Unit II Psychology - Attention, Perception and Memory

1. Attention………..

4. UNIT-2
ATTENTION,PERCEPTION&
MEMORY

6. Attention
• The concept of Attention is studied in Cognitive
Psychology with focus on explaining how we
process the environmental information with the
help of our sensory receptors.
• The term attention is used for various perceptual
processes, which involves selection and inclusion
of certain sensory inputs as a part of our
conscious experience.
• The process of attention involves the very act of
listening and concentrating on a specific object,
topic or event, for fulfilling the desired goals.

7. • Attention improves our concentration or
consciousness on a selective object only, which
helps in improving the clarity or focus on the
object which is being perceived.
• Attention cannot be simply regarded to be a
cognitive process only, as it is also influenced by
emotions, attitude, interest and memory.
• The process of attention takes place through our
cognitive abilities, but the behavioral and
emotional factors help in the selection of the
relevant information or stimuli from the
environment for focusing one’s consciousness
around one event or thing for having a clear
perception.

9. Attention
• Attention is a process which produces interest
to select the particular stimulus from various
stimuli in the environment.

11. Definition of Attention
• Attention is the process of getting an
object of thought clearly before the
mind.
• - Ross (1951)

12. Types of Attention
Attention
• Voluntary or Volitional
attention
• Involuntary or Non-volitional
attention

13. Characteristics of Attention
• It is a selective process
• Cognition (First step in the mental process)
• Three Dimensional (A,B,C)
• McDougall – ‘Attending’ as ‘Striving’
• It needs motor-adjustment
• Attention is not divisible.

14. • It is fluctuating in nature.
• Span of attention is limited.
• Internal factors
• Interest and efforts

15. Nature of Attention
• Attention is a cognitive process.
• Attention is continuous.
• Attention involves selectivity.
• Attention is always fluctuating and shifting, our interest
and needs are changing and they affect the process of
attending.
• Attention is a form of consciousness that makes
information rationally accessible to the subject.
• There can be no attention without interest or need.
• It increases the clarity of the stimuli for perception.

16. • Attention as a personal level activity.
• Attention is a process of adjustment.
• Through attending the individual adjust himself inner needs
or to outer stimuli.
• Attention helps to keep in mind experiences more
accurately and fully.
• Attention increases efficiency. It helps people to get ready
to meet any situation.
• Attention improves sensory discrimination.
• It is a motivational process.
• Attention is dynamic in nature.
• It is Purposive

18. Distraction

21. Inattention
• Inattention means not paying attention to a
particular stimulus or to any stimulus.
• we do not pay attention to a particular
stimulus because we are not interested in it.
• Inattention is caused by the absence of
objective and subjective factors that
determine one’s attention,
• Eg: lack of interest, motivation, need on the
part of the individual cause inattention

23. Divided Attention
• In divided attention, the user pays attention to
two or more tasks at the same time and is also
sometimes regarded as Multi-tasking which
involves managing between two or more than
two tasks at the same time.

24. Divided attention
• Divided attention could be defined as our brain's ability
to attend to two different stimuli at the same time, and
respond to the multiple demands of your surroundings.
• Divided attention is a type of simultaneous attention
that allows us to process different information sources
and successfully carry out multiple tasks at a time.
• This cognitive skills is very important, as it allows us to
be more efficient in our day-to-day lives.
• Our ability to attend to multiple stimuli and do various
tasks at a time does have its limits.
• When you divide your attention, the efficiency with
which you do these actions is decreased, and you will
almost certainly perform poorly.

25. Span of attention
• The term “span of attention” refers to the
numbers of object which can be grasped in
one short presentation.

27. Determining span of attention experimentally

28. Determinants of Attention
• External Factors: These are the factors which are
external in nature and are usually governed by the
characteristics of the stimuli.
• These external factors could be related to the nature
of the stimuli, the intensity as well as the size of the
stimuli, the degree to which contrast, variety or
change is present in the stimuli.
• The extent to which the exposure to a stimulus is
repeated will, also determine the strength of the
attention.
• Moreover, a stimulus which is in a state of motion
will be able to catch our attention more quickly than
a stationery one.

