Chapter 4 Flashcards
Consciousness
- One’s moment-to-moment subjective experience of the world
- continuous stream
- persons subjective (personal) awareness
SQ: What do philosophers mean when they refer to “easy” and “hard” questions about consciousness?
Easy: Cognitive processes
- Materialistic approach
Hard: Why do qualia exist? Why aren’t we zombies?
Qualia
- Subjective (personal, individual) experiences of sensation (ex. do we all see colour the same? do foods taste the same to everyone?)
- We can’t know if one persons qualia is the same as the next persons because we all experience consciousness personally
Change Blindness
A failure to notice large changes in your environment
Q: How do the limits on consciousness contribute to change blindness?
- Major changes may go unnoticed if attention is focused elsewhere
- we can only focus on a few things at a time
How does attention work with your conscious?
- selects what can enter your consciousness since it is limited and only important things should be allowed in
What is the cocktail party effect and who coined the term? (Hint: name is a fruit)
Cocktail party effect refers to selective attention
- being able to only focus on the conversation you’re having with your friend and tuning out the party around you
Coined by: Psychologist E.C.Cherry
Selective Listening and Bottleneck Theories
Bottleneck theory: all info can’t come through one small bottle neck so we pick and choose what is important to listen to
Shadowing study done by…hint: same fruit dude
Cherry performed a shadowing study where info would be played through headphones on one ear of the participant and they would have to repeat the words that the researcher was listing to them while ignoring what was coming through the headphones
“Early” Recognition Theory
(Cherry) Selection occurs before recognition (ex. in one ear, out the other)
- unconsciously filtering out what is unimportant before being able to recognize and internalize the info
“Late” Recognition Theory
Moray’s Experiment
- same shadow experiment but one word would be the persons name and they would get tripped up once they realized
- Selection occurs after recognition
Endogenous Attention
Voluntary
(ENdogenous is withIN you)
- conscious decision, controlled processing
Exogenous Attention
Automatic, stimulus driven
(EXogenous is EXternal)
(ex. emotional response, sudden onset noise, etc.)
Q: You see an accident on the side of the road and can’t help but slow down to look at the traumatic scene. Why?
Because of the automatic emotional response to the stimuli
- an example of exogenous attention
Q: Why should you avoid using your laptop during lectures?
Multitasking:
Many students believe they are good at multitasking but the reality is that it’s impossible
- you may not feel like you missed important info but you also weren’t paying attention so you have no awareness of the events and can’t base your confidence off anything
Priming
Occurs when the response to a stimulus is influenced by recent experiences
(ex. asked to list words that start with “cha” -> just heard the sentence “the family was having dinner at the table” -> first response will most likely be “chair” because they were just thinking about dinner tables)
Subliminal Perception (subliminal = “existing or functioning below the threshold of consciousness”)
Processing information by sensory systems without conscious awareness
(ex. why movie theatres flash a message suggesting you buy a drink)
Q: Which type of subliminal messages are most likely to affect behaviour?
“Messages that invoke emotion or motivation may subtly shift behaviour, but such messages do not affect complex behaviours like buying or self-confidence”
Attention as a resource is limited. What is Capacity Theory?
Different tasks require different amounts of mental effort
Brain determines how that effort gets distributed by Automatic vs. Controlled processing
Automatic Processing
Learned, practiced (ex. reading (STROOP!))
What is Materialism and who is Thomas Nagel?
Materialism: Brain enables the mind and creates consciousness
Thomas Nagel wondered what it’s like to be a bat
- this question assumes that a bat has some kind of experience of being a bat
- what if being a bat is nothing at all?
- what if you didn’t have the self-awareness to even know you were a bat?
Panpsychism
Notion that all objects possess some level of conscious mind
Cartesian Dualism
Theatre of the mind -> lil man in your head (ex. characters from inside out)
Why is it difficult to study consciousness?
It’s not a physical thing, it’s meta-physical
Introspection
“Examination or observation of one’s own mental and emotional processes”
- determines our mental contents but not aware of our processing
Introspection Illusion
Can’t trust your brain
Cognitive illusion that makes us think we have direct insight into our mental states
(ex. unconscious inference (Helmholtz)
Inattentional Blindness
Being unaware of our own levels of awareness
- the brain wants everything to make sense so it confabulates explanations of our actions
Anosognosia
Denial of illness (ex. paralyzed arm that they think is still moving)
What is the difference between automatic and controlled processing?
Automatic processing has been heavily practiced and therefore doesn’t require much attention at all
Controlled processing occurs when you are learning a new task or needing to pay more attention to something than you normally would (ex. driving in a rain storm)
Q: When Tara was learning how to knit, she had to pay attention to every stitch. Now she can knit while watching tv. Why can she knit now without giving it full attention?
Because it used to be controlled processing and now it is automatic
What are 3 ways of naturally altering waking consciousness?
Meditation, immersion in an action, hypnosis
Meditation
A mental procedure that focuses attention on an external object, an internal event, or a sense of awareness
