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CHAPTER-4
CHAPTER-4
Vigilance
• Refers to a person’s ability to attend to a field of stimulation over a prolonged period,
during which the person seeks to detect the appearance of a particular target stimulus of
interest.
Neuroscience and Vigilance
Both the amygdala and thalamus are involved in vigilance.
Selective Attention
Cocktail Party Problem (Collin Cherry)
• The process of tracking one conversation while distracted by other conversations.
Dichotic Presentation
• Present separate message to each ear.
Shadowing
The shadowing procedure is used to ensure that participants are focusing their attention on the
attended message.
✓ Additional studies have analyzed data from real-world incidents. A study of 2,700 crashes
in the state of Virginia between June and November 2002 investigated causes of accidents
(Warner, 2004). Following are some of the main factors that resulted in accidents, with
the percentage of accidents for which each was responsible:
• rubbernecking (viewing accidents that have already occurred), 16%
• driver fatigue, 12%
• looking at scenery or landmarks, 10%
• distractions caused by passengers or children, 9%
• adjusting a radio or other media player, 7%
• cell phone use, 5%
✓ Other research has indicated that, when time on task and driving conditions are controlled
for, the effects of talking on a cell phone can be as detrimental as driving while
intoxicated (Strayer, Drews, & Crouch, 2006).
✓ Still other research has found that, compared with people not on a cell phone, people
talking on a cell phone exhibit more anger, through honking and facial expressions, when
presented with a frustrating situation.
✓ Increased aggression has been linked with increased accidents (Deffenbacher et al., 2003).
These findings, combined with those on the effects of divided attention, help to explain why an
increase in accidents is seen when cell phones are involved.
Maciej, Nitsch, and Vollrath (2011)
- Suggests that the presence of a passenger in the car actually makes driving safer than driving
alone.
✓ Another study indicated that the more people actually speak on the cell phone, the less
risky they perceive this behavior (Hallett, Lambert, & Regan, 2011).
✓ Another high-risk behavior during driving is texting.
DIVIDED ATTENTION CAN BE ACHIEVED WITH PRACTICE: AUTOMATIC PROCESSING (Goldstein)
Walter Schneider and Robert Shiffrin (1977)
- They required the participant to carry out two tasks simultaneously:
(1) Holding information about target stimuli in memory; and
(2) Paying attention to a series of “distractor” stimuli and determining if one of the target
stimuli is present among these distractor stimuli.
✓ The participant was shown a memory set consisting of one to four characters called target
stimuli.
✓ The memory set was followed by rapid presentation of 20 “test frames,” each of which
contained distractors.
✓ On half of the trials, one of the frames contained a target stimulus from the memory set.
✓ There is one target stimulus in the memory set, there are four stimuli in each frame, and the
target stimulus 3 appears in one of the frames.
✓ The targets and distractors were always from different categories, so the targets were
numbers.
o Schneider and Shiffrin called this way of presenting stimuli the consistent mapping
condition because even though the targets changed from trial to trial, the participants
always knew that the target would be numbers and the distractors would be letters.
✓ At the beginning of the experiment, the participants’ performance was only 55% correct, and
it took 900 trials for performance to reach 90%.
• Participants reported that for the first 600 trials, they had to keep repeating the target items
in each memory set in order to remember them.
• However, participants reported that after about 600 trials, the task had become automatic:
The frames appeared, and participants responded without consciously thinking about it.
- According to Schneider and Shiffrin, practice made it possible for participants to divide
their attention to deal with all of the target and test items simultaneously.
✓ Furthermore, the many trials of practice resulted in automatic processing – a type of
processing that occurs
(1) without intention (it happens automatically without the person intending to do it) and
(2) at a cost of only some of a person’s cognitive resources.
Hyperactivity- Levels of activity that exceed what is normally shown by children of a given age.
Three Main Types of ADHD:
▪ Hyperactive-impulsive
▪ Inattentive
▪ Combination of hyperactive-impulsive and inattentive behavior.
Children with the inattentive type of ADHD show several distinctive symptoms:
• They are easily distracted by irrelevant sights and sounds.
• They often fail to pay attention to details.
• They are susceptible to making careless mistakes in their work.
• They often fail to read instructions completely or carefully.
• They are susceptible to forgetting or losing things they need for tasks, such as pencils or
books.
• They tend to jump from one incomplete task to another.
Note:
- Studies have shown that children with ADHD exhibit slower and more variable reaction
times than their siblings who are not affected by the disorder.
- ADHD typically first displays itself during the preschool or early school years.
Treatments and Medications:
- ADHD is most often treated with a combination of psychotherapy and drugs.
