
• Social Loafing: Reduced effort in groups.
• Group Polarization: Group discussions amplify initial tendencies (risky or cautious).
• Groupthink: Prioritizing cohesion and consensus over critical thinking.
• Persuasion: Techniques like foot-in-the-door, low-ball, and door-in-the-face are effective persuasion strategies.
• Helping and Harming Behavior:
• Bystander Effect: Diffusion of responsibility reduces individual intervention.
• Aggression: Types include relational (indirect) and hostile (direct) aggression.
• Stanford Prison Experiment: Illustrates how easily people adopt roles and exhibit dehumanizing behaviors due to social influence and deindividuation.

Explore the fascinating topic of attention in psychology with this quiz. You'll dive into concepts like selective processing, the cocktail party effect, and the intricacies of bottom-up and top-down processing. Test your understanding of inattentional blindness and automaticity to see how they shape our perception.