L33 Psych 360 Lecture Notes - Lecture 4: Attentional Blink, Inattentional Blindness, Lisa Lopes
Document Summary
Most of the visual scenes we"re presented with have a lot going on; we simply can"t process/attend to all of it. If you attend to some things, you"re devoting less energy of attention to other things. Attention refers to the choices we make about which parts of the world to process more fully and which parts to process less fully. Mechanisms involved in those choices have been the subject of some of the most intensive research over the past 30 years -- kind of mysterious. Difficult to observe what a person is actually paying attention to. Sometimes you know because of where they look (overt attention) Also covert attention (the mind"s eye) -- voluntary/automatic. You can stare at one spot and consciously choose to attend to something in the periphery/different part of visual field -- done by moving mind"s eye/mental resources. Something very salient (loud noise, flash of light) will attract your attention immediately.
