Chapter 3 - Perceptual Processes II: Attention and Consciousness

Chapter 3 discusses three types of attention: divided, selective, and saccadic eye movement. Divided attention is trying to pay attention to more than one detail, but causes a decrease in accuracy when this is done. Selective attention is where someone is instructed to respond selectively to certain kinds of information, while ignoring other information. Saccadic eye movements is the process which our visual system makes during reading. Chapter 3 also discusses consciousness, which is the awareness that people have about the outside world and about their perceptions, images, thoughts, memories, and feelings.

So far, we have learned about the types of perception: visual, audio, facial, and speech and I believe that when one is conscious of what is going on around them, using these perceptions, they are more aware and can give better attention.

This chapter was very interesting, so I understood most of it. One thing I had to reread to understand better was the working memory.

I would like to apply this to my own teaching by using my conscious to pay more attention to which students have high working-memory versus low working-memory.

After trying all of the demonstrations the author provided, that was proof enough to believe these theories. I fell for every one of them.

It is important to know this information in order to be able to know our students better through knowing their attention processing capabilities. The saccadic movements students use to read will help me differentiate from the poor readers and the good readers.

I would use the saccadic eye movement in order to help students practice being better readers. I am currently researching the EyeQ reading program, which I think helps with improving reading by exercising the eyes by reading words on a computer screen from left to right.

This EyeQ program is very expensive, so I believe this may be accomplished just by having students read anything on a computer screen or maybe have the words fly across the computer to build faster readers (it may start out slow, then move faster as the student progresses).

Chapter 2

1. Chapter 2 discussed perceptual processes and different theories on how both our visual and auditory systems impose organization on our perceptual world. Some different theories were top-down and bottom-up processing, visual and auditory object recognition, face recognition, proximal stimuli vs. tre distal stimuli and the general mechanism approach to speech perception.

2. Chapter 1 discusses the idea that your cognitive processes are interrelated. For example, when one figures out a problem to something, they must use their perceptual processes, which according to Chapter 2, is the visual and auditory recognition that use our previous knowledge to interpreet the stimuli that are registerd by our senses.

3. With all of the different theories discussed in the chapter, I am a little confused on why some students are quicker learners than others or faster readers, etc. I am also confused on why students are different learners. How does this fit in with cognition. Is it active learning, genetic, or does it have to do with their surroundings (behaviorist theory) where they had reactions to stimuli in the environment. Is it top-down/bottom-up processing that makes a person "see" things or is it the fact that we build our memories the more we see or are exposed to something? I don't know.

4. How would apply this to my own teaching/work? According to Chapter 2, the way I would apply these theories, which I have done so already, is to make sure students see, hear, and have hands-on experiences in all areas. They must see a facial expression when being spoken to and they must hear the sounds that go along with certain things. Today I did a lesson on Adverbs and I used the bottom-up and top-down processing to help students become more familiar with these words. I gave them each a different adverb to write on a sticky note, then I had them stick their adverb on a chart in the correct column labeled "HOW," "WHEN," "WHERE," AND "TO WHAT DEGREE". Then they had to try to verbally use the word in a sentence. Students commented on how much easier it was for them to understand what an adverb was after that lesson.

5. I'm not sure this theory goes with the above lesson, but it was convincing enough to me when it talked about how students could read faster by recognizing words that were used correctly in a sentence vs. words that were spelled wrong or out of order.

6. I guess this is important because in order for us to be better teachers, we can create more successful lesson plans and be able to reach more students.

Practice

This is just a test to see if this works.