unconscious Flashcards
What is the cognitive unconscious?
like a behind the scenes activity- the broad set of mental activities that you’re no aware of but that make possible your ordinary interaction with the world.
Give an example of how an unconscious process can lead to a conscious product
generally aware of your mental products but unaware of your mental processes.
recalling going out for dinner you remember the product, you “remember” your weaving together elements that were actually recorded into memory at the time of the dinner, along with other elements such as inferences or assumptions.
so remembering the dinner is a mental product, and something your aware of, though your unaware of the processes that brought you the knowledge.
Describe the influence of unconscious attributions using Nisbett and Schacter’s (1966) experiment
the participants that were given the pill that was said to cause symptoms, hands trembling, butterfly’s stomach etc. stood 4 times more shock then the other group. though they said they only thought about the shock during the experiment their reasoning about the pill was entirely unconscious. so the placebo participants deteced their symptoms (that were normal for electic shock fear) and made an inference about the scourse of the symptoms attributing them to the pill not the shock.
Explain why people make mistaken introspections using after-the-fact reconstructions
the processes of thought are often unconscious, people seeking to introspect, therefore, have no way to inspect these processes and so if they’re going to explain their own behaviour, they need some other information. after-the-fact-reconstruction, why did i act that way ?they have no direct information and therefore draw on broad knowledge about why in general people might act this way. there people can make plausible inferences about why someone would act that way.
in most cases they are actuate, drawing on general knowledge is usually pretty accurate.
people think that they are remembering their mental processes to explain their own behaviour.
people are conscious of the product and not the process that lead them to the conclusion, therefore they continue to believe (flalsely) that the conclusion rests on an introspection when it actually rests on after-the-fact-reconstruction.
describe how our conscious thinking may be guided by our unconscious (e.g., problem solving set, decision frame)
the “fringe” of your conscious thought, thoughts are influences by an unseen hand.
un un-noticed framework can guide your deliberate, conscious thinking- about problem, decisions and more.
previous research; patients are influenced by by memories they dont know they have and so, apparently some aspects of remembering and some influences of experience an go forward even in the absence of a conscious memory.
How do patients with amnesia and blindsight provide evidence for unconscious processes?
amnesia patients, on implicts test the patients seem quiet normal they seem to remember if probes behaviour indirectly, they are influenced by memories they dont consciously know they have.
blind sight, they are blind for all practical purposes, but when asked about their physical environment they can respond pretty acuately. they say they cannot see the stimuli and offer no explination to why their guesses are so accurate. Apparently these patients are not aware of seeing but even so in some ways they can see.
therefore their is a difference between perception and conscious perception. it is possible to perceive in the absence on consciousness.
Describe some of the limits of unconscious performance
unconsious judgements and inferences are well tuned and guided by cues on the situation, or by prior habit.
you rely on inferences to fill gaps in your memory, but they can lead to errors, some cases large consequential errors. just as you cannot choose to avoid a perceptual illusion you cannot choose to avoid memory error and you cannot turn off you inferences even when you want to.
action slips; eg intending to turn left but usually go right and because not thinking about it you do what you normally do and go right. not thinking about it and therefore went back to old pattern. influenced by situation and previous habits.
What are the four things needed for executive control?
Initiate actions; remember to turn left for friends house
represent goals and plans;
i am going to friends house
whats going on?;
what bits of information is coming in. all the stuff see on the road.
How smoothly is everything running?:
you can override unconsious processes; a goal of getting to friends place therefore know to turn right instead of usual left.
What are metacognition and metamemory?
metacognition=our ability to monitor and control our own mental processes.
metamemory= our knowledge about, awareness of, and control over our own memories.
thinking about studying for exam you have knowledge about what is is on, awareness of what is needed to be learn and control over how much you do to learn it.
use the 4 exceptive function.
use metamemory to judge whether we have learnt enough information for the exam.
Define the term “qualia” and give an example
Qualia- describe what is is like to each a chocolate bar? this is describing qualia, the subject of expereinces we have, its our consiousness of what it feels like to do curtain things. it is subjective as it varies from person to person. i expereince chocolate differently to another. is difficult to describe, exactly what our subjective experience of chocolate bar is like. cannot convey the actual experience.
How does processing fluency influence subjective experiences?
the famous name study.
mental processing is sometimes more fluent and sometimes less so and people seem sensitive to this degree of fluency. they dont detect fluency as fluency. for example they dont have the expereince of “Boy that obect sure was easy to perceive” instead people have a broad sense of why on this occasion the processing was special. so they might decide the input is one they have recently met or name belongs to someone famous (sense of familiarity.
same with memory; that memory came to mind easily; i guess it must be a strong memory and therefore an accurate one, so i can be confident that memory is right.
this can often be sensible but it can be misleading. eg if you receive a memory over and over the retrieval becomes more fluent because of this “practice” quite independently of how firmly established the memory was at the start, repeated retrieval increases memory confidence, whether the memory is accurate or not.
What role does consciousness play in promoting spontaneous and intentional behaviour?
perceptual information has to be conscious before a person puts that information to use?
in many situations, you need to take action based on remembered or percieved information. in some settings the action is overt (walking across the room or making verbal response) at other times the action is mental (reaching a decision or drawing a conclusion) in all cases it seems not enough to have acess to the information, you seem to need some justification, some reason to take the information seriously.
578 text book go over if need
but- the confluence of inputs provided by the neuronal workspace helps provide the richness and plausibly the conscious experience itself, that you use in deciding whether you ideas and perceptions and memories are “false creations” or instead are true to reality, it is only one you decide they are real that you use them as a basis for actions
