PSY100H1 Lecture Notes - Visual Search, Spatial Memory, Sketchpad

• School: UTSG
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY100H1
• Professor: Ashley Waggoner Denton

Document Summary

In order for something to potentially be remembered, it must be attended to in the first place. Attention is selective -- this is necessary because attention is limited. Change blindness is the common failure for people to notice large changes in their environment. An example of this is even though a person looks at his/her watch multiple times in a day; he/she would not be able to describe what the face looks like. Selective attention can be displayed through visual search tasks: Parallel processing: involves searching for on feature; fast and automatic: the reaction time is not affected, regardless of how many distracters there are. Serial processing: involves searching for two or more features; slow and effortful due to examining targets one by one: the reaction time is altered by the processing time. Encoding phase: information us acquired and processed into a neural code that the brain can use.