Drugs currently used to treat ADHD:
▪ Ritalin (methylphenidate)
▪ Metadate (methylphenidate)
▪ Strattera (atomoxetine)
Note: A number of studies have noted that, although medication is a useful tool in the treatment
of ADHD, it is best used in combination with behavioral interventions.
Multiple Intelligences- a theory of Gardner, which has proven to be especially helpful in the
treatment and support of children with ADHD. This theory distinguishes eight distinct
intelligences that are relatively independent of each other:
▪ Linguistic
▪ logical-mathematical
▪ naturalist
▪ interpersonal
▪ intrapersonal
▪ spatial
▪ musical
▪ bodily kinesthetic intelligences.
Extinction
- When stimuli are present in both sides of the visual field, people with hemi-neglect suddenly
ignore the stimuli that are contralateral to their lesion.
- If the lesion is in the right hemisphere, they neglect stimuli in the left visual field.
Ipsilateral Field- the part of the visual field where the lesion is.
Note:
▪ A recent study found that people with spatial neglect also have trouble remembering
events from their past.
▪ Recent studies indicate that the posterior superior temporal gyrus, insula, and basal
ganglia, as well as the superior longitudinal fasciculus in the parietal lobe are most likely
connected with spatial neglect.
Automatization
• Tasks that started off as controlled processes that become automatic.
• When a skill, action, or behavior has been performed and practiced so much that it
becomes automatic requiring little or no conscious effort. The process has become
routine.
• For example, driving a car is initially a controlled process. But once we master driving, it
becomes automatic under normal driving conditions. Such conditions involve familiar
roads, fair weather, and little or no traffic.
• Another example is learning a new language. At first, you’ll have to translate word for
word. But once you get fluent in that language, it enables you to skip translating and
speaking it becomes automatic.
Stroop effect
In this figure, the colored ink matches the name of the color word.
Here, the colors of the inks differ from the color names that are printed with them.
Performing this task will probably be difficult. Each of the written words interferes with your
naming the color of the ink. The Stroop effect demonstrates the psychological difficulty in
selectively attending to the color of the ink and trying to ignore the word that is printed with the
ink of that color. One explanation of why the Stroop test may be particularly difficult is that, for
you and most other adults, reading is now an automatic process. It is not readily subject to your
conscious control. For that reason, you find it difficult not to read the words and instead to
concentrate on identifying the color of the ink
In some situations, however, automatic processes may be lifesaving. Therefore, it is important to
automate safety practices. This is particularly true for people engaging in high-risk occupations,
such as pilots, undersea divers, and firefighters. But in other situations automatization may result
in “mindlessness” and may be life threatening.
Mistakes We Make in Automatic Processes
An extensive analysis of human error shows that errors can be classified either as mistakes or as
slips. Mistakes are errors in choosing an objective or in specifying a means of achieving it. It
involve errors in intentional, controlled processes. Slips are errors in carrying out an intended
means for reaching an objective. Slips often involve errors in automatic processes.
Slips are most likely to happen when two circumstances occur. First is when we must deviate from
a routine and automatic processes inappropriately override intentional, controlled processes.
Second is when our automatic processes are interrupted. Such interruptions are usually a result
of external events or data, but sometimes they are a result of internal events, such as highly
distracting thoughts.
Automatic processes are helpful to us under many circumstances. They save us from needlessly
focusing attention on routine tasks, such as tying our shoes or dialing a familiar phone number.
We are thus unlikely to forgo them just to avoid occasional slips. Instead, we should attempt to
minimize the costs of these slips. How can we minimize the potential for negative consequences
of slips? In everyday situations, we are less likely to slip when we receive appropriate feedback
from the environment. If we can find ways to obtain useful feedback, we may be able to reduce
the likelihood that harmful consequences will result from slips. A particularly helpful kind of
feedback involves forcing functions. These are physical constraints that make it difficult or
impossible to carry out an automatic behavior that may lead to a slip.
Slips Associated with Automatic Processes
Capture errors - Intending to deviate from a routine activity we are implementing in familiar
surroundings, but at a point at which we should depart from the routine, we fail to pay attention
and to regain control of the process; hence, the automatic process captures our behavior, and we
fail to deviate from the routine.
Omissions - An interruption of a routine activity may cause us to skip a step(s) in implementing
the remaining portion of the routine.
Perseverations - After completing an automatic procedure, one or more steps of the procedure
may be repeated.
Description errors - An internal description of the intended behavior leads to performing the
correct action on the wrong object.
Data-driven errors - Incoming sensory information may override the intended variables in an
automatic action sequence.
Associative-activation errors - Strong associations may trigger the wrong automatic routine.
Loss-of-activation errors - The activation of a routine may be insufficient to carry it through to
completion.
CONSCIOUSNESS
Not everything we do, reason, and perceive is necessarily conscious. We may be unaware of
stimuli that alter our perceptions and judgments or may be unable to come up with the right
word in a sentence even though we know that we know the right word.
