PSY 1 Chapter Notes - Chapter 8-8.2: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Fidgeting, Spreading Activation
Document Summary
Attention is the tendency to respond to and to remember some stimuli more than others. When something suddenly grabs your attention, it is called a bottom-up process because the peripheral stimuli control it. You can deliberately to shift your attention in a top-down process. Preattentive process means that it stands out immediately, or differs drastically from items around it in size, shape, color, or movement. An attentive process is one that requires searching through the items in series. Much evidence indicates that attention is limited, as if various items were trying to get through a bottleneck that permits very little to pass through at a time. When two activities are highly compatible, it is easy to do both at once. Even when you are doing only one task, your attention level varies because your mind can wander. The tendency to read the words instead of saying the color of ink is known as the stroop effect.
