PSY 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Caffeine, Parasomnia, Torpor
5 Jun 2018
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Lecture 6 October 25, 2017
How can we study consciousness?
• What is consciousness?
o The sujetie eperiee of iteral ad eteral eets.
• Psychology essentially began as the study of conscious experience, via
introspection.
• Although introspection was not used during the era of behaviourism, the study
of osiousess retured as part of the ogitie reolutio.
Setting priorities for mental functioning: Attention
(1) Explain how attention relates to consciousness and how experiments on dichotic
listening can be used to study attention.
(2) Descrie the oept of autoatiit and give examples of it.
(3) Outline research on the influence of subliminal messages.
Attetio as a spotlight.
• Attention – the iteral proesses people use to set priorities for their etal
futios.
• The link between consciousness and attention:
o Because we have a limited capacity to process information, we cannot be
consciously aware of everything at once.
o Therefore, to a large extent, the contents of our conscious experiences
are the things to which we pay attention.
Experiments on attention: Dichotic listening.
• A person is presented with two streams of auditory information and asked to
shado (i.e., to repeat back) one of them.
• These studies attempt to investigate how much information people can pay
attention to at once (how much we can hold in conscious awareness), as well as
what happens to material that we cannot pay attention to.
• It is not easy to pay attention to two things at once. Therefore, generally, people
cannot recall much, if anything, from the unshadowed message.
What kinds of information ARE gathered from the unshadowed message?
Changes in pitch are detected, because we probably ought to pay attention to them. If
you were in a helicopter, you would want to start paying attention if the pitch of the
blades suddenly decreased! In general (as we shall see in the next class on learning) our
attention is drawn to sounds that change.
• Treisman (1960) – the unshadowed message is processed for meaning to
some extent.
Processing without attention: Automaticity.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Lecture 6 October 25, 2017
• Studies on dichotic listening demonstrate that our brains can perform some
operations (such as monitoring speech) without our conscious awareness.
• Our brains are actually constantly performing tasks without bringing them to
our attention, including some things that we can take conscious control of,
such as breathing.
• In fact, many complex tasks can involve surprisingly little conscious
awareness.
Automaticity.
• Many tasks require much conscious effort to learn at first, but require little
thought ad eoe relatiel autoati ith pratie.
• A task can be said to be performed relatively automatically when it allows you
eough ogitie resoures to egage i aother task siultaeousl.
• When the performance of one task does not interfere with the performance of
another task.
Limitations to automaticity.
• If tasks require similar resources, it will be harder to do both at once, even if one
or both tasks by themselves are normally quite automatic.
• For instance, even though reading and listening are quite automatic (for mature
speakers), it is hard to read and listen to speech at the same time, because they
both use the parts of your brain devoted to language.
• It may be easier to read and listen to music.
• Some tasks can become so autoati that e at help doig the, ee he
ere ot supposed to!
Disorders of attention
• If attention is the gateway to consciousness, then malfunctions in attention
should cause changes in consciousness.
• One example of this is visual neglect.
• A patient with visual neglect will fail to pay attention to one half of the visual
field. This is usually caused by damage to the right parietal lobe.
• Is the patient blind in one hemi-field, or just failing to pay attention to one hemi-
field?
Subliminal perception.
• The cocktail party phenomenon and visual neglect demonstrate that some
unconscious (or subconscious) processing can take place. Is it possible that we
are all processing and being influenced by subconscious or subliminal
information?
• In the dichotic listening studies, remember that, although meaning is processed
to some extent, it is quickly forgotten if not brought to consciousness.
• However, could such information be affecting us anyway?
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
It is not easy to pay attention to two things at once. Therefore, generally, people cannot recall much, if anything, from the unshadowed message. Changes in pitch are detected, because we probably ought to pay attention to them. If you were in a helicopter, you would want to start paying attention if the pitch of the blades suddenly decreased! In general (as we shall see in the next class on learning) our attention is drawn to sounds that change: treisman (1960) the unshadowed message is processed for meaning to some extent. In fact, many complex tasks can involve surprisingly little conscious awareness. It may be easier to read and listen to music: some tasks can become so auto(cid:373)ati(cid:272) that (cid:449)e (cid:272)a(cid:374)(cid:859)t help doi(cid:374)g the(cid:373), e(cid:448)e(cid:374) (cid:449)he(cid:374) (cid:449)e(cid:859)re (cid:374)ot supposed to! This is usually caused by damage to the right parietal lobe. Subliminal perception: the cocktail party phenomenon and visual neglect demonstrate that some unconscious (or subconscious) processing can take place.
