PSY100H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Cocktail Party, Inattentional Blindness, Just For Laughs
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PSY100H1 Full Course Notes
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Attention is the process that, at a given moment, enhances some information and inhibits other information. The enhancement allows us to select some information for further processing, and the inhibition allows us to set some information aside. We all intuitively understand that it means to "pay attention" - it is to focus on something, and ignore distractions. But attention has been notoriously tricky to define. It has been used synonymously with terms such as arousal, control, and consciousness. Selective attention refers to the skill through which one focuses on one input or one task while ignoring other stimuli. Once you see the face in the coffee beans, you can never not see that face. The passes example is the visual version of the audio task. Sometimes effects of attention are so strong that we fail to see stimuli that are directly in front of our eyes.
