Attention and Consciousness Cognitive Psychology

Attention and Consciousness: Attention is basically the means by which we actively process a restricted amount of information from the massive amount of information available through our senses, our stored memories, and our other cognitive processes. Attention permits us to use our limited mental resources judiciously. By reducing the lights on many stimuli from outside and inside, we can highlight the stimuli that interest us. This heightened focus rises the likelihood that we can respond speedily and accurately to interesting stimuli. attention comprises both conscious and unconscious processes. In several cases, conscious processes are comparatively easy to study. Unconscious processes are inflexible to study, simply because you are not conscious of them.

For example, you always have a riches of information available to you that you are not even aware of until you save that information from your memory or shift your attention toward it. You maybe can remember where you slept when you were ten years old or where you ate your breakfasts when you were 12. At any given time, you also have available a stunning array of sensory information to which you just do not attend. In the end, if you attended to each and every detail of your environment, you would feel overwhelmed pretty fast. You also have very little consistent information about what happens when you sleep. Therefore, it is hard to study processes that are unknown somewhere in your unconsciousness, and of which you are not aware.

Here are the four key functions of attention:

Consciousness contains both the feeling of awareness and the content of awareness, some of which might be under the focus of attention. As a result, attention and consciousness form two partially overlapping sets. Conscious attention serves three purposes in playing a fundamental role for cognition.

1. It aids in monitoring our relations with the environment. Over suchmonitoring, we preserve our awareness of how well we are adapting to the conditionin which we find ourselves.
2. It supports us in associating our past such as memories andour present as sensations to give us a sense of stability of experience. Such continuity might even serve as the basis for personal identity.
3. It helps us in controlling and planning for our future activities. We can do so based on the informationfrom monitoring and from the relations between past memories and present sensations.

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