Please explain what Attention means, how we study it and your final thoughts on the human

created definition.
Our textbook talks about attention as if its a puzzle waiting to be solved like the riddles of our
universe but to look at it in terms of a mental process it is the process of concentrating effort on a
stimulus or a mental event (pg. 113); or in other words a way of focusing like a magnifying glass
on some tinder and tuning out whatever it is we need to tune out in order to concentrate our
mental resources to that thing.
There are many ways of looking at the meanings of attention such as viewing it from the angle as
a mental resource as opposed to a process and it seems that with every new approach there is
almost always some new insight to be taken away from it but its never significant enough to
give us anything concrete as the processes of scientific inquiry and experimentation demands of
it because we are limited by the tools we have available to us that measure essentially light
impulses. Contrarily, its quite possible that things like attention are susceptible to forces of the
universe like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and because of it I think the more that we
look sometimes the less we find and just when we thought we found something we realize that
theres so much more to be found.
Explain what neuroimaging is, methods and what we can/cannot deduce from such studies.
Neuroimaging is a method of investigating with certain technologies our functional brains by
observing it as it functions; or in other words the brain in action (pg. 59). That is, we can
examine a persons anatomy all we want to, his/her physical structures; eyes, ears, nose, etc. but
will it every give us insight into who that person is? Looking deeper we try to understand this
person by putting them in certain situations perhaps well place him/her at the mall, the zoo, or at
an amusement park to observe them interact with their environment and to get a better
understanding of them. In much the same way, we observe the brain by the images we receive in
responses to certain stimuli by way of the nervous system. What we can deduce from these
images are the connections they have to certain parts of the brain and the way the nervous system
interacts with it thus perhaps giving us the ability to manually manipulate sensations, motor
responses, or things like feelings by using certain stimuli to trigger reactions. What we cannot
deduce are things like intuition or pin-point, for example, the location of where something like
the soul or spirit of a person might be housed in the brain.
Explain what we know about learning/memory from a cognitive approach. Explain
neurologically what is happening and the distinctions between the two.
There are different approaches to understanding memory, how it is stacked in the brain or how it
is connected through neurons in an ever-expanding network. There are various memory stores
that are specific to pieces information that we inherit biologically and that we develop over time
about who we are, what the world is, as well as other pieces of information like those that we
gather from studying disciplines like mathematics that allows us to make sense and perceive the
world as we see it, and there is also memory for how we operate. Essentially there are two types
of memory: short-term memory that has a limited capacity for retaining information and longterm memory that has integrated itself into our being.

In terms of learning, memory plays a very important role in how much we can learn, what we
can learn, and how much we can further our learning to greater depths of understanding. For
example, by using the ideas of depth of processing (pg. 197) we can think about things and place
them into our long-term memory store so that we can use them to understand another concept or
idea in the future. Or we could use mnemonics to help us retrieve information so that we can
get a good grade on a test that will open the door to taking an upper division class that will
further our learning in a particular discipline. So what are the distinctions between memory and
learning? The only distinction that I can think of is that learning is more just psychology
whereas memory is cognitive psychology. I mean, we can learn about learning through the
program of behaviorism (pg. 17) but to use the same method to learn about memory would be
like trying to understand the mechanics of a car just by observing the routes it takes on a daily
basis which would be pretty futile.
Please explain one concept/topic we went over this semester in this textbook that you enjoyed.
Please go through its significance/impact on our field.
There were so many topics that I enjoyed learning in this course but for the sake of this
assignment Ill choose what weve learned about in Chapter 8 about the sins of memory.
Learning about this, I really got a taste of what the world was made of, how it was formed, and
why it is the way it is sometimes. The significance of the sins of memory idea with the field of
cognitive psychology in mind is that if we assume that the brain is something that can be likened
to something like a complex computer system then we can understand how to program it or how
to create a program that can complement, compensate, or activate places in the brain that might
fill in these holes of our memory so that we can function more efficiently and accurately.