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Attention and Memory - Coggle Diagram
Attention and Memory
Memory
- Photographic memory (sometimes eidetic memory): a purported ability to remember visual scenes in such accurate detail that it is like looking at a photograph
- Probably doesn’t exist, at least not beyond a fraction of a second.
- Iconic memory: richly detailed visual memory that persists for a fraction of a second.
- Deese/Roediger-McDermott Effect: memory can be distorted by our biases and assumptions and by misleading information
- Spreading activation > activating one thing will activate cascades of other concepts.
We structure our memories around meaning
- Schemas: knowledge or expectations about a domain or event > Sometimes schemas can lead our memories astray.
- As memory fades and becomes less precise, people’s recollections grow ever more influenced by their schemas.
- Memory is biased > we shape our memories in line with beliefs about who we are and what should have been.
- Our knowledge and expectations about an event, which we use when constructing our memories.
- When schemas match the details of an event, they can aid in memory. When they are inconsistent, they can lead memories astray.
- Boundary extension: participants routinely fill in the edges of a picture, both in drawings and in recognition tests
- Misattribution is a common cause of memory distortion > confusions about the source of our memories are common
- Source monitoring: keeping track of where our memories came from
- Source misattribution: mistakes in source monitoring
- According to a reality monitoring framework, people often have trouble distinguishing memories of actual events from memories they have imagined.
- In one study (Henkel and Franklin 1998) participants saw a magnifying glass and were asked to imagine a lollipop. Later, they had trouble remembering which they had actually seen and which they had imagined.
- Suggestibility: memory can be shaped and changed through leading questions and clues.
- Memory has also been found to be suggestible in emotional, stressful situations > some research suggests that emotion and arousal can sometimes enhance memory.
- Infantile amnesia: sparse memory for events before age 3 or 4.
- Partly due to neurobiological development, perhaps also because of undeveloped schemas for organising memories.
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Attention
Cognitive impenetrability:
- the notion that perception can be influenced by knowledge, motivation, or beliefs.
- We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are; distances look further if you’re carrying heavy weight, and things you want look closer than they actually are.
- Pitfalls in the field; evaluating the evidence for cognition affecting perception
- You're not reporting what you see, you’re reporting judgement.
- Demand and response bias > if the participant thinks you want them to answer a certain way, they will.
- Memory and recognition issues.
- No good evidence
Many perception researchers believe that it is not a question of whether perception is penetrable or not. Instead, it's which aspects are penetrable and which aren’t.
- Predictive processing theories:
- Our brains don’t just react to sensory information, they predict what we’re about to experience.
- These predictions combine with incoming information to shape perception > and play an important role when information is ambiguous.
Cocktail party effect:
- we’re able to tune out irrelevant information and attend to one course of auditory information.
- Early selection theories: we filter information based on physical features, like the sound of the voice
- Late selection theories: we filter information based on meaning.
- We seem to notice emotional and personally meaningful stimuli from unattended channels, consistent with late selection theories.
- An attenuator model of attention proposes that they just need to meet a lower bar to avoid being filtered out
- The current belief is that attentional selection happens at multiple points, not just early or late.
Inattentional blindness:
- failing to notice what you are looking right at when your attention is preoccupied
- Look but fail to see car accidents.
- Is not intrinsically maladaptive
- It arises because every choice to attend to one thing is a choice to ignore another > there is always too much around us to attend to everything at once
Varieties of Attention
- “Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought.” > William James 1890
- Load theory
- Perceptual load can reduce distractor processing > the harder the task, the less distracting noise is.
External attention
- How do we attend to the world?
- Modality (sight, sound, etc)
- How someone looks, their voice, etc.
- Features
- Tuning attention based on the features of what you’re looking for
- Location
- Spatial attention: selecting information based on its location
- Attention is the gateway to awareness > inattentional blindness > however, not SUFFICIENT
- Blindsight: a condition in which people who are blind in part of their visual field (due to damage to the visual cortex) can still respond to stimuli presented there (in the blind spot).
- Involuntary attention: sometimes things grab our attention “automatically” > attention capture > reflexive shift of attention
- Sometimes seems to be driven by salience or uniqueness
- Emotion and spatial attention: People are faster to respond to targets when they appear in the same place as an emotionally significant stimulus.
- Heightened in anxiety disorders
- Attention shaped by learning
- Value-modulated attentional capture > stimuli linked with reward or punishment grab attention even when counter-productive.
- Participants can’t help looking at (and being slowed down by) the value-linked colour even though it makes them less likely to be rewarded.
- Seems to predict risky alcohol use and addictive behaviours
- Contextual cueing > learned patterns guide attention even when we’re not aware of them.
- Attention to emotion
- emotional-driven attentional biases > emotional stimuli are often found to capture attention
- Attentional biases to negative or threatening stimuli are frequently heightened in anxiety and depression.
- Attentional bias modification > an attempt to combat anxiety by altering attentional biases through training
- One problem is that the dot probe is unreliable. It doesn't always yield the same results between people > important to explore the potential of other measures
- Time (eg vigilance)
- The rarer something is, the more it is missed in attention > it is not expected.
- Attentional blink > consolidation takes time and proceeds one at a time. If a second target appears while the first target is being consolidated, it will fade from awareness
- Emotion and temporal awareness
- Emotion induced blindness
- Difficult seeing a brief target if it follows soon after an emotional distractor
- Disruption is much less if distractor is non-emotional
Internal Attention
- To internal information
- Long-term memory
- Selecting responses.
- working memory
- What you can hold and manipulate in your mind
- Intimately linked with attention
- executive attention: how well people can resolve interference from conflicting information
- spatial orienting: how well people can direct their attention to a location
- alerting: how well people can prepare to respond when anticipating a target.