Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

Cognitive Psychology

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 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

History of Cognitive Psychology

• What is Cognitive Psychology?

• History of Cognitive Psychology

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 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

What is Cognitive Psychology?

• Psychology: the study of the mind and
behavior.

• Cognitive psychology is the study of thinking.

• Cognitive psychology can also be viewed as the

study of processes underlying mental events.

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What is Cognitive Psychology?

• that branch of psychology concerned with how
people acquire, store, transform, use, and
communicate information (Neisser,1967).

• the branch of psychology that explores the

operation of mental processes related to
perceiving, attending, thinking, language, and
memory, mainly through inferences from
behavior (APA, 2015).
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History of Cognitive Psychology

• Aristotle

• the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 bce) examined topics

such as perception, memory, and mental imagery.

• He also discussed how humans acquire knowledge through

experience and observation (Barnes, 2004;Sternberg, 1999).

• Aristotle emphasized the importance of empirical evidence, or

scientific evidence obtained by careful observation and
experimentation.

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• Wilhelm Wundt (1832 - 1920)

• Wundt proposed that psychology should study mental processes,

using a technique called introspection.

• Introspection meant that carefully trained observers would

systematically analyze their own sensations and report them as
objectively as possible, under standardized conditions

• For example, observers might be asked to objectively report their

reactions to a specific musical chord, without relying on their
previous knowledge about music.

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• Hermann Ebbinghaus (1850–1909)

• Was the first person to scientifically study human memory.

– nonsense syllables. Eg. TVX, DRG, UAJ, etc.

• Mary Whiton Calkins (1863–1930).

• For example, Calkins reported a memory phenomenon called the

recency effect (Schwartz, 2011).

• The recency effect refers to the observation that our recall is

especially accurate for the final items in a series of stimuli.

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History of Cognitive Psychology

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History of Cognitive Psychology

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• William James (1842–1910).

• James was not impressed with Wundt’s introspection technique or

Ebbinghaus’s research with nonsense syllables.

• Instead, James preferred to theorize about our everyday psychological

experiences

• Principles of Psychology provides clear, detailed descriptions about people’s

everyday experiences (Benjamin, 2009). It also emphasizes that the human
mind is active and inquiring.

• Covered topics such as perception, attention, memory, understanding,

reasoning, and the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• Behaviorism.

• During the first half of the 20th century, behaviorism was the most prominent
theoretical perspective in the United States.

• According to the principles of behaviorism, psychology must focus on

objective, observable reactions to stimuli in the environment, rather than
introspection (Benjamin, 2009; O’Boyle, 2006).

• Behaviorists also argued that researchers could not objectively study mental
representations, such as an image, idea, or thought (Epstein, 2004; Skinner,
2004).

• For example, behaviorists emphasized the importance of the operational

definition, a precise definition that specifies exactly how a concept is to be
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History of Cognitive Psychology

• The Gestalt Approach.

• Gestalt psychology emphasizes that we humans have basic tendencies to

actively organize what we see; furthermore, the whole is greater than the
sum of its parts (Benjamin, 2009).

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History of Cognitive Psychology

Gestalt Laws of Perceptual Organization 13

 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

History of Cognitive Psychology

• Frederic Bartlett (1886–1969)

• Conducted his research on human memory. Remembering: An

Experimental and Social Study (Bartlett, 1932)

• Bartlett advanced the concept that memories of past events and

experiences are actually mental reconstructions that are colored by
cultural attitudes and personal habits, rather than being direct
recollections of observations made at the time.

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• In experiments beginning in 1914, Bartlett showed that very little of
an event is actually perceived at the time of its occurrence but that,
in reconstructing the memory, gaps in observation or perception are
filled in with the aid of previous experiences.

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• He used meaningful materials, such as lengthy stories in which we
interpret and transform the information we encounter.

• We search for meaning, trying to integrate this new information so

that it is more consistent with our own personal experiences
(Benjamin, 2009; Pickford & Gregory, 2004; Pickren & Rutherford,
2010).

