Brain games pay attention answers

The assignment is to choose only two of my classmate's post and reply to their post. One paragraph or two is enough for each of my classmates. Because it is like a discussion post try to be informal and use words like ( I like your points on..., I found your post really interesting, you have a good point..., when I read your post I..., I believe that ....) something like that (using the "I" word)

The rubric

For the Response Posts you will be graded as follows:

Points Awarded

0

1-­‐2

3-­‐4

Criteria

You did not complete any response posts, or your response Posts did not contribute to the discussion question.

You only completed one response post and/or your responses did not contribute to the discussion in a significant way.

Your responses advanced the conversation in a meaningful way, and provided a helpful and unique perspective on the discussion topic.

The question was:

The video will review many of the concepts discussed in your book (e.g., the spotlight metaphor of attention, change blindness, divided attention, etc). You will also have the oppotunity to engage in attention games! After watching the video, please post your thoughts/reactions to the games and link them to the principles/concepts discussed in your book and in the video.

The videos

· Brain Games - Pay Attention https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1zwwx4

· Test Your Awareness: Do the test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4

Your answer was:

I sat down to watch the two videos prepared to catch every little detail by closely paying attention. I hoped to prove scientists wrong. Even after it was clearly stated that there would be tricks and destructions throughout, I still fell for most of them and ended up amazed. Scenes such as that of Apollo at the warehouse and while picking pockets, for instance, clarified for me how we pay attention to what is important and often not to what isn’t (spotlight metaphor of attention). Even after watching Brain Games - Pay Attention, I went ahead and counted the number of passes the white team made in Test Your Awareness, I was relieved to find out I had counted correctly but immediately got furious that I had missed the moonwalking bear. Being asked to focus on an aspect with the intention of making me unaware of other occurrences left me feeling quite cheated, but has driven the concepts home nonetheless. It really is easy to miss something you are not looking for! I still can’t believe I was not able to catch the switch in Brain Games - Pay Attention, especially due to the change in the color of the shirt when the man went under for a pen (change blindness).

The concept associated with foveation that perception of the world being largely due to unconscious construction and filling in on the basis of inference to supplement the inadequate input of the eyes has also been supported by the scene in Brain Games - Pay Attention, where it was possible to read the entire sentence with all the letters out of place just after I happened to have missed the bunny, the gorilla and the bear in the previous scene, this confirms the positioning of my eyeballs in a way that limited the field of vision to what Apollo was doing thus filtering out the other details resulting in inattention blindness. I am delighted by the way the two videos have imposed on me an in-depth understanding of the not so easy to perceive concepts.

The classmate's answers:

Mary’s answer:

brain games in this week’s video demonstrated that it is difficult, if not impossible, to process more than one thing at a time. It’s interesting and a bit frightening to learn how much we are oblivious to in our environment and how influential our perceptions can be with regard to the attended or unattended data that we process.

The Jabawockee game demonstrated inattentional blindness, the process by which we fail to see things that are right in front of us. The game supports the theory that attention is required to see and process stimuli. The penguin in the background was considered (by my brain at least) to be a distraction to the stimuli that I was supposed to be focusing on, therefore, it was filtered out.

With his understanding of how minds work, Apollo is able to create illusions and distract audiences effectively. Knowing that most minds can only focus on one thing at a time, he distracts by asking questions, which requires use of the attended channel and resources to process. While asking questions (requiring top-down attention), his hands are moving, constantly disrupting our visual (spotlight) attention. He grabs our attention with one hand, to show us something, (requiring bottom-up attention), while the other hand steals an item off of the person, who missed it because it was out of his perception of expectation. Our brains focus on the perceived priority, and in this case, there were too many things to focus on to pick a priority.

The Copperfield and Magic game was a great example of how difficult it is to effectively multi-task, especially unpracticed tasks with measureable outcomes. Petrus Venter reinforces this as he attempts to navigate obstacles with his car while having to focus on an unfamiliar conversation. He perceives his ability to simultaneously drive and conduct business on the cell phone as exceptional under normal circumstances, but when both tasks required additional resources because they were unfamiliar, he found it to be challenging.

Change blindness was demonstrated in games 1, 2 and 3. In all 3 games, some aspect of the scene changed. I didn’t catch any of the changes, due to either selection or priming (Reisberg, 158). The selection proposal suggests that the changes were perceived and then forgotten, or they weren’t seen at all. Priming suggests that the expectation of stimuli will prepare the appropriate detectors, allowing for recognition.

Jessica’s answer:

This video had my attention right from the get-go! The first trick had me really confused. I found myself rewinding multiple times to try and figure out exactly was happening. I picked a card and then it was gone, so I rewound and picked another and then it was also gone, I was so confused! I then continued to watch the video. By the next trick, I was once again bewildered. The fact that so much can be changing around us and we might not even notice it. This is due to inattentional blindness. Inattentional blindness is when people fail to see a prominent stimulus even though they are staring at it. We focus so much on one object and then miss the stimulus. In the video, he was counting his money all well the back round was changing. His hat also changed, the table was changed into a stool and his handkerchief changed. Our brains were completely focused on the money we missed all of these things in the back. I think that inattentional blindness is a very interesting subject because it is something that happens every day. I find it very interesting because this is something I see every time I am on the ice for hockey. I focus only on the puck as I am a goalie and I miss everything else. I don't see someone fall, or the parent dancing in the stands I just see the puck. I had always wondered how I was able to do this. Inattentional blindness can actually be very dangerous. When you are doing something like driving you to focus so much on the road and the task of driving that you could easily miss the person/animal that just jumped in front of you.

We also see change blindness when the man is counting his money. As we see him with a background counting his money, the camera zooms in on his hands and then zooms back out to him and the background is different. I didn't notice at first but when I rewound the video I noticed that the background had actually changed. We just didn't notice because we had been focused on the money while it zoomed in it more.

I enjoyed how at the end of the video it wrapped up by saying that we miss these things because of our full attention to what was important. I often feel as though when I am focused on something I am going to miss something but I guess that is right in that the brain knows what is important and will focus on that.