PSY 111 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Sensory Memory, Long-Term Memory, Episodic Memory
Document Summary
The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment. Voluntary attention: top down brain pathways, result of effort, builds self-regulation. Involuntary attention: bottom up brain pathways, a response to a stimulus, build a dependence on the stimulus. Processing capacity - how much info a person can handle at any given moment. Perceptual load - the difficulty of a given task. High load tasks use higher amount of processing capacity. Low load tasks use lower amount of processing capacity. Selective = attending to one thing while ignoring others. Sustained = attending to an activity for a long period of time. Alternating = switching attention btwn multiple tasks. Divided = paying attention to more than one time at a time. Practice enables people to simultaneously do two things that were difficult at first. More successful = as you practice something it becomes more low load and requires less attention and processing becomes automatic.
