Text 8. Attention

Read the text and give its short summary.

Attention is a concept studied in cognitive psychology that refers to how we actively process specific information present in our environment. As you are reading this, there are numerous sights, sounds and sensations going on around you – the pressure of your feet against the floor, the sight of the street out of a nearby window, the soft warmth of your shirt, the memory of a conversation you had earlier with a friend. How do we manage to experience all of these sensations and still focus on just one element of our environment?

According to psychologist and philosopher William James, attention “is the taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts…It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others”.

Think of attention as a highlighter. As you read through a section of text in a book, the highlighted section stands out, causing you to focus your interest on that area. Attention allows you to “tune out” information, sensations and perceptions that are not relevant at the moment and instead focus your energy on the information that is important.

(Abridged from: http://psychology.about.com/od/cognitivepsychology/f/attention.htm)

Answer the questions below:

1. What does attention refer to?

2. What is attention according to psychologist and philosopher William James?

3. How are sensations and perceptions relevant to attention?

References:

1. Cемашко Л.А. Английский язык: Сборник текстов для студентов факультета психологии. – Челябинск: Изд-во ЮУрГУ, 2006. – 156 с. 2.http://psychology.about.com.htm

3.http://allpsych.com/psychology101.html

Part III. RELATED READING

FORGETTING

You can’t talk about remembering without mentioning its counterpart. It seems that as much as we do remember, we forget even more. Forgetting isn’t really all that bad, and is in actuality, a pretty natural phenomenon. Imagine if you remembered every minute detail of every minute or every hour, of every day during your entire life, no matter how good, bad, or insignificant. Now imagine trying to sift through it all for the important stuff like where you left your keys.

There are many reasons we forget things and often these reasons overlap. Like in the example above, some information never makes it to LTM. Other times, the information gets there, but is lost before it can attach itself to our LTM. Other reasons include decay, which means that information that is not used for an extended period of time decays or fades away over time. It is possible that we are physiologically preprogrammed to eventually erase data that no longer appears pertinent to us.

Failing to remember something doesn’t mean the information is gone forever though. Sometimes the information is there but for various reasons we can’t access it. This could be caused by distractions going on around us or possibly due to an error of association (e.g., believing something about the data which is not correct causing you to attempt to retrieve information that is not there). There is also the phenomenon of repression, which means that we purposefully (albeit subconsciously) push a memory out of reach because we do not want to remember the associated feelings. This is often sited in cases where adults ‘forget’ incidences of sexual abuse when they were children. And finally, amnesia, which can be psychological or physiological in origin.

http://allpsych.com/psychology101/memory.html

What Is Cognitive Dissonance?

People tend to seek consistency in their beliefs and perceptions. So what happens when one of our beliefs conflicts with another previously held belief? The term cognitive dissonance is used to describe the feeling of discomfort that results from holding two conflicting beliefs. When there is a discrepancy between beliefs and behaviors, something must change in order to eliminate or reduce the dissonance.