¶ … Perception Cognitive Psychology

Perception and attention questions

Q1.Explain the relationship between perception and attention. Provide specific examples in your explanation.

Attention is defined as the "selection of information for specialized processing usually in the context of some goal or task" (Attention lecture, n.d., PSY 394). It is impossible to focus on everything within our sensory field; we must be selective, either consciously or unconsciously. Perception can be defined as "the active process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting the information brought to the brain by the senses" (Psychology class notes: Sensation and perception, 2012, Class notes). Attention applies the principle of selectivity to what we perceive.

It has been noted in several experimental psychology studies on working memory that "individuals with higher scores in such tasks also are better at controlling their attention, in ways such as counteracting the impulse to look toward a suddenly-appearing object or ignoring one's own name spoken in a channel irrelevant to the assigned task" (Cowan & Morey 2006). This does not necessarily mean that they have more acute perceptions than the average individual but rather the way in which they apply their attentive resources, is more skilled and better able to filter out irrelevant information.

Due to neurological problems (brain trauma) and physical problems (disabilities), perceptual abilities may be limited. But even people with the same perceptual data who are able to perceive it with equal acuity may remember...

"Low-capacity individuals might forego this extra processing because, for them, it is uncomfortably effortful or self-defeating (as the extra effort might drain too many resources from the consolidation process)" (Cowan & Morey 2006).
Q2. What role does attention play in this situation? How does attention help us filter out irrelevant information?

"In a dynamic environment stimulus task relevancy could be altered through time and it is not always possible to dissociate relevant and irrelevant objects from the very first moment they come to our sight. In such conditions, subjects need to retain maximum possible information in their WM [working memory] until it is clear which items should be eliminated from WM to free attention and memory resources" (Nasr, Moeeny, & Etek 2008). In the case of Where's Waldo, the creators of the book deliberately create a visual environment with many distractions to make filtering out such data more difficult and individuals must retain data about the picture in their working memory to find the elusive Waldo.

A recent study found that "people who are good at remembering things, even with distractions, have more activity in the basal ganglia on brain scans… a specific part of the basal ganglia -- the globus pallidus -- correlated with less unnecessary storage in another part of the brain, the posterior parietal cortex, which is sensitive to the amount of information held in memory" (Brain filter found for irrelevant data, 2007, Times of India)

In another scientific…