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History of Cognitive Psychology

• Modern Cognitive Psychology

– 1956 & the MIT symposium

– Ulric Neisser's Cognitive Psychology

– https://study.com/academy/lesson/cognitive-re
volution-in-psychology.html

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History of Cognitive Psychology

– https://study.com/academy/lesson/ancient-gre
ek-philosophy-introspection-associationism.ht
ml

– https://study.com/academy/lesson/rationalism-
vs-empiricism-similarities-differences.html

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Information Processing Approach

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Information Processing Approach

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Information Processing Approach

• The information-processing approach dominated cognitive
psychology in the 1960s and 1970s and remains strong and
influential today (Atkinson & Shiffrin, 1968).

• As its name implies, the information-processing approach draws an

analogy between human cognition and computerized processing of
information.

• Central to the information-processing approach is the idea that

cognition can be thought of as information (what we see, hear, read
about, think about) passing through a system (us or, more
specifically, our minds).

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Information Processing Approach

• Researchers following an information-processing approach often
assume that information is processed (received, stored, recoded,
transformed, retrieved, and transmitted) in stages and that it is
stored in specific places while being processed.

• One goal within this framework, then, is to determine what these

stages and storage places are and how they work.

• One is that people’s cognitive abilities can be thought of as

“systems” of interrelated capacities.

– We know different individuals have different cognitive capacities—different

attention spans, memory capacities, and language skills, to name a few.

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Information Processing Approach

• Basic Assumptions

• Information made available by the environment is processed by a

series of processing systems (e.g. attention, perception, memory);

• These processing systems transform or alter the information in

systematic ways;

• The aim of research is to specify the processes and structures that

underlie cognitive performance;

• Information processing in humans resembles that in computers.

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Information Processing Approach

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Information Processing Approach

• Certain processes, such as detection and recognition, are used at
the beginning of information processing; others, such as recoding
or retrieval, have to do with memory storage; still others, such as
reasoning or concept formation, have to do with putting
information together in new ways.

• In this model, boxes represent stores, and arrows represent

processes (leading some to refer to information-processing models
as “boxes-and-arrows” models of cognition).

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Information Processing Approach

• The information-processing tradition is rooted in structuralism, in
that its followers attempt to identify the basic capacities and
processes we use in cognition.

• The computer metaphor used in this approach also shows an

indebtedness to the fields of engineering and communications.

• Psychologists working in the information-processing tradition are

interested in relating individual and developmental differences to
differences in basic capacities and processes.

• https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-information-processing-
definition-stages.html
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Information Processing Approach

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Information Processing Approach

• Atkinson and Shiffrin’s (1968) information-processing model
dominated memory research for many years. However, its influence
is now diminished.

• For instance, most cognitive psychologists now consider sensory

memory to be the very brief storage process that is part of
perception, rather than an actual memory (Baddeley et al., 2009).

• Many researchers also question Atkinson and Shiffrin’s (1968) clear-

cut distinction between short-term memory and long-term memory
(Baddeley et al., 2009; J. Brown, 2004).

• https://study.com/academy/lesson/atkinson-shiffrins-modal-model-of-memory.html 28
• https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-information-processing-definition-stages.html
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

The Ecological Approach

Ecology

• the branch of biology that deals with the relations of

organisms to one another and to their physical
surroundings.

• n. the study of relationships between organisms and

their physical and social environments.

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The Ecological Approach

Ecological Psychology

the analysis of behavior settings with the aim of predicting patterns of behavior
that occur within certain settings.

The focus is on the role of the physical and social elements of the setting in
producing the behavior.

According to behavior-setting theory, the behavior that will occur in a particular

setting is largely prescribed by the roles that exist in that setting and the actions
of those in such roles, irrespective of the personalities, age, gender, and other
characteristics of the individuals present.

In a place of worship, for example, one or more individuals have the role of
leaders (the clergy), whereas a larger number of participants function as an
audience (the congregation). 30
 Amity Institute of Psychology and Allied Sciences

The Ecological Approach

• A major approach to the study of cognition comes from
both psychologists and anthropologists.

• The central tenet of this approach is that cognition

does not occur in isolation from larger cultural
contexts;

• all cognitive activities are shaped by the culture and by

the context in which they occur.

