PSYC 330 Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Zoom Lens, Lucretius, Lesion

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 330
• Professor: Richard Wright

Document Summary

Attention: mentally focusing or concentrating on a stimulus or event in order to process it as efficiently as possible (especially sensory or mental events) Human information processing capacity is limited due to brain(cid:3244)s complexity cannot. Everybody knows what attention is" encode all of the inputs at the same time selectively attending (like a filter) Historical examination of the study of attention ranging from the ideas of the ancient. Greek philosophers (aristotle, lucretius) and 19th century intro-spectionists. Concluded that attention has been defined in a variety of ways, and contemporary ideas about attention root from 100 years ago: spearman (1937) Study of attention stopped after 1910: behaviorist era dominate psychology, they believed that internal processes aren"t associated with external behaviors. Metaphors- a filter, a resource, a skill, a spotlight, a zoom lens, glue. Umbrella": a number of different operations (many forms: seeing and selective attention.