29. Types of Attention
Non-Volitional
(Involuntary
attention)
Enforced
Spontaneous
Volitional
Voluntary
Attention
Implicit
Explicit

30. External factors
• Nature of the stimulus
• Movement of the stimulus
• Contrast and variety of the stimulus .
• Intensity and size of the stimulus
• Repetition of stimulus.
• Change of the stimulus.
• Rareness of the stimulus .
• Novelty of the stimulus.
• Strangeness of the stimulus.
• Isolation of the stimulus

31. Internal (Subjective) factors
• The subjective factors which influence attention
are interests, motive, mind set and our attitudes
& moods.
• It is believed that interest is the mother of
attention, as we pay attention or focus on those
objects about which we have interest.
• Similarly, our needs or motives equally govern
our attention for specific events or objects.
• Moreover, the mental readiness of a person to
respond to certain stimuli or preparedness will
also determine the attention level for that
person.

32. Internal factors
These factors are based on individuals.
1. Interest
2. Motives
3. Attitude
4. Mind set
5. Aim/ goal
6. Attitudes
7. Basic needs (food deprivation)
8. Curiosity
9.Habit or practice
10. Emotion

33. 11.Feelings
12. Individual‘s internal desire and needs
13. Mental set
14. Mood
15. Past experiences
16. Purpose
17. Social motives
18. Temperament
19. Training.
20.Education and training

34. Educational Implications of attention
• i. The teacher should try to secure attention of the children in
teaching-learning situation.
• ii. The teacher should create a conducive environment at the
time of teaching in order to concentrate full attention among
the children.
• iii. The learning atmosphere should be free from all possible
distracting factors.
• iv. In order to create attention the teacher should try to
motivate the students at each stage of teaching.
• v. Diagrams, figures and pictures should be drawn at the time
of need.
• vi. Audio-visual aids should be used properly.

35. • vii. The teacher should move use of gestures,
postures, actions and demonstrations at the time of
teaching.
• viii. The students should be involved actively in
teaching-learning activities.
• ix. Fear of punishment and rude behavior of teacher
should be avoided.
• x. The teacher should show a fair and impartial
treatment to all the students in the class.

40. Sense organs are the gateways of
Human Knowledge

41. Five Senses

42. • Visual Stimuli Eyes Visual Sensation Seeing
• Auditory Stimuli Ears Auditory Sensation Hearing
• Fragrance – Nose – Olfactory – Smelling
• Taste Stimuli - Tongue - Gustatory Sensation – Tasting
• Tactile stimuli - Skin – Tactile Sensation – Feeling of
touch

43. • Sensation is the immediate result of a sense
organ acted upon by appropriate stimuli.

44. Perception
• It is a psychological process.
• Perception is the process of understanding
sensory inputs to which we attend, into
organised impressions that we experience.
• Mental interpretation of sensation results in
perception.
• Perception = Sensation + Meaningful
interpretation.

45. Laws of Perceptual Organisation
• Law of Pragnanz
• Law of Proximity
• Law of Similarity
• Law of Closure
• Law of Continuity

46. Law of Pragnanz
• Gestalt
• Pragnanz means ‘compact but significant’.

47. Law of Proximity

48. Law of Similarity

49. Law of Closure

50. Law of Continuity

52. Errors in Perception
• Our perception is not always true and
accurate. Sometimes errors do creep in our
perception when our mind wrongly interprets
the sensory input, which is otherwise known
as ‘Illusion”.

53. Illusion
• Illusions are wrong or mistaken perceptions
which fail to correspond with the situation as
objectively assessed.
• Illusions arise because of the ambiguous
qualities of what is perceived or the state of
the perceiving the person or both.
• Eg. Rope as snake
• Small round nickel as rupee coin

55. Different types of Illusion
• Illusion of movements – A spot of light in dark
appears to be move around.
• Illusion of perspectives – Two parallel lines
appear to meet at a long distance.
• Reversible perspective figures.
• Muller-Lyer illusion and Vertical-Horizontal
illusion
• Optical illusions.

57. Hallucination
• Hallucination is false perception.
• It is differentiated from illusion.
• It has no sensory basis and it is a dream like
image often mistaken for perception.
• Eg.Mirage.
• Ghost spotting a tamarind tree.