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The Ecological Approach

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The Ecological Approach

• Jean Lave, a current theorist in this tradition, has
conducted some fascinating work that illustrates the
ecological approach.

• Lave (1988) described the results of the Adult Math

Project as “an observational and experimental
investigation of everyday arithmetic practices” (p. 1).

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The Ecological Approach

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The Ecological Approach

• Lave, Murtaugh, and de la Rocha (1984) studied how
people used arithmetic in their everyday lives.
• In one study, they followed people on grocery-shopping
trips to analyze how and when people calculate “best
buys.”
• They found that people’s methods of calculation
varied with the context.
• This was somewhat surprising, because students in our
culture are taught to use the same specified formulas on
all problems of a given type to yield one definite
numerical answer.
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The Ecological Approach

• To illustrate, compare a typical third-grade arithmetic
problem presented by teachers to students—“Brandi had
eight seashells. Nikki had five more. How many
seashells did the two of them have together?”

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The Ecological Approach

• The number of apples she should purchase for her
family for the week: There’s only about three or four
[apples] at home, and I have four kids, so you figure at
least two apiece in the next three days. These are the
kinds of things I have to resupply. I only have a certain
amount of storage space in the refrigerator, so I can’t
load it up totally. . . . Now that I’m home in the
summertime, this is a good snack food. And I like an
apple sometimes at lunchtime when I come home.
(Murtaugh, 1985, p. 188)

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The Ecological Approach

• First, the second example has many possible answers
(for example, 5, 6, 9), unlike the first problem, which has
one (13).

• Second, the first problem is given to the problem solver

to solve; the second is constructed by the problem solver
herself.

• Third, the first problem is somewhat disconnected from

personal experience, goals, and interests, whereas the
second comes out of practical daily living.
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The Ecological Approach

Daniel Smilek at the University of Waterloo, and Alan
Kingston at the University of British Columbia, have been
focusing on understanding how attention operates in
everyday situations by examining eye movements in real-
world displays (Kingstone, Smilek, & Ristic, 2003; Smilek,
Birmingham, Cameron, & Bischof, 2007).

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The Ecological Approach

In one of their studies they presented participants with pictures of
art and sports scenes, and monitored their eye movements while
they described the pictures aloud.

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The Ecological Approach

• They found that, regardless of the type of image
participants were viewing, most eye fixations were
committed to the eyes and faces of the people in the
scene.

• They argued that eye gaze, head position, body

position, and situational context are important cues
that people use to understand not only the basic gist of
scenes, but also the intentional state of others.

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The Ecological Approach

• We can see the influences of both the functionalist and
the Gestalt schools on the ecological approach. The
functionalists focused on the purposes served by
cognitive processes, certainly an ecological question.

• Gestalt psychology’s emphasis on the context

surrounding any experience is likewise compatible with
the ecological approach.

• The ecological approach would deny the usefulness (and

perhaps even the possibility) of studying cognitive
phenomena in artificial circumstances divorced from
larger contexts. 42
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The Ecological Approach

• Thus, this tradition relies less on laboratory experiments
or computer simulations and more on naturalistic
observation and field studies to explore cognition.

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Contemporary Cognitive
Psychology

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Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

• In 1879, the first psychology lab was opened, and this date is generally
thought of as the beginning of psychology as a separate science.

• The early work in psychology paved the way for the study of contemporary
cognitive psychology today.

• Contemporary cognitive psychology is an outgrowth of historical

cognitive psychology, with influences from Jean Piaget and Information
Processing theorists.

• Contemporary cognitive psychology can apply the methods of today,

such as brain imaging, and can also examine how the tenets of cognitive
psychology are applied to contemporary issues.

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Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive Revolution

• Intellectual shift in psychology in the 1950s focusing on the internal mental

processes driving human behavior.

• The study of human thought became interdisciplinary by directing

attention to processing skills including language acquisition, memory,
problem-solving, and learning.

• This scientific approach to understanding how the brain works moved away
from behavioral psychology and embraced understanding the processes
that drive behavior.
• Ulric Neisser
• Jerome Bruner
• Noam Chomsky
• George A. Miller
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Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

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Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

• The events in the 1950s and 1960s as the cognitive revolution.

