PSYC 330 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Reticular Formation, Habituation, Brainstem
4 Jun 2016
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
We can shift our attention slightly to the side of where our eyes are pointing: known as using peripheral vision or looking out of the corner of the eye, common part of introspective psychology. Not much interest in studying attention because behaviorism dominated psychology until the 1960s: however there was interesting in studying orienting response that animals make toward stimuli that capture their attention. Reflects a gradual decrease in the extent to which a brainstem called the reticular activating system (ras) causes cortical arousal: moruzzi and magoun discovered that electrical stimulation of the ras of cats produce arousal and orienting response. For that reason, many theorist in the mid 20th century believed that the ras was the brain area that controlled attentional processing. The term orienting has been refined to distinguish between: shifts of attention that occur in synchrony with changes in body position, shifts of attention that occurs independently of body position.
