PSYC 1010 Chapter Notes -Encoding Specificity Principle, Daniel Schacter, Forgetting Curve

• School: York University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 1010
• Professor: Rebecca Jubis

Document Summary

The nature of consciousness: consciousness is the awareness of internal and external stimuli. As you read this sentence, it becomes part of your consciousness: your consciousness is continuously changing, a fact that led william james (1902) to describe this continuous flow as the stream of consciousness. Conscious thought is thought with attention; unconscious thought is thought without attention (or with attention directed elsewhere) . Conscious thought is constrained by capacity limitations such that you often consider only a small subset of all the relevant information when making a decision or evaluation. Ultimately, the eeg summarizes the rhythm of cortical activity in the brain in terms of line tracings called brain waves. These brain-wave tracings vary in amplitude (height) and frequency (cycles per second, abbreviated cps). Human brain-wave activity is usually divided into four principal bands, based on the frequency of the brain waves. These bands, named after letters in the greek alphabet, are: