PSYCH101 Chapter Notes -Heart Rate, Hallucination, Change Blindness

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Jennifer Tomaszczyk

Document Summary

Consciousness: awareness of ourselves and our environment. Cognitive neuroscience: study of brain activity linked to mental processes. 23 year old unconscious women had brain activity in the areas linked to arm and leg movement when asked to imagine playing tennis. Conscious experience produced by synchronized activity across the brain. If stimulus activates enough brain wide coordinated neural activity, a threshold for consciousness is crossed. Weaker stimulus only engages one part of the brain for a brief moment, not even to cross the threshold for conscious activity. Dual processing: information is simultaneously processed on both a conscious and unconscious track. When we see a bird flying, we are consciously aware of our cognitive processing, that we have recognized a humming bird. We are not, however, consciously aware of the cognitive sub processing that occurred, which allowed us to determine its color, depth, size all at the same time too. Blindsight: can respond to a visual stimulus without consciously experiencing it.