Consciousness

Question 1

What is consciousness?

Answer 1

a state of awareness of sensations or ideas so that you can reflect on tehm, and report them to toehrs

Question 2

How can we study consciousness?

Answer 2

by considering processes of which we are not conscious fo

Question 3

What is blind sight?

Answer 3

results form damage to visual cortex, cannot see objects but can “guess” the location pretty accurately, reach for them, adn describe them

Question 4

What is subliminal perception?

Answer 4

people can be influenced by visual inputs they didn’t consciously perceive

Question 5

What is evidence for subliminal perception?

Answer 5

Evidence for subliminal perception comes from studies of the N400
brain wave, surprise signal from brain

Question 6

What areas of brain contribute to your overall alterness/sensitivity?

Answer 6

thalamus and reticular activating system

Question 7

What is the cognitive unconscious?

Answer 7

mental activities outisde of your awareness that make your interactions with the world possible

Question 8

In terms of cognition what are we generally aware/not aware of?

Answer 8

aware of products but not processes

Question 9

What is an example of a product vs process?

Answer 9

product: memory of a nice dinner

process: inferences, retrieval, reconstruction

Question 10

Can people reason unconsciously?

Answer 10

yes

Question 11

Can your conscious inner dialogue be influenced by the cognitive unconscious? Example?

Answer 11

yes

framing effect

Question 12

What are our unconscious judgements/inferences like?

Answer 12

fast, efficient, reasonable

Question 13

What are our unconscious judgemnets/inferences guided by?

Answer 13

situtational cues, prior habits, familiarity

Question 14

What are action slips?

Answer 14

cases where you do something differently than your intended to (accidently do something that you are used to doing)

Question 15

Are unconscious processes flexible?

Answer 15

generally no

Question 16

How can unconscious processes happen without supervision?

Answer 16

biological (built into nervous system), or practiced (become automated)

Question 17

What does executive control require?

Answer 17

output side (to initiate or overide actions), way to represent goals/agenda, input side

Question 18

What are metacognitive skills?

Answer 18

skills in monitoring/controlling your own mental processes

Question 19

What is metamemory?

Answer 19

knowledge and beliefs about, awareness of, and control over one’s own memory

Question 20

What is the global neuronal workspace hypothesis?

Answer 20

workspace neurons link the activity of various specialized brain areas, integrates and makes single coherent representations possible

Question 21

How does the global neuronal workspace work?

Answer 21

Workspace neurons carry different info and compete for attention, whatever we pay attention to wins (sustained/broad/focused attention will affect this)

Question 22

What is access consciousness?

Answer 22

your sensitivity and access to certain types of info

Question 23

What is phenomenal consciousness?

Answer 23

what it feels like to have certain expereinces

Question 24

What is qualia?

Answer 24

one’s subjective experiences that cannot be conveyed as a first-person experience to someone else (pain of headache etc)