Consciousness and attention

Question 1

Conscious

Answer 1

Wakefulness or awareness

Question 2

Defining characteristics of consciousness

Answer 2

Intentionality - directed towards something
Unity - resistant to division
Selectivity - only contains a fraction of the info it could
Transience - content subject to change in/voluntarily

Question 3

Change detection paradigm - Vogel

Answer 3

Requires participants to identify whether a change occurs in an image of abstract objects. Performance rapidly declined when number in visual store exceeds 4

Question 4

Sperling partial-report task

Answer 4

Consciousness can hold much more info
Difference is change detection paradigm is a measure of working or ST memory
Partial report-task is a measure or sensory memory, much higher-capacity by shorter-lived

Question 5

Inattention blindness demonstrations - Carrasco

Answer 5

We are effectively blind to a stimulus change is our attention is diverted elsewhere.
Carrasco shown that when our attention is engaged in a particular object, our conscious experience of it changes - appears clearer to us

Question 6

Posner - pre-cueing paradigm

Answer 6

Participants must identify some property of a visual target that can appear in one of several spatial locations. Prior to the target’s appearance, attention is diverted in the form of a transient peripheral cute (flash of light) or a central symbol cue (arrowhead). Engage attention

Question 7

Exogenous

Answer 7

Transient peripheral cue

Question 8

Endogenous

Answer 8

Central symbolic cue

Question 9

Attentional blink paradigm

Answer 9

Attentional resources distributed temporally as well as spatially
2 targets are presented in quick succession in a series of distractors, the second target can go completed unnoticed due to attentional resources being take up by the recognition of the first target.

Question 10

Global Workspace theory, Baars 1988-1998

Answer 10

Theatre metaphor
Working memory competes for access to the conscious spotlight
Unconscious processes are behind the scenes
Once reached level of consioucness - broadcast to several specialised modules

Question 11

Pre attentive and automatic

Answer 11

Describe perceptual processing that can occur in the absence of attention or prior to attention being distrubuted

Question 12

Dichotic listening task

Answer 12

Measure of pre attentive processing
Participants listen to 2 septette auditory streams and shadow one of them. Gross physical characteristics of stimuli can be retrieved from unattended stream - cocktail party effect when you become aware of your own name - suggest even semantic content can be processed to some extent

Question 13

Bottleneck theory of attentional selection

Answer 13

Unattended info is filtered out quite high up in processing stream

Question 14

Visual search task - Treisman and the feature integration theory

Answer 14

Determining which characteristics of visual stimuli are processed pre attentively.
A single object amongst a set of distractors will immediately capture our attention if it differs in a single visual feature. Does not happen if the target different in terms of a conjunction of 2 or more features
Theory posits that attention is required in order to bind the separate 2 features of an object into a coherent whole

Question 15

Disorder of attention: neglect

Answer 15

Damage to the parietal lobe, results in patient being unable to attend to the left-side of space, making the patient unaware of things appearing on this side

Question 16

Disorder of attention: extinction

Answer 16

Mild form of neglect, patients can be aware of stimuli on left but only when not accompanied by a competing stimulus on the right. Semantic info about neglected item still processed

Question 17

McGurk effect and the rubber hand illusion

Answer 17

Examples of how our mental representation of the world can be altered by the presence of competing sensory info from different modalities.

Question 18

Delay of formation of representation

Answer 18

In order to achieve multi sensory integration

Information from different modalities can be combined

Question 19

Compartmentalisation of function, even within a single modality

Answer 19

e.g. vision - colour and motion processed spatially separately. Perception of each of these can be selectively deleted - achromatopsia and akinetopsis.

Question 20

Neural synchrony

Answer 20

Neurons that represent the same object fire in a synchronous pattern of activity, whereas those that represent different objects do not

Question 21

Balint’s syndrome

Answer 21

Fail to integrate information as a coherent whole. Fail to see global arrangement of small details and make more conjunction errors, but not intrusion errors in tasks where there have to report the correct combination of colours and letters.
Shows evidence of the classic Stroop effect - on some level, binding is taking place, but lack consciousness access to it

Question 22

Goals of neuroscientific understanding of consciousness

Answer 22

Determine Neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) and create neural models of consciousness

Question 23

NCC

Answer 23

The minimal set of neuronal events sufficient for a conscious experience - detectable pattern of neural activity that indicates a person is having a conscious experiences.

Question 24

Binocular rivalry and bistable images

Answer 24

Valuable in identifying NCCs as they can induce a dramatic change in the contents of someones conscious experience without having to interfere with the stimulus or the person.

