movement facilitates perception
movement helps us perceive things in environment more accurate than static images, it provides more info/ raw data.
dorsal and ventral streams
dorsal= vision for action
ventral= vision for perception
reaching behaviour often involves alternating between the dorsal and ventral streams
lesioning or ablation experiments
- an animal is trained to indicate perceptual capacities
- a specific part of the brain is removed or destroyed
- the animal is retrained to determine which perceptual abilities remain
- results reveal which portions of the brain are responsible for specific behaviour
effects of removal of temporal lobe tissue
results in problems with object discrimination task (implicating the what pathway, or ventral stream)
effects of removal of parietal lobe tissue
results in problems with landmark discrimination task. (implicating the where pathway, or dorsal stream)
double dissociations
refer to two regions of the brain which seem to serve different functions/ involve different mechanisms and operate independently
selective attention
attending to one thing while ignoring others
divided attention
paying attention to more than one thing at a time
sustained attention
maintaining focus over long periods of time
spatial attention
attention across space
dichotic listening
used to study our control over selectively attending to certain auditory stimuli. one message is presented in one ear and another in the other, have to shadow one message and ignore the other
cocktail party effect
ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out others
Broadbent’s filter model
suggests that attention functions as a selective filter that operates early in the information processing stream, blocking irrelevant stimuli based on their physical characteristics
attenuation model
attenuator analyzes oncoming messages in terms of physical characteristics, language, and meaning the separates info to 2 streams:
1. attend to message is let through attenuator at full strength
2. unattended message let through at much weaker strength
dictionary unit
contains words, each have specific thresholds for being activated.
common words have lower thresholds
early selection model
unattended information is filtered out at a very early stage of processing, before it is assigned meaning.
late selection models
the selection for stimuli for final processing does not occur until after info has already been analyzed for meaning
load theory of attention
consists of processing capacity (amount of info that a system can handle) and Perceptual load (difficulty of perceptual requirements associated with task)
- High load= difficult and use larger amounts of processing capacity
-low load- easy and use small amounts of processing capacity
stroop effect
psychological phenomenon that slows people down when they perform a task that conflicts with an automatic response, such as naming the ink color of a word when the word itself is a different color