• But it is important to realize that although the revolution made it acceptable

to study the mind, the field of cognitive psychology continued to evolve in
the decades that followed.

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/10/the-cognitive-revolution/
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Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

• Ulrich Neisser’s (1967) Cognitive Psychology

– Chapter 1, is “to provide a useful and current assessment of the existing state of the art”

– Most of the book is devoted to vision and hearing.

– There are descriptions of how information is taken in by vision and held in memory for short
periods of time, and how people search for visual information and use visual information to
see simple patterns.

– Most of the discussion is about the intake of information and holding information in the mind
for brief periods of time, such as how long people can remember sounds like strings of
numbers.

– But it isn’t until page 279 of the 305-page book that Neisser considers “higher mental
processes” such as thinking, problem solving, and long-term remembering.

– The reason Neisser gives for this scant treatment is that in 1967, we just didn’t know much
about higher mental processes.
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Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

• Ulrich Neisser’s (1967) Cognitive Psychology

– Another gap in coverage is the almost complete absence of physiology.

– Neisser says that “I do not doubt that human behavior and

consciousness depends entirely on the activity of the brain and related
processes” (p. 5), but then he goes on to argue that he is interested in
how the mind operates, but not in the physiological mechanisms behind
this operation.

– These two gaps in Neisser’s book highlight what are central topics in
present-day cognitive psychology.

– study of higher mental processes

– the study of the physiology of mental processes.
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Study of Higher Mental Processes

Episodic memory is memory for events in your life (like

what you did last weekend).

Semantic memory is memory for facts (such as the

capitals of the states).

Procedural memory is memory for physical actions

(suchas how to ride a bike or play the piano).

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Study of Physiology of Cognition

• Since the 1800s, was providing important insights into the “behind the
scenes” activity in the nervous system that creates the mind.

• Two physiological techniques dominated early physiological research on the

mind.

• Neuropsychology, the study of the behavior of people with brain damage,

had been providing insights into the functioning of different parts of the brain
since the 1800s.

• Electrophysiology, measuring electrical responses of the nervous system,

made it possible to listen to the activity of single neurons.

• Most electrophysiology research was done on animals.

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Study of Physiology of Cognition

• Brain imaging: But perhaps the most significant physiological advance
wasn’t to come until a decade after Neisser’s book, when the technique of
brain imaging was introduced.

• A procedure called positron emission tomography (PET), which was

introduced in 1976, made it possible to see which areas of the human brain
are activated during cognitive activity

• A disadvantage of this technique was that it was expensive and involved

injecting radioactive tracers into a person’s bloodstream

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Study of Physiology of Cognition

Functional magnetic resonance imaging
(fMRI), which didn’t involve radioactive tracers
and which was capable of higher resolution
(Ogawa et al., 1990).

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Study of Physiology of Cognition

• The introduction of fMRI brings us back to the idea of revolutions.

• Thomas Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shifts was based on the idea that a
scientific revolution involves a shift in the way people think about a subject.

• This was clearly the case in the shift from the behavioral paradigm to the
cognitive paradigm.

• But there’s another kind of shift in addition to the shift in thinking: a

shift in how people do science (Dyson, 2012; Galison, 1997).

• This shift, which depends on new developments in technology, is what

happened with the introduction of the fMRI.

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Evolution of Cognitive Psychology

• So how has cognitive psychology evolved since Neisser’s 1967
“progress report”?

• Contemporary cognitive psychology involves:

– more-sophisticated flow diagrams of the mind,

– a consideration of higher mental processes,

– and also a large amount of physiological research.

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Contemporary Cognitive Psychology

• researchers began taking research out of the laboratory.

• Contemporary cognitive psychology therefore features an increasing

amount of research on cognition in “real-world” situations.

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• Researchers also realized that humans are not “blank slates” that just accept and store
information, so they began doing experiments that demonstrated the importance of knowledge for
cognition.

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Evolution of Psychology
• https://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-cognitive-psychology-definition-theories-quiz.html

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Conscious Processes

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Consciousness Processes
There are research controversies over the concept of consciousness and
multiple perspectives about its meaning.