60. Memory
• Memory is storehouse. It stores information.
• The information is recollected.
• Memory in general is an ability to remember
things that happened a short or long time ago.
• Our mind has the power of retaining and
responding the information.

61. Definitions of Memory
• “Memory is retention or storage of
information in any form” - Guilford (1968)
• “Memory is the ability of an organism to store
information from earlier learning process,
experience, retention and reproduce that
information in answer to specific stimuli”.
• Eysenck (1970)

62. Definitions of Memory
• “Memory is the cognitive process of
preserving current information for later use” -
Bootzin (1991)
• “Memory is the capacity to retain and later
retrieve information”.
• Baron (1995)

63. Four elements involved in memory
Learning Retention Recall
Recognition

64. • Learning depends on
• Nature of learning material
• Nature of learner
• Learning methods.

65. Three Stages of Memory
• Learning or memorizing
• Retention of storing
• Retrieving (Recall or recognition)

66. Information Processing
Information
is
fed
from
sensory
channels
INPUT
Information
is
stored
and
processed
CENTRAL
OROCESSING
UNIT
Information
is
retrieved
OUTPUT

67. Stages of Memory
Encoding Storage Retrieval

68. Nature and Types of Memory
Incidental
Memory
Indistinct
Sensory
Memory
Short-Term
Memory
Long-Term
Memory

69. Atkinson-Shiffrin Store Model of
Information Processing

70. Sensory Memory
• All the information captured by the sense
organs.
• Some selected information goes for longer
storage.

71. Short-Term Memory
• A memory store holds a limited amount of
information for a relatively short period. (20
Seconds).
• After that information will disappear unless
rehearsed.
• It is renamed as working memory.

72. Long Term Memory
• An apparently permanent and for practical
purposes unlimited memory store can be
termed as LTM.
• It can hold information over lengthy period of
time.

75. Strategies for improving Memory
• Retrieval – bring back the stored information
for the use as and when we required.
• Recall – recollect the happenings
• Recognition – identification marks, clues,
evidences

76. Signs of Good Memory
• Rapidity – to have good memory, recollect his past
experiences very quickly
• Accuracy - One could bring back the learned materials
without any distortion, he is said to have good memory
• Length of Time - How long one could retain the learned
materials in memory before retrieving
• Promptness of retrieval - If one is able to bring back the
learned materials instantly with easy without requiring any
help
• Serviceableness - recall of right thing at the right place
• Example – can’t recall the answer at the time of interview

77. Memory Span
• Span of Memory is measures by Memory
Drum
• Letter span or Digital span
• Training, grouping and meaning help to
increase memory span
• Span of memory depends upon the factors of
Preservation
• Memory span increase with age, reaching the
maximum by about 25 years

78. Techniques of Promoting Better
memory
• A good memory depends on good brain
• Motivation to learn
• Meaning ful learning
• Follow SQR3 – Survey, questioning, recite, repeat,
review.
• Spacing the learning periods
• Recitation & self evaluation
• Over- learning
• Rhymes & Logical Association

79. • Mnemonics devices - artificial associations like
abbreviations Ex. VIBGYOR
• Multisensory learning (film scenes & songs - TV)
• Periodical rest and sleep immediately after
learning
• Subjects of study should be arranged to avoid
interferences like pro-active and retro –active
inhibitions Ex. After learning Maths, then learn
language subjects
• Concept Mapping – advanced organiser –
Ausubel.

80. Factors that affecting Memory
• Here are several common factors that can affect
your memory:
• Lack of sleep- Not getting enough sleep is a major
factor of memory loss and forgetfulness.
• Stress and anxiety- stress and anxiety can
contribute to memory loss and forgetfulness
• Depression - affect your ability to concentrate,
remember details, stay organized and make
decisions
• Thyroid problems - thyroid gland controls your
metabolism, which can also affect your memory

81. Memory Disorder
• Damage of neuron- anatomical structure that
hinders the storage, retention and recollection of
memories.
• Head Injuries
• Common memory loss
• Memory slip - misplaced the car key, tip of the
tongue but unable to recall the name
• Alcohol Related dementia – brain damage due to
intake of alcohol – short term memory loss
• Mental Blocks – Mind going Blank