PSYCH 1X03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Insomnia, Scale-Invariant Feature Transform, Visual Search
9 May 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Attention allows us to focus our processing resources to navigate through information and distraction. It is the conscious ability to attend to information that is relevant to out goal selectively control where you focus your attention: carry a conversation, cross a busy street, learn new things. Selection: attending to something causes the object of attention to be selected apart from the rest of the unattended objects. Some stimuli in the environment, such as a flash of light, catches your attention in an automatic fashion no control. Distraction: when irrelevant information in the environment overwhelm the relevant signals: driving through an intersection becomes more difficult when talking on the phone. Automatic process (type 2): doing a task so often that you can perform it on auto-pilot : driving a car wanting to go to one destination but end up somewhere else, tying a shoe lace, riding a bike. Attention spotlight: only focuses on part of the environment at a time.
