PSYCH 1X03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Colin Cherry, Emergency Vehicle, Dazed
Document Summary
Refers to our conscious ability to attend to the information that is relevant to our goals. Selection: attending to something causes the object of attention to be selected apart form the rest of the unattended objects. Some sensations will fade into the background noise. Some stimuli will trigger your attention in an automatic fashion. When noise overwhelms the signal, you get distracted. Automatic: triggered involuntarily by external events, trigger the capture of attention, fast, efficient and obligatory manner, linked with discussion of learning: Salient: some cues seem more noticeable and lead to stronger and quicker association when paired with events. Ex: loud sounds and flashing lights of emergency vehicle learned motor skills: with practice, all tasks can be done in the same sequence without much effort. Ex: driving on auto pilot: events demanding automatic attentional processing cause your attention to quickly dart to the given situation.
