PSYCH 1F03 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Dazed, Sensory System, Stroop Effect
Document Summary
Difficult to define with one all-encompassing definition. We can select what we attend to. We generally attend to that which is relevant to our goals. Our environment present our sensory system with an overwhelming amount of information. Sometimes we process irrelevant information and get distracted. Operate slowly e. g. driving a car, choose to pay attention to many aspects of the environment. Allow us to accomplish a wide variety of goals. Salient information pops out and automatically captures attention. After enough practice, skills such as driving a car or riding a bike become turn into automatic processes. Attention operates like a spotlight, illuminating (amplifying the processing of) a region of (perceptual) space. The most significant filter models of attention have been proposed by broadbent and later by triesman. Filter deflecting unwanted sensory information from reaching consciousness. Both models assume that cognitive processing operates in a simple feed-forward manner.