PSYC1020 Lecture 5: Attention, Learning and Consciousness
Lecture 5 - Attention, Learning and Consciousness
Review
● Discussed Erikson’s theory of development
○ Development is based on the resolution of a series of crises
○ Strengths of the theory: full lifespan account of development, insight about
central crises facing individuals in development, and brought the issues of
meaning and wisdom into the Psychology of Development
○ Weaknesses of the theory: difficult to directly test the theory, not clear if it
makes falsifiable predictions, and needs better integration with theories and
evidence about cognitive development
● Discussed Bowlby and Ainsworth’s theory based on attachment
○ Examine why attachment is so important based on evolutionary psychology
○ We examine how Ainsworth invented the Strange Situation experimental design
in order to test for different styles of attachment
○ We then saw that there is a strong relationship between childhood attachment
and adult attachment, especially romantic attachment
● We looked at Siegel’s work and Hutto’s work on why narrative predicts attachment
because of narrative’s role in mindsight development
● We then moved on to talk about sensation and perception where sensation is the
detection and transduction of features in the environment into the electro-chemical
language of the neuron
○ When this transduced information is in communication with stored information
within the brain then we have the beginning of perception
● We focused on sight
○ One central problem is the problem of how the proximal stimulus is converted
into the distal stimulus
○ We discussed stored knowledge given to you by evolution for helping to convert
the proximal stimulus into the distal stimulus – Gestalt principles
○ Sometimes these principles go wrong and cause illusions
○ Illusions – failed predictions by your brain – point to top-down effects in
perception
○ Top-down processing starts in the brain and uses stored information to try to
organize and interpret information coming in from the world in order to make
adaptive predictions about the world and produce a distal stimulus
○ Bottom-up processing starts in the world and contains the raw information
within the proximal stimulus
○ We talked about the two types of transducers in the retina – rods and cones
● We talked about the Grand Illusion of Consciousness
● We then focused on colour perception and talked about two theories of colour
perception: the trichromatic theory and the opponent processing theory
○ Both are needed in order to explain colour vision
● We then investigated depth perception
○ There are two types of cues for depth perception
○ Monocular or pictorial cues
○ Binocular cues
● We then moved on to attention and consciousness
○ Two problems – filling in because of the poor quality of information in the
proximal stimulus, and way too much information in the environment
○ Technical sense of information not the everyday sense of the word
○ Out of all the information in the room attention has to select which information
to which it will pay attention – pay because you have to take the chance of
where to commit your limited time and resources
○ But once that information is selected it is very poor in quality and it must be
filled in so that we have a more comprehensive picture of the world
○ How you pay attention addresses these problems of selection and completion
● The very first experimental theory of attention was directed at the selection problem
○ Broadbent argued that attention was the cognitive process that performed this
selection process
○ For Broadbent attention acts like a filter that screens out irrelevant information
so that the organism can devoted its limited processing resources to what is
relevant to it
○ Selective attention is attending to relevant information and ignoring irrelevant
information
● Dichotic listening task (Broadbent):
○ Participants are exposed to two verbal messages simultaneously and are
required to answer questions posed in only one of the messages
○ Participants are good at answering the question if they know which of two voices
contain the question, but very poor when they do not know
● Broadbent worked with Colin Cherry (1953)
○ Cherry focused on using dichotic listening tasks for filtering tasks
○ Two streams of verbal input, one to each ear, and participants have to “shadow,”
i.e., verbally repeat one of the streams
○ Participants could answer questions about the shadowed message but not the
unattended stream
○ This selective listening ability is called the cocktail party phenomenon
○ The cocktail party phenomenon
○ ability to attend to one conversation when many other conversations are going
on around you
○ The results of these shadowing experiments were interpreted to show that
people filter out information that they don’t want to attend to
Attention
● Neville Moray (1959) built on Cherry’s work (dichotic listening task) and found that
○ Small number of words repeated multiple times were not reported by
participants
Document Summary
Development is based on the resolution of a series of crises. Strengths of the theory: full lifespan account of development, insight about central crises facing individuals in development, and brought the issues of meaning and wisdom into the psychology of development. Weaknesses of the theory: difficult to directly test the theory, not clear if it makes falsifiable predictions, and needs better integration with theories and evidence about cognitive development. Dis(cid:272)ussed bo(cid:449)l(cid:271)(cid:455) a(cid:374)d ai(cid:374)s(cid:449)o(cid:396)th(cid:859)s theo(cid:396)(cid:455) (cid:271)ased o(cid:374) atta(cid:272)h(cid:373)e(cid:374)t. Examine why attachment is so important based on evolutionary psychology. We examine how ainsworth invented the strange situation experimental design in order to test for different styles of attachment. We then saw that there is a strong relationship between childhood attachment and adult attachment, especially romantic attachment. We looked at iegel(cid:859)s (cid:449)o(cid:396)k a(cid:374)d hutto(cid:859)s (cid:449)o(cid:396)k o(cid:374) (cid:449)h(cid:455) (cid:374)a(cid:396)(cid:396)ati(cid:448)e p(cid:396)edi(cid:272)ts atta(cid:272)h(cid:373)e(cid:374)t (cid:271)e(cid:272)ause of (cid:374)a(cid:396)(cid:396)ati(cid:448)e(cid:859)s (cid:396)ole i(cid:374) (cid:373)i(cid:374)dsight de(cid:448)elop(cid:373)e(cid:374)t.
