8.5 Constructing bibliographies At the end of your assignments you need to include a bibliography or list of references. This is an alphabetical list of all the sources that you have used – each chapter, book and article that you refer to in the main body of your discussion. Bibliographies take a particular form and usually involve listing the: author's name, date of publication, title of the piece, and details of the publisher.
8.3 Acknowledging the sources of ideas Even when you have used your own words it is essential that you acknowledge the source of the ideas you re-present. This entails making a note of the author and date of publication of the material from which you extract key concepts and points. So at the end of our summary of the Croall extract above, we would need to acknowledge that we got our information from that source by putting (Croall, 1998) at the end of the relevant paragraph. If you use more than one author's work in a paragraph th
7.1 Processing meanings Reading and thinking requires you to begin to process the material you read in preparation for re-presenting it in assessments. Initially, processing happens in your head. Selecting what to identify and extract will start the process off. Summarizing the arguments continues this process and, crucially, gets you started on reproducing ideas in your own words. The next stage is to develop your notes further by thinking more consciously about the material you have read and the points you
1.2 How do you read? A good way of getting started on developing your reading and note-taking skills is to think about how you read now. The short extract reproduced below is taken from The Scotsman and is a journalistic piece of wr Starting with psychology Acknowledgements The material below is contained in Social Psychology Matters, Wendy Holloway, Helen Lucey and Anne Phoenix, published in association with Open University Press, 2007. The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under creative commons licence. Grateful acknowledgement is m 3.3 A body–world interconnection Our consciousness of our bodies remains fundamentally tied up with our everyday embodied activities and relationships. The body thus represents both our particular view of the world as well as our Being-in-the-world (Heidegger, 1962 [1927]). Martin Heidegger (2001) draws a distinction between corporeal things and the body, questioning whether the sense of embodied selfhood that we all possess needs to coincide with the limits of a corporeal body. The corporeal thing stops 3.2 Consciousness of the body Phenomenological theorists distinguish between the subjective body (as lived and experienced) and the objective body (as observed and scientifically investigated). These are not two different bodies as such (phenomenologists pride themselves on overcoming dualisms!); rather they are different facets of our experience and consciousness. The body-subject, or subjective body, is the body-as-it-is-lived. I do not simply possess a body; I am my body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962 2.1 Resisting a body–mind–social split To what extent are you your body? The seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes saw human subjective experience (including rationality, thought and spirituality) as separate and fundamentally different from the objective world of matter, that of our bodies and the physical universe. This idea of a fundamental divide between mind and matter (as two different kinds of ‘stuff’) set the stage for centuries of debate on what came to be known as Cartesian dualism. Critics of this w References Further reading Styles, E.A. (1997) The Psychology of Attention, Hove, Psychology Press. A very readable textbook, which covers and extends the topics introduced in this unit. Pashler, H. (ed.) (1998) Attention, Hove, Psychology Press. An edited book, with contributors from North America and the UK. Topics are dealt with in rather more depth than in the Styles book. 5.4 Summary of Section 5 Many familiar themes have re-emerged in this section, together with the recognition that attention is involved in the assembly of remembered material as well as of current perceptions. Attention is associated with the generation of perceptual objects. In addition to being an essential part of external stimulus processing, attention influences remembered experiences. ERP data show that cortical signals derived from una 5.1 Introduction Modern techniques for revealing where and when different parts of the brain become active have recently provided a window on the processes of attention. For example, one of these brain-scanning techniques, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has been used to show the behaviour of an area of the brain that responds to speech. It turns out also to become activated in a person viewing lips making speech movements in the absence of sound. For this to happen there must be connecti 4.1 Introduction The above account of having attention taken away from the intended target reminds us that, while it may be advantageous from a survival point of view to have attention captured by novel events, these events are actually distractions from the current object of attention. Those who have to work in open-plan offices, or try to study while others watch TV, will know how distracting extraneous material can be. Some try to escape by wearing headphones, hoping that music will be less distracting, bu 3.1 Introduction The binding of features emerges as being a very significant process when displays are brief, because there is so little time in which to unite them. With normal viewing, such as when you examine the letters and words on this page, it is not obvious to introspection that binding is taking place. However, if, as explained above, it is a necessary precursor to conscious awareness, the process must also occur when we examine long-lived visual displays. Researchers have attempted to demonstrate th 2.6 Summary of Section 2 The results of the visual attention experiments we have considered can be interpreted as follows. Attention can be directed selectively towards different areas of the visual field, without the need to re-focus. The inability to report much detail from brief, masked visual displays appears to be linked to the need to assemble the various information components. The visual information is captured in parallel, but assemb 2.5 Masking and attention Before I summarise the material in this section, and we move on to consider attentional processes with clearly-seen displays, it would be appropriate to consider the relevance of the masking studies to the issue of attention. We began the whole subject by enquiring about the fate of material which was, in principle, available for processing, but happened not to be at the focus of attention. Somehow we have moved into a different enquiry, concerning the fate of material that a participant was 2.4 Rapid serial visual presentation It has been known for a long time that backward masking can act in one of two ways: integration and interruption (Turvey, 1973). When the SOA between target and mask is very short, integration occurs; that is, the two items are perceived as one, with the result that the target is difficult to report, just as when one word is written over another. Of more interest is masking by interruption, which is the type we have been considering in the previous section. It occurs at longer S 2.2 Knowing about unseen information An obvious difference between hearing and seeing is that the former is extended in time, while the latter extends over space. So, for example, we can listen to a spoken sentence coming from one place, but it takes some time to hear it all. In contrast, a written sentence is spread over an area (of paper, say) but, as long as it is reasonably short, it can be seen almost instantly. Nevertheless, seeing does require some finite time to capture and analyse the information. This process can be ex 1.4 Eavesdropping on the unattended message It was not long before researchers devised more complex ways of testing Broadbent's theory of attention, and it soon became clear that it could not be entirely correct. Even in the absence of formal experiments, common experiences might lead one to question the theory. An oft-cited example is the cocktail party effect. Imagine you are attending a noisy party, but your auditory location system is working wonderfully, enabling you to focus upon one particular conversation. Suddenly, from
Activity 1
The most ‘important and greatest puzzle’ we face as humans is ourselves (Boring, 1950, p. 56). Humans are a puzzle – one that is complex, subtle and multi-layered, and it gets even more complicated as we evolve over time and change in different contexts.
When answering the question ‘What makes us who we are?’, psychologists put forward a range of explanations about why people feel, think and behave the way they do. Just when psychologists seem to understand one bit of ‘who we are’