• Consciousness - includes only the narrower range of information that the individual is
aware of manipulating. But with our conscious awareness allowing us to monitor our
interactions with the environment, linking our past and present experiences and thereby
sense a continuous thread of experience, and to control and plan for future actions. That
is why we can actively process information at the preconscious level without being aware
of doing so.
• One view: People have good access to their complex mental processes.
• Using protocol analysis in analyzing people’s solving of problems, i.e chess problems and
crypt-arithmetic problems - one has to figure out what numbers substitute for letters in
a mathematical computation problem.
• Second view: People’s access to their complex mental processes is not very good.
• In this view, people may think they know how they solve complex problems, but their
thoughts are frequently erroneous.
• You may believe you know why you made the decision, but that belief is likely to be flawed
• ESSENCE: People’s conscious access to their thought processes, and even their control
over their thought processes, is minimal.
• Thought suppression - As soon as you think of the person, you try to put the individual
out of your mind.
• One major problem: It often does not work. The more you try not to think about someone
or something, the more “obsessed” you may become with the person or object.
Preconscious Processing
Some information that currently is outside our conscious awareness still may be available to
consciousness or at least to cognitive processes.
• Information that is available for cognitive processing but that currently lies outside
conscious awareness exists at the preconscious level of awareness.
• Preconscious information:
1. Stored Memories - we are not using at a given time but that we could summon when
needed.
2. Sensations - may be pulled from preconscious to conscious awareness.
Priming
• A given stimulus increases the likelihood that a subsequent related (or identical) stimulus
will be readily processed (e.g., retrieval from long-term memory)
• Participants are presented with a first stimulus (the prime), followed by a break that can
range from milliseconds to weeks or months. Then, the participants are presented with a
second stimulus and make a judgment (e.g., are both the first and the second stimulus
the same?) to see whether the presentation of the first stimulus affected the perception
of the second.
• Presentation of the first stimulus: may activate related concepts in memory that are then
more easily accessible.
• Most priming is positive which facilitates later recognition. But priming on occasion may
be negative and impede later recognition.
• Sometimes we are aware of the priming stimuli. However, priming occurs even when the
priming stimulus is presented in a way that does not permit its entry into conscious
awareness
Marcel
• observed processing of stimuli that were presented too briefly to be detected in conscious
awareness. The participants were presented with a prime that had two different
meanings e.g PALM, which can refer both to a body part and a plant.
• Participants were presented with pairs (dyads) of three-word groups. One of the triads in
each dyad was a potentially coherent grouping. The other triad contained random and
unrelated words.
• Participants in the dyad of triads task were presented with two 3-word groups (triads).
One of those triads contained unrelated words; the other triad contained words that were
coherent in some way. After seeing the two triads, participants were presented with
another word and were asked to identify which triad was related to that word.
• Visual Priming
• Auditory Priming - Priming effects can be demonstrated using aural material as well.
Experiments exploring auditory priming reveal the same behavioral effects as visual
priming.
• Patients Under Anesthesia - While under anesthesia, these patients were presented with
lists of words. They were asked yes/no questions and word-stem completion questions
about the words they heard
• You try to remember something that is stored in memory but that cannot readily be
retrieved.
• Another example of preconscious processing, which retrieves the desired information
from memory that does not occur, despite an ability to retrieve related information.
• Participants were read a large number of dictionary definitions and were given the clue.
The subjects then were asked to identify the corresponding words having these meanings.
• Similar to the television show “Jeopardy”
• The results then indicate that a particular preconscious information, although not fully
accessible to conscious thinking, is still available to attentional processes.
Blindsight
• traces of visual perceptual ability in blind areas, but when forced to guess about a stimulus
in the “blind” region, they correctly guess locations and orientations of objects at above-
chance levels
• Cortically Blind Participants - pre adjust their hands appropriately to size, shape,
orientation, and 3-D location of that object in the blind field. Yet they fail to show
voluntary behavior.
• blind on the left side of his visual field as an unfortunate result of an operation. He
reported no awareness of any objects placed on his left side or of any events that took
place on this side, but despite his unawareness of vision on this side, there was evidence
of vision.
1. forced- choice test - patient had to indicate which of two objects had been presented to
this side. He performed at levels that were significantly better than chance. In other
words, he “saw” despite his unawareness of seeing.
The information from the retina is forwarded to the visual cortex, which is damaged in cortically
blind people. That is why, a part of the visual information bypasses the visual cortex and is sent
to other locations in the cortex.
BS PSYCHOLOGY 3C
EUGENIO, Jeline Flor
ELIANG, Kyla
LAUIGAN, Klarhys Mae
MAIQUEZ, Laurice
MALLARI, April Joy