Broadly, these interpretations divide along two major lines:

(a) those proposed by scholars on the basis of function or behavior (i.e.,

consciousness viewed “from the outside”—the observable organism); and

(b) those proposed by scholars on the basis of experience or subjectivity (i.e.,

consciousness viewed “from the inside”—the mind)

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Consciousness Processes
The former generally represents generally represents the reductionist or
materialist perspective (see materialism), whereas the latter generally
represents the immaterialist perspective (see immaterialism).

For example, functional or behavioral interpretations tend to define

consciousness in terms of physical, neurobiological, and cognitive processes,
such as the ability to discriminate stimuli, to monitor internal states, to control
behavior, and to respond to the environment.

According particularly to this view, the contents of consciousness are assessed

through their ability to be reported accurately and verifiably (see reportability),
although recent brain imaging research suggests that brain indices of
conscious contents may become available.

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Consciousness Processes
Experiential or subjective interpretations, however, tend to define
consciousness in terms of mental imagery; intuition; subjective experience as
related to sensations, perceptions, emotions, moods, and dreams; self-
awareness; awareness of awareness itself and of the unity between the self
and others and the physical world; stream of consciousness; and other aspects
of private experience.

According to this view, the contents of consciousness can be assessed to some

extent by their reportability but must also, given their phenomenological nature,
rely on introspection.

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Conscious Processes
Conscious process

• a mental operation of which a person is explicitly aware

and often in control.

Unconscious process

• in cognitive psychology, a mental process that occurs

without a person being explicitly aware of it and largely
outside of conscious control.
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•
Conscious Processes
Attention is the means by which we actively process a limited amount of
information from the enormous amount of information available through our
senses, our stored memories, and our other cognitive processes (De
Weerd, 2003a; Rao, 2003).

• It includes both conscious and unconscious processes.

• In many cases, conscious processes are relatively easy to study.

• Unconscious processes are harder to study, simply because you are not
conscious of them (Jacoby, Lindsay, & Toth, 1992; Merikle, 2000).

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•
Conscious Processes
For example, you always have a wealth of information available to you
that you are not even aware of until you retrieve that information from your
memory or shift your attention toward it.

• You probably can remember where you slept when you were ten years
old or where you ate your breakfasts when you were 12. At any given
time, you also have available a dazzling array of sensory information to
which you just do not attend.

• After all, if you attended to each and every detail of your environment, you
would feel overwhelmed pretty fast.

• You also have very little reliable information about what happens when you
sleep. Therefore, it is hard to study processes that are hidden somewhere in
your unconsciousness, and of which you are not aware.

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•
Conscious Processes
Attention allows us to use our limited mental resources judiciously. By
dimming the lights on many stimuli from outside (sensations) and inside
(thoughts and memories), we can highlight the stimuli that interest us. This
heightened focus increases the likelihood that we can respond speedily and
accurately to interesting stimuli.

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Conscious Processes

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Conscious Processes

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Conscious Processes
Attention and Consciousness

• At one time, psychologists believed that attention was the same thing
as consciousness.

• Now, however, they acknowledge that some active attentional processing of

sensory and of remembered information proceeds without our conscious
awareness (Bahrami et al., 2008; Shear, 1997).

• For example, writing your name requires little conscious awareness.

You may write it while consciously engaged in other activities.

• In contrast, writing a name that you have never encountered requires

attention to the sequence of letters.

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Conscious Processes
• Consciousness includes both the feeling of awareness and the
content of awareness, some of which may be under the focus of
attention (Bourguignon, 2000; Farthing, 1992, 2000; Taylor, 2002).
Therefore, attention and consciousness form two partially
overlapping sets (Srinivasan, 2008; DiGirolamo & Griffin, 2003).

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Conscious Processes
Conscious attention serves three purposes in playing a causal role
for cognition.

• First, it helps in monitoring our interactions with the environment.

Through such monitoring, we maintain our awareness of how well
we are adapting to the situation in which we find ourselves.

• Second, it assists us in linking our past (memories) and our present

(sensations) to give us a sense of continuity of experience. Such
continuity may even serve as the basis for personal identity.

• Third, it helps us in controlling and planning for our future actions.

We can do so based on the information from monitoring and from
the links between past memories and present sensations.
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