CAS PS 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Sensory Memory, Briey, Memory Span

• School: Boston University
• Department: Psychological & Brain Sciences
• Course: CAS PS 101
• Professor: Robert Reinhart

Document Summary

We are bombarded with info from our environment and we can only focus on certain things and thanks to our attention we can ignore distractors (restrict our processes on some objects on the expense of others). Because we cannot simultaneously process everything in the vast array of visual information available (in environment), often we are blind to large changes in our environments. Change blindness: a failure to notice large changes in one"s environment. Change blindness illustrates that our perception can be inaccurate. Attention: the granting of priority of processing to a particular location, item, or thought (at the expense of another processing). Filter theory maintains that attention is selective, boosting relevant information, and rejecting irrelevant information. Because attention is limited, it is hard to perform two tasks at the same time, especially if the two tasks rely on the same sensory or mental mechanisms.