In cognitive psychology, cognitive load refers to the total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory. Cognitive load theory was developed out of the study of problem solving by John Sweller in the late 1980s. Sweller argued that instructional design can be used to reduce cognitive load in learners. Cognitive load theory
Crossmodal attention refers to the distribution of attention to different senses. Attention is the cognitive process of selectively emphasizing and ignoring sensory stimuli. According to the crossmodal attention perspective, attention often occurs simultaneously through multiple sensory modalities. These modalities process information from the different sensory fields, such as: visual, auditory, spatial, and tacitile. While each
Stimulus modality, also called sensory modality, is one aspect of a stimulus or what we perceive after a stimulus. For example, the temperature modality is registered after heat or cold stimulate a receptor. Some sensory modalities include: light, sound, temperature, taste, pressure, and smell. The type and location of the sensory receptor activated by the
Visual search is a type of perceptual task requiring attention that typically involves an active scan of the visual environment for a particular object or feature (the target) among other objects or features (the distractors). Visual search can take place with or without eye movements. The ability to consciously locate an object or target amongst
Attentional shift (or shift of attention) occurs when directing attention to a point to increase the efficiency of processing that point and includes inhibition to decrease attentional resources to unwanted or irrelevant inputs. Shifting of attention is needed to allocate attentional resources to more efficiently process information from a stimulus. Research has shown that when
Green Red BluePurple Red PurpleMouse Top FaceMonkey Top Monkey Naming the font color of a printed word is an easier and quicker task if word meaning and font color are not incongruent. If both are printed in red, the average time to say “RED” in response to the word ‘Green’ is greater than the time
The binding problem is a term used at the interface between neuroscience, cognitive science and philosophy of mind that has multiple meanings. Firstly, there is the segregation problem: a practical computational problem of how brains segregate elements in complex patterns of sensory input so that they are allocated to discrete “objects”. In other words, when
The hard problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining how and why we have qualia or phenomenal experiences—how sensations acquire characteristics, such as colors and tastes. The philosopher David Chalmers, who introduced the term “hard problem” of consciousness, contrasts this with the “easy problems” of explaining the ability to discriminate, integrate information, report mental
A parent and child engage in joint attention Joint attention or shared attention is the shared focus of two individuals on an object. It is achieved when one individual alerts another to an object by means of eye-gazing, pointing or other verbal or non-verbal indications. An individual gazes at another individual, points to an
Perceptual learning is learning better perception skills such as differentiating two musical tones from one another or categorizations of spatial and temporal patterns relevant to real-world expertise as in reading, seeing relations among chess pieces, knowing whether or not an X-ray image shows a tumor. Sensory modalities may include visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, and taste.
The term psychological refractory period (PRP) refers to the period of time during which the response to a second stimulus is significantly slowed because a first stimulus is still being processed. This delay in response time when one is required to divide attention can exhibit a negative effect that is evident in many fields of
Dichotic Listening is a psychological test commonly used to investigate selective attention within the auditory system and is a subtopic of cognitive psychology and neuroscience. Specifically, it is “used as a behavioral test for hemispheric lateralization of speech sound perception.”:381 During a standard dichotic listening test, a participant is presented with two different auditory stimuli
Attentional retraining is the retraining of automatic attentional processes. The method of retraining varies but has typically employed computerized training programs. The term originally indicated retraining of attention to rehabilitate individuals after a brain injury who suffered from neurological disorders of attention including hemineglect, perseveration, limited attention span, and even ADHD. However, in more recent
Object-based attention refers to the relationship between an ‘object’ representation and a person’s visually stimulated, selective attention, as opposed to a relationship involving either a spatial or a feature representation; although these types of selective attention are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Research into object-based attention suggests that attention improves the quality of the sensory representation
The cocktail party effect is the phenomenon of being able to focus one’s auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, as when a partygoer can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room. This effect is what allows most people to “tune into” a single voice and
Stimulus filtering occurs when an animal’s nervous system fails to respond to stimuli that would otherwise cause a reaction to occur. The nervous system has developed the capability to perceive and distinguish between minute differences in stimuli, which allows the animal to only react to significant impetus. This enables the animal to conserve energy as
In psychophysics, sensory threshold is the weakest stimulus that an organism can detect. Unless otherwise indicated, it is usually defined as the weakest stimulus that can be detected half the time, for example, as indicated by a point on a probability curve. Methods have been developed to measure thresholds in any of the senses. The
Selective auditory attention or selective hearing is a type of selective attention and involves the auditory system of the nervous system. Selective hearing is characterized as the action in which people focus their attention on a specific source of a sound or spoken words. The sounds and noise in the surrounding environment is heard by
The mental state of highway hypnosis can occur on highways like this one. Highway hypnosis, also known as white line fever, is a mental state in which a person can drive a truck or other automobile great distances, responding to external events in the expected, safe and correct manner with no recollection of having
Cognitive inhibition refers to the mind’s ability to tune out stimuli that are irrelevant to the task/process at hand or to the mind’s current state. Cognitive inhibition can be done either in whole or in part, intentionally or otherwise. Cognitive inhibition in particular can be observed in many instances throughout specific areas of cognitive science.
Multi-Tasking on Laptop and Mobile Phone Human multitasking is an apparent human ability to perform more than one task, or activity, over a short period (1 hour). An example of multitasking is taking phone calls while typing an email and reading a book. Multitasking can result in time wasted due to human context switching
Continuous partial attention (CPA) is the process of paying simultaneous attention to a number of sources of incoming information, but at a superficial level. The term was coined by Linda Stone in 1998. Author Steven Berlin Johnson describes this as a kind of multitasking: “It usually involves skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking
Attention economics is an approach to the management of information that treats human attention as a scarce commodity, and applies economic theory to solve various information management problems. Put simply by Matthew Crawford, “Attention is a resource—a person has only so much of it.” In this perspective Thomas H. Davenport and J. C. Beck define
Absent-mindedness is where a person shows inattentive or forgetful behaviour. It can have three different causes: a low level of attention (“blanking” or “zoning out”) intense attention to a single object of focus (hyperfocus) that makes a person oblivious to events around him or her; unwarranted distraction of attention from the object of focus by