Cognitive Psych_Conscious and attention

It is our awareness of internal and external experiences, including thoughts, emotions, and perception.

Recognizing and responding to stimuli

Focusing on specific information while ignoring others

A smooth flow of consciousness shaping personal identity

Ranging from full alertness to unconscious state

Examines how we process, understand, and apply information. Conscious and unconscious interactions help explain learning, memory, and decision making.

Participants heard different stimuli in each ear and focused on one while ignoring the other

Ability to focus on one conversation in a noisy setting.

Holds all incoming information briefly

Selects attended message based on physical characteristics

Processes selected information for meaning

It stores attended information

Some participants noticed their name in the unattended ear

Dear aunt jane experiment suggested meaning influences attention

Proposed a "leaky filter" allowing some unattended messages through

Words in the unattended ear influenced sentences interpretation, supporting late selection model

The amount of info a person can handle

Task difficulty affects how much attention is available

Participants responded to target letters in displays of varying complexity

Low load rask leave resources available for distruction

High load task use all cognitive resources, leaving no room for distractions

Words interfere with naming ink colors due to automatic reading

Shows how task-irrelevant stimuli can be hard to ignore

Pausing on an object to gather information

Quick shift from one point to another

Moving the eyes to focus on an object

Physical properties (color, contrast, movement) attracts attention

Expectations and knowledge guide attention (top down processing, scene schemas)

Eye movement are influenced by the task being performed

Participants responded faster when cue correctly predicted a target location. It supports the spotlight model of attention

Reaction times were faster for object in the same cued location

Shifting attention increases activity in specific brain regions

Focusing on a category (e.g, people) activates related areas in the brain

With practice, tasks can become automatic

It requires full attention like driving in a heavy traffic

Talking on a phone increases red light misses and slower reaction times.

Frequent phone use is reinforced by notifications

Constant switching between tasks reduces efficiency

Realizing you dont remember what you just read

Disrupts tasks but can enhance creativity

Failure to see visible stimuli when not attending

Focusing on a difficult task makes people less likely to hear sounds

Difficulty noticing differences between images

People needed multiple repetitions before detecting changes

Mistakes in movies (e.g, s character's clothing changing between shots)

Individual features (color, shape) are processed separately.

Features are combined into objects

People mistakenly mix features from different objects when not paying full attention

Finding an object based on one characteristics

Searching for a combination of features

Controls attention based on stimulus salience

Controls attention based on top-down processes.

How easily brain activity travels along pathways