Question 25

Pascual-Leone and Walsh used TMS

Answer 25

A technique that disrupts neural activity to show that neural activity in the form of feedback from high-level visual areas to low-level visual areas is necessary in order to experience a perception of motion.

Question 26

Implicit memory

Answer 26

When past experience of something influences cognition and/or behaviour without any associated conscious experience

Question 27

Patient HM

Answer 27

Improve mirror-drawing skills without remembering taking part in sessions. Shows a clear dissociation between conscious recollection and procedural memory due to different parts of the brain governing these different abilities.

Question 28

Priming

Answer 28

When exposure to a stimulus influences responses to a subsequent stimulus with or without conscious experience. Word fragment completion for example, participants more likely to fill in blanks of words they have already been exposed to, even though they don't consciously remember the words.

Question 29

Jacoby-Whitehouse effect

Answer 29

Even words that aren't consciously experienced are nonetheless processed at a high level

Question 30

Continuous flash suppression (CFS)

Answer 30

An extension of binocular rivalry and involves presenting one stimulus to one eye and a complex, dynamic stimulus to the other. Complex stimulus suppresses the other stimulus. Brain can discriminate between stimuli that are faces and those that are not. Familiar faces break out of the flash suppression more quickly than unfamiliar faces, suggesting unconscious recognition of facial identity can occur

Question 31

Ego theories of self

Answer 31

There is a true unidentified and continuous self that is the subject of experiences and initiates decisions

Question 32

Bundle theories

Answer 32

The sense of self is in fact an illusion and a person is simply a constellation of separate experiences and states

Question 33

Proto self

Answer 33

Entirely unconscious and simply describes the neural patterns that map the state of an organism at any given time

Question 34

Core self

Answer 34

An event modifies the photo self and provides us with a sense of self from omomembt to moment

Question 35

Autobiographical self

Answer 35

Depends on memory and describes our representation of our extended self

Question 36

Corpus scallum severed patients

Answer 36

Split-brain - 2 functionally independent streams of consciousness Object in left visual field ensures it is processed in the right hemisphere, but not name as no language production in right, but can draw it in left hand More able to recognise a picture of themselves in the right visual fields and others in the left Left = self-related concepts Right = other-related concepts

Question 37

Agency

Answer 37

Important aspect of our self - ability to make a decision and act on it.

Question 38

Libet, EEF

Answer 38

Measured brain activity and found the conscious intention to make a decision is preceded by a neural signal by about 300ms

Question 39

Readiness potential

Answer 39

Develops from 500ms before an actions made, but decision to make that action only occurs 200ms before the action. Suggests our conscious sense of intentionality and free-will may in fact not be a casual factor in making decisions.

Question 40

Choice-blindness, Johannson et al

Answer 40

Participants have poor insight into their own decision and their motivations for them. Participants had to judge which of 2 faces they preferred and given a closer look at their choice and asked to justify and explain. Affected their susbsequenct decisions in the task.

Question 41

Hypnogogic stage of sleep

Answer 41

Stage leading into sleep - transition from wakefulness to first stages of sleep, hallucinatory experiences common

Question 42

Hypnopompic stage of sleep

Answer 42

Stage leading out of sleep - transition from sleep to full wakefulness - reduced cognitive functioning: sleep inertia

Question 43

Stage I

Answer 43

Theta waves

Question 44

Stage 2

Answer 44

Sleep spindles and K-complexes

Question 45

Stage 3/4

Answer 45

Delta waves (1 hour to deep sleep)

Question 46

REM sleep

Answer 46

Beta waves and sawtooth waves

Question 47

Sleep deprivation

Answer 47

Poor immune system and metabilism

Question 48

Stickgold et al 2000

Answer 48

Perceptual task sleep deprived do not show performance advantage on subsequent testing

Question 49

Consolidation of declarative (episodic) memory

Answer 49

Deep sleep

Question 50

Consolidation of non-declarative (procedural) memory

Answer 50

REM sleep

Question 51

Dreams

Answer 51

About recent experiences. Surreal = result of the brain trying to consolidate random neural activity in the absence of a constant stimulus - activation synthesis model

Question 52

Coma

Answer 52

No outward signs of being awake

Question 53

Persistant vegetative state (PVS)

Answer 53

Sleep wake cycle - wakefulness without awareness

Question 54

fMRI by Owen et al 2006 on PVS

Answer 54

PVS patients have high cognitive ability that may be take as evidence for awareness. When read ambiguous words, greater activity than non-ambiguous words, suggesting some semantic processing. Activity in posterior parietal complex when instructed to imagine walking through house Activity in motor area when instructed to imagine playing tennis Mental imagery But not present when the word walk or tennis said, so not a simple priming effect