Chapter 3

1. There are three types of attention processes: divided attention, selective attention, and saccadic eye movements. The processes explain how our attention can or cannot focus on what is happening at the moment. There are also multiple theories that explain attention such as neuroscience research and visual reasoning for attention. The chapter also discussed consciousness and its relation to attention and vision with thought suppression, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and blindsight.
2. The feature-integration theory discussed one can easily find and target, could be a word or a specific picture, when it is in a specific color and different from the irrevelant items. The website discussed when using less color and distractors one can more easily view and understand the content presented-thus, reinforcing the the study by Treisman and Gelade. The chapter also discussed brain lesions in which people might not see specific places in the viewing field which accounts for "unusual deficits" in attention tasks. My father-in-law suffers from this. It is hard to keep him on task when eating because he believes he is finished eating and wants to leave the table because he cannot see his food. Or, he often sees the food on others' plates and wonders why he doesn't have it (he cannot see it on his plate). His attention is diverted constantly because of his visual problem. Chapter 2 discussed brain lesions and prosopagnosia with not recognizing human faces. So, lesions, depending on where they occur, can effect different visual or attention processes.
3. I am still not clear on where ADD fits into the picture. This is the attention processing chapter. It did touch on OCD but not a lot of students are OCD. We, as teachers, struggle with students who have attention issues and how to combat them with our teaching.
4. As discussed on blackboard, I wrote about how my students use the attention process of saccadic eye movements. I have realized that most of my students read word by word and pause longer to figure out the word because they are taking the whole word and stretching it out letter by letter sound. Their attention is focusing incorrectly. I need to try and teach my students more about taking larger eye movements and looking ahead at words when they read. This will hopefully increase their fluency and comprehension because they will be more apt to thinking about the story and not about decoding letter by letter. I guess the whole is bigger than the part! 5. Again, previous chapters back up the theories stated that seem to make it valid. I am not quite sure about the bottleneck theories. The book discusses it is too simplistic and goes further to discuss how it might be incorrect. The author does go to say that there are some credible parts of the theory but I cannot seem to find if the author is for or against this theory. There is not a lot of evidence to back it either way (or am I missing something?)
6. Attention is important because it allows us to see that there are different modes and reasonings why and how our brains process information and reverts to what is happening in our surroundings. It allows me to understand why some of my students conduct themselves the way they do during our small group lessons and during independent reading. I have more of a concept that each student is different and their attention processing is different. It's like differentiated instruction but I'm going to call it differentiated attention! This chapter also helps explain my father-in-law! He suffered a major stroke and now cannot see everything-especially things on his dinner plate. I need to be more patient with him during dinner because I have an understanding as to why he is acting this way!
7. I can use the saccadic eye movement attention processing with my lower readers. I will use this concept when working with my students in taking them one step forward and take their attention from reading letter by letter to reading word by word and looking ahead to help with fluency and comprehension.
8. I think that the white bear and cocktail party effect could have more easily been studied through surveys. It would have been a faster and cheaper method. The white bear could have been studied in a high school classroom setting quickly and without any cost. As for the brain research discussed, I still think that there has to be a more cost effective way to research the brain lobes without the expensive PET scans. If anyone can think of a way, please let me know!