PSYC 221 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Attentional Blink, Brain Damage, Hemispatial Neglect

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 221
• Professor: Thomas Spalek

Document Summary

We apply the term attention to a huge range of phenomena, from the basic notion of arousal and alertness all the way up to consciousness and awareness. Attention: the mental energy or resource necessary for completing mental processes, believed to be limited in quantity and under the control of some executive control mechanism: concentrating efort on a stimulus or mental event. Attention is a process within the cognitive system. Attention is focused on and driving the mental event of remembering, searching for information stored in your long term memory, attempting to comprehend. Attention: the limited mental energy or resource that powers the mental system. Mental commodity and mental resource necessary to run the cognitive system. Limit to how many things we can attend to and do all at once. Attention involves the basic capacity to respond to the environment. Alertness and arousal is a necessary state of the nervous system.