cog psych

  1. What is attention?
    the active cognitive processing of a limited amount of information from the vast amount of information available through the senses, in memory, and through cognitives process; focus on a small subset of available stimuli
  2. What is consciousness?
    Includes both the feeling of awareness and the content of awareness
  3. What is Preconsciousness processing?
    information that is available for cognitive processing but that currently lies outside conscious awareness exists at the preconscious level of awareness. Preconscious information includes stores memories that we are not using at a given time but that we could summon when needed.
  4. Priming
    The facilitation of one's ability to utilize missing information; occurs when recognition of certain stimuli is affected by prior presentation of the same or similar stimuli
  5. Input Attention: Alertness or arousal
    a basic capacity to respond to the environment
  6. Input Attention: Vigilance/Sustained attention
    maintenance of attention for infrequent events over long periods of time
  7. Input Attention: Explicit Processing
    Conscious processing- conscious awareness that a task is being preformed, and usually conscious awareness of the outcome of performance
  8. Input Attention: Implicit Processing
    Processing with no necessary involvement of conscious awareness
  9. Bonebakker, Jelic, Passchier & Bonke (1996) - Word Stem Completion Task
    Patients going into surgery were given a list of words then during surgery they were given a list of words. BOARD LIGHT -- they were given BO_ _ _ LI _ _ _. Patients undergoing surgery would be able to fill out the blank letters.
  10. Orientating Reflex Response
    A reflex redirection of attention that orients you toward the unexpected stimulus
  11. Orientating Reflex Response: Attention Capture
    the spontaneous redirection of attention to stimuli in the world based on physical characteristics. Triggers: stimuli important to the organism, novel stimuli. Habituation: gradual reduction of the orientating response baseline
  12. Spotlight Attention and Search
    The mental attention focusing mechanism that prepares.. includes posner's spacial cueing task
  13. Controlled Attention
    Deliberate, voluntary allocation of mental effort or concentration
  14. Selective Attention
    The Ability to attend to one source of information while ignoring other on-going stimuli around us
  15. Filtering/Selecting
    The mental process of eliminating distractions/unwanted messages
  16. Overload
    giving the system more than it can handle and test the accuracy for a portion of information
  17. What is the orientating reflex and why is it important?
    It is important because it allows on organism to direct their attention to different situations in their environment.
  18. Can the orientating reflex hibernate?
    yes
  19. Explicit Processing
    Conscious processing - conscious awareness that a task is being preformed, and usually conscious awareness of the outcome of performance
  20. Implicit Processing
    processing with no necessary involvement of conscious awareness
  21. Posner's Spatial cuing task
    type of perceptual task requiring attention that typically involves an active scan of the visual environment for a particular object or feature (the target) among other objects or features (the distractors)
  22. Posner's Spatial Cuing Task - Facilitation
    Faster than baseline response resulting from the useful advance information
  23. Posner's Spatial Cuing Task - Cost
    A response slower than baseline because of the misleading cue
  24. Visual Search Task - Feature Search
    search for the presence of specified features
  25. Visual Search Task - Conjunction Search
    search for the combination of two features
  26. Visual Search Task - Inhibition of Return
    Recently checked locations are mentally marked by attention as places that the search process would not return to
  27. Shadowing Experiements
    Participants must repeat back a message that is played through headphones in one ear and ignore the other message
  28. Shadowing Experiments - Attentional selection
    • occurs after the initial processing of the message is done
    • Right Ear: While Bill was walking through the forest/ A Bank can lend you the money
    • Left Ear: If you want to buy a car/ A tree fell
  29. Late Selection Theory - Attenuation
    reduced in informational importance to ongoing processing
  30. Late Selection Theory - Mind Wandering
    situation in which a person's attention and thoughts wander from the current task to some other inappropriate line of thought
  31. Early Selection Theory
    attention shuts down or attenuates processing in the unattended ear before the mind can analyze its semantic content
  32. Inhibition
    actively suppress mental representation of salient but irrevelent information so that it's activation level is reduced, perhaps resting below baseline level.
  33. Negative Priming
    slower to respond to the target trials when they were preceded by irreverent distractor primes compared to control trials where the ignored object on the prime trial was an unrelated item
  34. Automatic Processing
    is done with little or no necessary involvement of a conscious
  35. Conscious Processing
    occurs with attention, open to awareness, tends to be slower
  36. Disadvantages to automaticity
    action slips - unintended, often automatic, actions that are inappropriate for the current situation
  37. hemineglect
    disruption/decreased ability to attend to something in the (often) left field or vision
  38. memory
    the means by which we retain and draw on our past experiences to use this information in the present
  39. Early research on the short term memory
    intelligence tests. there is was found that people typically have a limit to how much they can remember and it is usually about 7(+-2)
  40. Chunking/Recording
    grouping items together, than remembering the newly formed groups
  41. Brown-Peterson Task
    Pp were given 3 letters followed by a 3 digit number. They were asked to count backwards by 3. after counting they were acked to recall the letters. it was said that the letters were forgotten due to decay over time. later researchers questioned the assumption that backward counting would not interfere with the task of keeping the letters in memory
  42. how did the prob digit task provide clearer evidence for interference
    16 digits were presented at a rate of either 1 or 4 per second. given 7 4 6 and 9 with a probe of 4, the person must recall the 6. if forgetting is due to decay the 2 groups should differ since so much time elapsd in the 16 second condition. agrued that it is not the passage of time but the interveneing items.
  43. proactive interference
    when older material interferes forward in time with your recollection of the current stimulus.
  44. release
    when the decline in performance caused by PI is reversed because of a switch in the to be remembered stimuli
  45. retro active interference
    when newer material interferes backward in time with your recollection of older items
  46. serial position curve
    graph of items by item accuracy on a recall task
  47. serial position
    refers to the original position an item had in the list it was studied
  48. working memory - central executive
    in charge of planning future actions, initiating retrieval and decision processes as necessary and integrating information coming into the system
  49. working memory - phonological loop
    speech and sound related component responsible for rehearsal of verbal information
  50. phonological loop - phonological store
    passive store components
  51. phonological loop - articulary loop
    involved in active refreshing of information in the phonological stage
  52. working memory - visual spatial sketch pad
    system specialized for visual and spatial information holding or maintaining that information in a short duration
  53. working memory - episodic buffer
    the portion of working memory where info from different modalities and sources are bound together to form new episodic memories
  54. two ways working memory can be assesed
    • dual task methodology
    • working memory span
  55. dual task methodology
    generally have a primary task that you are most interested in and a secondary task that is performed simultaneously (both tasks must be related to WM)
  56. working memory span
    individual differences approach (high and low span)
Author
evancour
ID
83419
Card Set
cog psych
Description
cog psych test 2
Updated