Psychology 1000 Chapter Notes - Chapter 6: Fusiform Face Area, Visual Agnosia, Visual Cortex
Psychology Chapter 6
Consciousness is
- Subjective and private (nobody can know what reality is like for you and vice versa)
- Dynamic and ever changing (a stream of mental activity)
- Self-reflective and central to our sense of self (mind is aware of its own consciousness)
- Consciousness is very connected to selective attention (pays attention to some stimuli, ignores
other parts)
Measuring states of consciousness
- Most common way is self-reporting → people describe their inner experiences
- Physiological measures → ojetie ethod that liks od ad id ut does’t tell hat it
going on subjectively
- Behavioral measures → performances on special tasks
o Rouge test: a red dot was put on chimps faces and they were given a mirror- began to
touch the dot, showing they had self-awareness
Psychodynamic perspective: levels of consciousness
- Sigmund Freud proposed that the mind had 3 levels of consciousness
- Conscious mind had thought, perceptions, and mental events we are aware of
- Preconscious events are outside current awareness but can easily be recalled
- Uosious eets a’t e rought ito osiousess
o Includes unacceptable urges and sexual desires that should not be in conscious mind
because it would arouse anxiety, guilt, negative emotions
- Behaviorists criticized Freud’s odel → wanted to explain behaviors without using conscious
mental processes, let alone unconscious ones
- Geerall, researh supports Freud’s idea of oosious processes influencing behavior
Cognitive perspective: levels of consciousness
- Reject the notion of an unconscious mind driven by urges and repression
- View conscious and unconscious mind as complementary forms of information processing
- Cognitive unconscious is a support that works with conscious
Controlled vs automatic processing
- Controlled processing
o Voluntary use of attention and conscious effort
o For learning new tasks
o More flexible and open to change
- Automatic processing
o Can be done with little/no conscious effort
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o With practice, performance becomes more automatic
o Can reduce our chances of finding new ways to approach problems
o Experiments suggest too much self-focused thinking can hurt task performance
- Divided attention
o Automatic processing also manages divided attention → perform more than one activity
at the same time
o Has its limits- is difficult when both tasks need same mental resources
o Distracted driving: collision rates increased
Detecting awareness
- Brain injury can render a person immobile and unresponsive but conscious and trapped in their
head
- Vegetative state: person is when a person appears to be awake but shows no sign of awareness
- Adrian Owen: worked with people in vegetative states to see if they were active
o Showed woman pictures of familiar faces and saw if her fusiform face area in temporal
cortex was activated using PET → it was
o Worked with patient 23: told him to imagine playing tennis in response to questions for
yes and imagine moving around his house for no, then put him into a fmri and measured
brain activity
o Owen worked with healthy volunteers and found that if patients concentrated on yes or
no the researchers could predict the right answer 90% of the time
Emotional unconscious
- Modern psychodynamic views incorporate info processing concepts from cognitive, but also
emphasize that emotional and motivational behavior operate unconsciously and affect behavior
- Chartrand and Bargh subliminally presented students with negative and positive words and had
them rate their mood: found that the students who experienced the most negative words had
the saddest mood
Windows to the brain
- Visual agnosia (D.F)
o D.F was exposed to CO and had brain damage → she ould’t reogize faes of frieds
and relatives
o Could’t idetif ojets sight Meli Goodale UWO sietist
o She could recognize peoples voices and recognize objects by touch but not sight
o She can reach for an object correctly even though she does not know what she’s
reaching for
o Her primary visual cortex was undamaged → showed there are multiple brain pathways
for visual info processing
▪ One path carries info to support the unconscious guidance of movements
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▪ Another path carries info to support brain areas involved in perception,
memory, emotion etc
o Patiets ith isual agosia a see ad are aare of it ut a’t idetif ojets
sight
- Blindsight
o Patients with it will say they cannot see but will respond to visual stimuli
o Blindsight patient may be blind in right half of the visual field, and when stimuli is
flashed there will say they did not see anything but their guesses are very accurate
Consciousness and modular mind
- No single place in the brain giving rise to consciousness
- Scientists view the mind as a collection of mostly separate but interacting information
processing modules
- Consciousness is a global workspace representing unified activity of many modules in different
areas of the brain
- Experience consciousness as unitary, not patchwork (like choir is made of different groups but
sings together)
Circadian Rhythms
- Biological cycles of hormones, temperature and bodily functions
- Regulated by suprahiasati ulei i the hpothalaus the rai’s lok
- Martin Ralph transplanted healthy SCN into hypothalamus of animals whose SCN had been
destroyed, and they regained a genetically programmed cycle of inactivity and activity
- Melatonin: secreted by pineal gland, has relaxing effect on body
o During day SCN is active and reduces melatonin
o During night SCN neurons are inactive and promote melatonin, relaxation and
sleepiness
o Biological clock is reset after sleeping
- Free running circadian rhythm (24.2-24.8 hours): if you lived in caves, were blind, doing a study
- If people on the free running cycle try to force their cycle by going to bed at certain times they
can face insomnia, fatigue and sleep problems
- Morning people → go to bed and rise earlier, body temperature, blood pressure and alertness
peak earlier
- Morning people are more common in older people, while night owls are mostly young people
- Ciradia rhths do’t regulate sleep regularl, ut derease ighttie alertness
Environmental disruptions of circadian rhythms
- Seasonal affective disorder: tendency to feel psychologically depressed during certain months of
the year
o Circadian rhythms of SAD people may be sensitive to light
o Treating it using phototherapy (timed exposure to artificial light)
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Document Summary
Subjective and private (nobody can know what reality is like for you and vice versa) Dynamic and ever changing (a stream of mental activity) Self-reflective and central to our sense of self (mind is aware of its own consciousness) Consciousness is very connected to selective attention (pays attention to some stimuli, ignores other parts) Most common way is self-reporting people describe their inner experiences. Physiological measures o(cid:271)je(cid:272)ti(cid:448)e (cid:373)ethod that li(cid:374)ks (cid:271)od(cid:455) a(cid:374)d (cid:373)i(cid:374)d (cid:271)ut does(cid:374)"t tell (cid:449)hat it going on subjectively. Behavioral measures performances on special tasks: rouge test: a red dot was put on chimps faces and they were given a mirror- began to touch the dot, showing they had self-awareness. Sigmund freud proposed that the mind had 3 levels of consciousness. Conscious mind had thought, perceptions, and mental events we are aware of. Preconscious events are outside current awareness but can easily be recalled. U(cid:374)(cid:272)o(cid:374)s(cid:272)ious e(cid:448)e(cid:374)ts (cid:272)a(cid:374)"t (cid:271)e (cid:271)rought i(cid:374)to (cid:272)o(cid:374)s(cid:272)ious(cid:374)ess.
