Psychology_100 chapter (consciousness )
Consciousness
Refers to the subject of awareness of percepts, thoughts, feelings and behavior
What is daydreaming?
A major component of the flow of consciousness, turning attention away from external stimuli to internal thoughts and imagine scenarios.
Unconscious process
A person may remember an abusive parent with love and admiration and have little access to unhappy memories because admitting the truth would be painful.
Blind sight
A phenomenon that bears on the neural underpinnings of consciousness is blind sight.
Amnesia
Amnesics Studies have shown that people can remember things implicitly even while lacking any consciousness of having seen them.
What are beeper studies?
And experience-sampling technique that has provided a more natural window to the flow of consciousness in every day life.
Unconscious mental processes
Are inaccessible to consciousness because they would be too anxiety provoking to acknowledge and this have been repressed.
Preconscious mental processes
Are not presently conscious but could be readily brought the consciousness of the need arose
Emotional processes
Can also influence thought and behavior without being conscious.
The functions of conscious and unconscious processes
Cognitive theorist examine the complimentary functions, strengths and weaknesses of conscious and unconscious processes in every day behavior.
Consciousness and Neural pathways
Consciousness is the seat of who we are; to lose consciousness permanently is to lose existence as a psychological being. What Neural structures produce conscious awareness and regulate states of consciousness?
Unconscious process
Dynamically unconscious is kept unconscious for a reason; keeping mental contents out of awareness requires continuing psychological effort or energy.
Consciousness
Freud defined it as one of three mental systems called the conscious, preconscious and unconscious.
Interim summary
Freud distinguished types of mental activities: conscious processes, preconscious processes, unconscious processes. Studies of subliminal perception have shown that perception of stimuli below the threshold of consciousness can indeed have an impact on conscious thought and behavior.
Neural pathways
From there the information passes through the thalamus and eventually onto the cortex.
Consciousness
Has limited capacity we can only see one scene at a time in our conscious mind.
Bkindsight
If shown an object, they deny having seen it. They typically have lesions to the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobes, a region Central to visual sensation. So their inability to see makes neurological sense.
Blindsight
In blindsight, this second pathway appears to allow some visual processing at the mid brain level, even though The first pathway is rendered inoperative by damage to the visual cortex.
Neural pathways
In the evolutionary more recent pathway, neurons of the optic nerve carries sensory information project to the Thalamus via the optic tract; the information is subsequently transmitted to the primary visual cortex in the a occipital lobes. This pathway is responsible for conscious visual perception and for determining the precise nature of stimuli.
Conscious mental processes
Involve subjective awareness of stimuli, feelings or ideas.
Repression
It's like a sensor, the mind censors threatening thoughts from consciousness.
Conscious spotlight
Midbrain reticular regions, the thalamus and the prefrontal cortex play a particular role in shining a conscious spotlight on thoughts, feelings or perceptions.
Divided attention
Means splitting attention between two or more stimuli or tasks.
Unconscious processes
Notably skills and associative processes such as priming and classical conditioning, the fast and efficient. They are usually based on considerable learning, they tend to lead to adaptive responses that make sense in the light of observed regularities in the environment.
Implicit processes
Tend to be rapid and to operate simultaneously.
Insights from neurological disorders
One way to learn about the new pathways involved in consciousness is to examine neurological conditions that distrupt it. People with split brain's, who's two hemispheres function independently following severing of the corpus callosum, provide one window to the neuropsychology of consciousness.
Conscious processes
Or slower and less efficient for tasks that require instant responses but are useful for shining a spotlight on problems that require more careful consideration.
Unconscious process
People can regulate their emotions outside of awareness by keeping distressing thoughts, feelings and memories out of consciousness.
Subliminal perception
Perception of stimuli below the threshold of consciousness. Use a device called tachistoscope; Flash images to quickly full conscious recognition but slowly enough to be registered outside awareness.
Consciousness
Performs two functions: monitoring the self and environment and controlling thought and behavior.
Attention
Process of focusing awareness, providing heightened sensitivity to a limited range of experience requiring more extensive information processing.
Connectionist models
Propose that information processing occurs simultaneously in multiple, relatively separate neural networks, most of which are unconscious.
Blindsight
Pursuing observations made by neurologists in the early part of the 20th century, researchers have examined the patients who are, in one sense, totally blind.
Cognitive unconscious
Refers to information-processing mechanisms that operate outside of awareness (such as implicit memory) rather then information the person is motivated to keep from awareness.
Free-recall
Recall without cues
Interim summary cognitive perspective
Researches from cognitive perspective have been studying the cognitive unconscious, which focuses on information-processing mechanisms that operate outside of awareness, such as procedural knowledge and implicit memory.
Types of daydreaming
Some daydreams a pleasurable fantasies, where as others involved planning for feature actions or conversations with significant others.
Blindsight
Thalamic processing may also permit some recognition of what an object is, even though this Thalamic knowledge cannot be consciously accessed. And may lead to emotional reactions to it even though the person has no idea what he has seen.
Neuropsychological basis of consciousness
The hindbrain and midbrain structures involved in conscious arousal and in shifts from waking to sleep include the reticular formation, pond and medulla.
Blindsight
The neural basis for blindsight is not clear, but one hypothesis, derived in part from animal research, points to the role of two neural pathways involved in vision.
Neural pathways
The other pathway is evolutionarily older. Neurons carry information from the retina project to a mid brain structure responsible for vision in animals such as frogs and birds that lack the highly specialized visual cortex of humans.
Experience-sampling
The study of the normal flow of consciousness where contents of consciousness reported at specific times. Participants report consciousness while performing task they talk and psychologist called the verbal responses into categories, such as emotional tone, relevance to the task at hand and ways of solving the task
Unconscious emotion
Unconscious cognitive and perceptual processes can influence behavior; distinctively psychodynamic hypothesis is that motivational and emotional processes can be unconscious as well.
Motivation
There is a distinction between conscious and unconscious motivational systems similar to the distinction between implicit and explicit memory in cognitive psychology.
Information-processing models
Use the times consciousness and working memory interchangeably.
Blindsight
Yet, if I asked to describe the objects geometric form example triangle orsquare or give its location in space for example to the right or left, up or down, they do so with accuracy far better than chance, frequently protesting all the while that they cannot do the task because they cannot see!
