PSY30400 Chapter Notes - Chapter 4: Temporal Lobe
Chapter 4: Attention
• Relation to Everyday Life:
o Our perceptual system only focuses on a small portion of the environment
▪ one of our most adaptive features because by only focusing on what is
important, we are making optimal use of our limited processing
• Some things in our environment are easier to see than others without close attention
o Experiment in which subjects looked at a cross and then saw the central
stimulus (an array of five letters)
o On some trials, all of the letters were the same, whereas on others, one of the
letters was different
o Letters were immediately followed by the peripheral stimulus (either a half
green disc or half red disc or a picture of a scene)
o Subject central task was to indicate if all the letters in the central stimulus were
the same
o Subject peripheral task was to indicate whether the scene contained an animal
or whether the colored discs were red-green or green-red
o Subject performance was 90% on peripheral picture task, but it was only 50% on
peripheral colored disc task
▪ Means that it is possible to take in information about some objects but
not others in scenes when attention is focused elsewhere
Section 4.6:
• Function of attention = help to create binding
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