Consciousness Flashcards
Consciousness
Subjective experience of the world and the mind (awareness of sensations, thoughts, feelings we experience at a given moment)
Basic properties of consciousness
Intentionality (aim toward an object), unity (resistance to division), selectivity, transience
Selectivity
Capacity to include certain objects and exclude others (cocktail party phenomenon)
Cocktail-party effect
Tuning in one message while filtering out others nearby
Selective attention
Focusing conscious awareness on a particular stimulus
Inattentional blindness
Failure to see visible objects when attention is directed elsewhere
Change blindness
failure to notice change in environment
Transcience
Has tendency to change.
Phenomenology
How things seem to the conscious person
Problem of other minds
Fundamental difficulty we have in perceiving the consciousness of others
People judge minds according to
Capacity for experience (hunger, pain, emotion) and capacity for agency (self control, planning, memory, thought)
Mind-body problem
The issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body
Minimal consciousness
Low-level sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behavior
Full consciousness
Level of consciousness in which you know and are able to report your mental state
Self-consciousness
Level of consciousness in which the person’s attention is drawn to the self as an object
Daydreaming
State of consciousness in which a seemingly purposeless flow of thoughts comes to mind
Default mode network (DMN)
Network of interacting brain regions active when a person is not focused on outside world
Mental control
Attempt to change conscious states of mind
Thought suppression
Conscious avoidance of thought (often backfires)
Cognitive unconscious
Mental processes that give rise to a person’s thoughts, choices, emotions, and behavior even though they are not experienced by the person
Dual process theories
Theories that suggest we have two different systems in our brains for processing information: systems 1 and 2