Cognition and Attention in Performance
There has been a long history of attention within psychology for the last century. According to Posner (1994), the researcher William James stated, "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 simultaneous objects or trains of thought." Research shows that the “brain stem reticular formation was a necessity to maintain the alert state provided some anatomical reality to the study of an aspect of attention.” These information-processing mechanisms started after World War II with studies of “selective listening.” Selective listening experiments “supported a view of attention that suggested early selection of relevant message, with nonselective information being lost to conscious processing” (p. 7398). The earliest research studies of attention involved “maintenance of the alert state” of consciousness and concentration. According to evidence, as the alertness increases, the speed of processing events improves. “The trade-off between improved speed and reduced accuracy with warning signals has led to a view that alerting does not act to improve the buildup of information concerning the nature of the target but, instead, acts on the attentional system to enhance the speed of actions taken toward the target” (p. 7402).
Concerning with attention and performance “it became a research tradition that began during World War II in the United Kingdom.” Research within this tradition has sought to illuminate basic questions about the architecture of the human mind by examining the human performance in relatively simple tasks. In addition and more relevant to this paper, “there has also been a great increase in efforts t...
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...onditions in motor learning.Journal of motor behavior, 36(2), 212-224.
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A video is put on, and in the beginning of this video your told to count how many times the people in the white shirts pass the ball. By the time the scene is over, most of the people watching the video have a number in their head. What these people missed was the gorilla walking through as they were so focused on counting the number of passes between the white team. Would you have noticed the gorilla? According to Cathy Davidson this is called attention blindness. As said by Davidson, "Attention blindness is the key to everything we do as individuals, from how we work in groups to what we value in our classrooms, at work, and in ourselves (Davidson, 2011, pg.4)." Davidson served as the vice provost for interdisciplinary studies at Duke University helping to create the Program in Science and Information Studies and the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience. She also holds highly distinguished chairs in English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke and has written a dozen different books. By the end of the introduction Davidson poses five different questions to the general population. Davidson's questions include, "Where do our patterns of attention come from? How can what we know about attention help us change how we teach and learn? How can the science of attention alter our ideas about how we test and what we measure? How can we work better with others with different skills and expertise in order to see what we're missing in a complicated and interdependent world? How does attention change as we age, and how can understanding the science of attention actually help us along the way? (Davidson, 2011, p.19-20)." Although Davidson hits many good points in Now You See It, overall the book isn't valid. She doesn't exactly provide answers ...
Processing capacity is a very broad and flexible category according to many researchers. In fact, the quote above mentioned suggests that we often fail to notice things that happen just in front of us (unexpected events that are often salient) either because we were completely absorbed by something else or because we had so many things to do at the same time that we couldn’t pay attention to it. We have all at least once failed to see a friend who was waving at us while eating in the cafeteria or walking in a crowded street. The primary question that we should ask ourselves is: how many things can we attend at the same time? The truth is that we didn’t perceive this friend because of a phenomenon called “inattentional blindness”. The problem is that the richness of our visual experience leads us to believe that our visual representation will include and preserve the same amount of detail (Levin et al 2000). In this paper we’ll see the different theories of inattentional blindness, and the classical theories demonstrating this paradigm.
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In order to do so, I shall be looking at different sources and reviewing various definitions and interpretations of consciousness and distinguishing the methods approached to the study of the topic in the way it is measured.
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Specific performance generally is an equitable remedy granted by the court imposing an obligation on the party who is intended or have committed a breach of contract to perform his duty. It is a proper method of compelling the defendant to perform a positive obligation of his own under the contract entered into between him and the plaintiff.[ Halsbury Law of Schools] With the order for specific performance, the party in breach must perform his obligation.
Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12(5): 182-186. Styles, E. A. & Co. a. The adage of the ad The Psychology of Attention. 2nd Edition.
Macleod and Mathews (1991) induced attentional biases within a laboratory setting to determine that a ca...
Also, this section will provide an overview of theories that have been used to clarify the relationship between anxiety and performance in athletes. In Edward’s and Hardy’s opinion, the main problem that research on the relationship between anxiety and performance has encountered is that researchers have not defined all the specific terminology that is required to understand this subject. The following operational definitions will be used for the terms anxiety and stress. “Stress is a state that results from the demands that are placed on the individual which require that person to engage in some coping behavior.” Arousal is going to be considered to be a signal to the athlete that he/ she has entered into a stressful situation and is characterized by physiological signs.
Why do we do what we do? This is one question that summarizes the motive for psychology. The answer to this question is the reason why I declared psychology as my major. Current psychologists and those dating back to the year 1879, strove to achieve the answer to this reoccurring question. “The Father of Psychology”, Wilhelm Wundt, and those psychologists of-age, have been strenuously consulting and researching to truly understand the mind and its effect on human behavior. Over the last 127 years, an accumulation of various answers to that specific question have been made. In this paper, the main focus will be the working memory in athletics; how the conscious movements become unconscious and almost instinct-like, and how coaches can teach their athletes better, using explicit and implicit technique.
The way that our brain processes information and responds to the awareness of things is a very complex system with in the brain. One study mentioned talks about the integration of senses in the brain and how we process the information. “Another study better illustrates the integrative nature of this synchrony. Words were presented in various locations on a screen; whether the subject became aware of the word’s color or if its location-indicated by being able to recall is later-depended on whether a frontal or temporal area was activated during the presentation. But if the individual registered both the color and the location, additional activity occurred in a part of the parietal cortex (Uncapher, Otten, & Rugg, 2006).” (Garrett, pg.501) This research demonstrates how different people react differently to stimuli and different levels of their cognition and awareness. It is important for people to develop a sense of awareness in order to function fully in the world. The book argues “that one apparent advantage is that it enables consistency and a playfulness in our behavior that would not be possible otherwise. (Garrett, pg. 502) It is human nature to rely on a consistency and the ability to plan ahead which is why the function of awareness is so important to the human
Well, let's take a look at the brain. From being in class, my awareness about what I'm doing, what I'm seeing, what I'm hearing, what I'm thinking has come to reflect upon not just what, but how is it all being done by my brain. This morning I woke up, my eyes opened, I looked out my window, I saw the sun rising, it was this beautifully deep yellow/orange color. I thought, "How beautiful" and I smiled with a sense and feeling of wonderment. It could be said that I experienced nothing out of the ordinary this morning. Yet, if I could narrate these few activities in terms of the networking of neurons resulting in my eyes opening, my sight of the sun, my ability to perceive its color, my inner acknowledgment of its beauty and the emotions that sight evoked in me, you would be reading for a very long time and what I did this morning would indeed present itself in quite an extraordinary light. It is in recognition of this, with respect to the brain's aptitudes, that Howard Hughes in his paper, "Seeing, Hearing and Smelling the World" quoted May Pines in expressing, "We can recognize a friend instantly-full face, in profile, or even by the back of his head. We can distinguish hundreds of colors and possibly as many as 10,000 smells. We can feel a feather as it brushes our skin, hear the faint rustle of a leaf. It all seems so effortless: we open our eyes or ears and let the world stream in. Yet anything we see, hear, feel, smell, or taste requires billions of nerve cells to flash urgent messages along linked pathways and feedback loops in our brains, performing intricate calculations that scientists have only begun to decipher"(1).
An analysis of factors that determine the allocation of attention was composed by Khaneman (1973) in which cognitive systems were formed and held responsible for allocating cogniti...