Chapter 3: Attention And Consciousness

Question 1

Attention

Answer 1

A concentration of mental activity that allows you to take a limited portion of the vast stream of information available from both your sensory world and your memory

Question 2

Divided attention

Answer 2

Trying to attend to more than one thing

Question 3

Multitask

Answer 3

Trying to accomplish two or more tasks at the same time

Question 4

Selective-attention task

Answer 4

Requires people to pay attention to certain kinds of information, while ignoring other ongoing information

Question 5

Dichotic listening

Answer 5

Selectively attending to one thing over another, screening out almost all of the unintended conversation

Question 6

Cocktail party effect

Answer 6

Even if you are paying close attention to one conversation, you may notice if your name is mentioned in a nearby conversation

Question 7

Stroop effect

Answer 7

People take a long time to name the ink color when that color is used in printing and incongruent word

Question 8

Emotional stroop task

Answer 8

People are instructed to name the ink color of words that could have strong emotional significance to them

Question 9

Attentional bias

Answer 9

Describes a situation in which people pay extra attention to some stimuli or some features

Question 10

Cognitive behavioural approach

Answer 10

Psychological problems arise from inappropriate thinking and inappropriate learning

Question 11

Visual search

Answer 11

Ignoring irrelevant items as you look for something specific

Question 12

Isolated-feature/combined feature effect

Answer 12

People can typically locate an isolated feature more quickly than a combined feature

Question 13

Feature-present/feature absent effect

Answer 13

People can typically locate a feature that is present more quickly than a feature that is absent

Question 14

Saccadic eye movements

Answer 14

Systematic eye movements that bring the centre of your retina to the thing you are focusing on or paying attention to

Question 15

Fixation

Answer 15

Occurs during the period between two saccadis movements; your visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful

Question 16

Perceptual span

Answer 16

Refers to the number of letters and spaces that we perceive during fixation

Question 17

Regressions

Answer 17

Moving one’s eyes backward to earlier material in the sentence

Question 18

Orienting attention network

Answer 18

Responsible for the kind of attention required for visual search, in which you must shift your attention around to various special locations

Question 19

Unilateral spatial neglect

Answer 19

When a person ignores part of his or her visual field

Question 20

Executive attention network

Answer 20

Responsible for the kind of attention we use when a task focusses on conflict

Question 21

Bottleneck theories

Answer 21

Proposed a narrow passageway in human information processing; limits the quantity of information to which we can pay attention to

Question 22

Feature-integration theory

Answer 22

We sometimes look at a scene using distributed attention, and we process all parts of the scene at the same time

Question 23

Distributed attention

Answer 23

Allows you to register features automatically

Question 24

Focussed attention

Answer 24

Requires slower serial processing, and you identify one object at a time

Question 25

Illusory conjunction

Answer 25

An inappropriate combination of features, perhaps combining one object’s shape with a nearby object’s color

Question 26

Binding problem

Answer 26

Looks at separate features rather than the unified whole

Question 27

Consciousness

Answer 27

The awareness that people have about the outside world and about their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings

Question 28

Mindless reading

Answer 28

Reading, but daydreaming so you aren’t actually aware that you are not reading. Your eyes may move forward, but you do not process the meaning of the material

Question 29

Mind wandering

Answer 29

Occurs when your thoughts shift from the external environment in favour of internal processing

Question 30

Thought suppression

Answer 30

When people try to eliminate the thoughts, ideas, and images that are related to an undesirable stimulus

Question 31

Does thought suppression work?

Answer 31

No, it usually backfires and increases the frequency in which a person thinks of the thing they are trying to suppress (in other words, it leads to the rebound effect)

Question 32

Ironic effects of mental control

Answer 32

Phrase used to describe how our efforts can backfire when we attempt to control the contents of our consciousness

Question 33

Rebound effect

Answer 33

Suppression of certain thoughts can actually make you think about that thing even more than you initially would have before you started to try and suppress it

Question 34

Blindsight

Answer 34

A condition in which an individual with a damaged visual cortex claims not to see an object; however, they can accurately report some characteristics of that object, such as its location

Question 35

What factors affect eye movement during reading?

Answer 35

Saccadic eye movements: bring the center of your retina into position over the words

Fixation: visual system pauses briefly in order to acquire information that is useful for reading