I. Ames’ RoomII. Size constancya. Retinal imageIII. Attentiona. Brain and attentionIV. Blindnessa. Inattentional blindnessb. Change blindnessV. AphasiasSenses  Stimulus analyzing mechanisms [starting at retina, going to thalamus]  Activate memory and meaning  Attention gate [you can’t perceive everything at once, those that are pertinent become part of consciousness] Conscious perceptionSimultaneous sensory input must be filtered and selected. You can’t attend to everything. Attention filter operates on basis of physical and sensory properties of incoming stimuli and meaning, significance, expectations, goals. Attending to one thing may preclude attending to another.Attentional filter appears to automatically scan and analyze all incoming things preconsciously. Ex: if someone says your name in another conversation, you’ll hear it.- Attention: selective aspect of sensing and perceiving- Stimuli that we filter out don’t go past the retina. Strong evidence is that the things we filter out leave little trace in the brain.- Inattentional blindness: failure to perceive easily detectable objects in situations ranging from brief flashes on a comp. screen to ongoing, naturalistic dynamic eventsEx: when counting the number of times a ball is thrown, wasn’t able to see the guy in the gorilla suit that walks through the screenAttention is a limited-capacity mental resourceThis research is the reason for bans on cell phone use while driving- Change blindness: difficulty in detecting changes that occur in a scene, even over very brief delaysEx: when a woman is talking to a construction worker and after a piece of wood passes between them, she doesn’t notice that she’s talking to a different construction workerSome changes are more detectable than others- Processing words is a fast, automatic, obligatory activityEx: seeing names of colors in different colors and being asked to name the color of the world- Stroop interference effect disappears when you’ve had lots of practice at the task.Subliminal perception: perceiving things below your sensory threshold and not being aware of it. Idea that a below-threshold stimulus may actually be detected without conscious experience of it- Limen: perceptual threshold. Minimum stimulus energy or stimulus duration required to produce a conscious sensory experience- Thresholds are estimates only- Visual backward masking: brief exposure of one face for 10 milliseconds, followed by longer duration masking stimulus- Supra-liminal: stimuli that affects us without our being aware of it- Study example: Seeing the color red impairs test performance- supra-liminalBrain and Attention:Primary sensory areas seem to be activated by unattended, unperceived stimuliParietal and frontal cortex activated also.“Attention” acts like an amplifier: focusingShifting attention: frontal lobes and parietal lobesConsciousness textbook definition: experiencing of one’s own mental events in such a way that one can report them to othersVery long history of attempts to define what consciousness means: awareness, alertness, responsiveness, attentivenessChallenge: discover neutral mechanisms of consciousness and to explain how they produce the conscious stateResearch strategy: study the return/recovery of consciousness following administration of anesthetic drugs under experimental conditions. Use PET scanning to identify the brain regions that become active when the subject is given a spoken command to perform a voluntary motor response (“Open your eyes”).Return of consciousness was associated with increased activity in brainstem, hypothalamus, and thalamus – oldest structures in the brain (phylogenetic)Increases in connectivity – which regions are messaging other regions. Parietal lobe interacts with parts of frontal lobes, this connectivity fades with loss of consciousness.Corpus callosum: causes connection of two hemispheres in the brainLeft hemisphere: verbal and linguistic information. Right hemisphere: spatial and nonverbal information. Two halves of the brain are talking to each other constantly.Receptive aphasias: Broca’s area. But Broca area damage also affects some aspects of speech comprehensionExpressive aphasias: Wernicke’sarea. Speech is easily produced but does not communicate much meaningEvidence of expression and receptive aphasis comes from patient populations, studies of split-brain patients, visual field experiments with normals, brain imaging researchSaccades: directed eye movementsHalf-crossing of optic tracts: left visual field gets interpreted in right hemisphere, right visual field gets interpreted in left hemisphere.Contralateral: relating or denoting the opposite side of a body, structure, etc. Most common.Ipsilateral: affecting the same side of the body.PSYC 100 1st Edition Lecture 11 Outline of Last Lecture I. Ames’ RoomII. Size constancya. Retinal imageOutline of Current LectureIII. Attentiona. Brain and attention IV. Blindnessa. Inattentional blindnessb. Change blindness V. Aphasias Current Lecture Senses  Stimulus analyzing mechanisms [starting at retina, going to thalamus]  Activate memory and meaning  Attention gate [you can’t perceive everything at once, those that are pertinent become part of consciousness] Conscious perception- Simultaneous sensory input must be filtered and selected. You can’t attend to everything. Attention filter operates on basis of physical and sensory properties of incoming stimuli and meaning, significance, expectations, goals. Attending to one thing may preclude attending to another. - Attentional filter appears to automatically scan and analyze all incoming things preconsciously. Ex: if someone says your name in another conversation, you’ll hear it.  - Attention: selective aspect of sensing and perceiving - Stimuli that we filter out don’t go past the retina. Strong evidence is that the things we filter out leave little trace in the brain.  - Inattentional blindness: failure to perceive easily detectable objects in situations ranging from brief flashes on a comp. screen to ongoing, naturalistic dynamic events- Ex: when counting the number of times a ball is thrown, wasn’t able to see the guy in the gorilla suit that walks through the screen- Attention is a limited-capacity mental resource- This research is the reason for bans on cell phone use while driving - Change blindness: difficulty in detecting changes that occur in a