PSYC 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter Week 7: Operational Definition, Materialism, Electroencephalography

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jill L Atkinson

Document Summary

Consciousness is the awareness of subjective experience; (cid:271)ei(cid:374)g a(cid:271)le to report o(cid:374)e"s o(cid:449)(cid:374) (cid:373)e(cid:374)tal state. Operational definition: to ask scientific questions about consciousness, it is important to have an operational definition of consciousness. Working memory -- a person is conscious when he or she is able to report his/her own mental state. Using this operational definition, we can then establish measures or indicators of consciousness. Common measures of consciousness include the ability to remember a stimulus long enough to report on it, giving a simple verbal report (e. g. , saying that you are aware of a stimulus). This working definition emphasizes the ability to remember and report what a person sees and observes. We can think of working memory as the site of consciousness. We are conscious if we can report our mental states, and the contents of working memory at any given time correspond to the contents of consciousness.