PSYC 2650 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Visual Cortex, Automaticity, Prefrontal Cortex

• School: University of Guelph
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 2650
• Professor: Naseem Al Aidroos

Document Summary

The skill through which a person focuses on one input or one task while ignoring other stimuli that are also on the scene. Participants wore headphones and heard one input from the left ear and a different input for the right ear. Participants were instructed to pay attention to one input (attended channel) and ignore the message in the other ear (unattended channel) To make sure they were listening, investigators gave them a task called shadowing: the participants were required to repeat back what they heard, word for word, echoing their attended channel. We can observe a similar pattern with visual inputs too (invisible gorilla video) However, if things said in the unattended channel are something close to you, such as your name, favourite song, etc. , you are more likely to hear and pay attention to it. We somehow block processing of the inputs we are not interested in.