Blinks
In the book Blink, Gladwell describes a phenomenon he refers to as “blinks”. These are instances where your unconscious takes in information and processes it, so you react to the situation without having to take the time to consciously think. Throughout his book Gladwell provides a variety of situations where these are helpful or harmful, however he does not touch on how this process occurs or how it relates to attention.
While we still are not sure exactly how attention selection works, it is most likely a mixture of late and early selection, and many scientists have proposed different models to demonstrate this. One such model is Deutsch-Norman late selection model. This late model suggests that all sensory information is processed, and then a context module forms a looping system to determine which stimulus will receive the most activation and thus be brought to your conscious attention. This model seems to make sense, but brings the question, what happens to the …show more content…
In this experiment they first had the subject listen and attend to one stimulus, and when the name of a city was presented the subject received a shock. In the next phase, the subject was told to only attend to the story read into the right ear, and ignore words in the left. What Corteen & Wood found was that the subjects skin still produced an electrodermal response to the city names i that were associated with a shock, even when the subject later reported not being consciously aware of the word being said. Not only does this support the Deutsch-Norman late selection model, but it provides an explanation for Gladwell’s ‘blinks’. It shows that even when we are not attending to a stimulus it is still getting processed and our unconscious is taking that information and determining what to do with it. It may disregard the stimulus, or produce an effect in a ‘blink’ such as the electrodermal response Corteen and Wood
In the book Blink, Gladwell describes a phenomenon he refers to as “blinks”. These are instances where your unconscious takes in information and processes it, so you react to the situation without having to take the time to consciously think. Throughout his book Gladwell provides a variety of situations where these are helpful or harmful, however he does not touch on how this process occurs or how it relates to attention.
While we still are not sure exactly how attention selection works, it is most likely a mixture of late and early selection, and many scientists have proposed different models to demonstrate this. One such model is Deutsch-Norman late selection model. This late model suggests that all sensory information is processed, and then a context module forms a looping system to determine which stimulus will receive the most activation and thus be brought to your conscious attention. This model seems to make sense, but brings the question, what happens to the …show more content…
In this experiment they first had the subject listen and attend to one stimulus, and when the name of a city was presented the subject received a shock. In the next phase, the subject was told to only attend to the story read into the right ear, and ignore words in the left. What Corteen & Wood found was that the subjects skin still produced an electrodermal response to the city names i that were associated with a shock, even when the subject later reported not being consciously aware of the word being said. Not only does this support the Deutsch-Norman late selection model, but it provides an explanation for Gladwell’s ‘blinks’. It shows that even when we are not attending to a stimulus it is still getting processed and our unconscious is taking that information and determining what to do with it. It may disregard the stimulus, or produce an effect in a ‘blink’ such as the electrodermal response Corteen and Wood