Chapter 3

1) Chapter 3 was all about attention and consciousness. Attention being all about our mental activity and how it allows us to take in a limited amount of the constant amount of information being thrown our way. Consciousness, simply stated, means the awareness one has of their outside world and their perceptions. Even though these two are closely related, they are not identical.

2) The material in chapter three reinforces what we have already learned in previous chapters. The brain is a magnificent machine and attention processes are related to how our abilities to take in and process visual and auditory information. I found myself reflecting on the Gestalt psychology that we read about in chapter 1. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

3) I enjoyed reading the information in this chapter. I did not find the material to be hard to understand; primarily due to the fact that it was of high interest to me. I would like to further investigate the obsessive-compulsive disorder. I have self diagnosed a family member with this and would be interested in learning more about it.

4) This information can and should be easily applied to the field of teaching. I found myself thinking of individuals in my classroom when reading about the divided and selective attention and dichotic listening. I know how hard it is for me to stay focused on just one thing at a time yet I expect my eight year old students to do this. I find it hard to concentrate when there are distracters present and yet I ask my students to do this everyday. I hope to keep this information in mind when dealing with my students. While I might not be able fix their attention problems, I can now understand them a little better.

5) The author presents many different studies and demonstrations to give the reader proof of what they are learning. I was amazed at the demonstration for the Stroop Effect. The studies that were discussed helped me to better understand the material.

6) The information in this chapter is extremely helpful in understanding attention and consciousness. These are two areas that teachers must be aware of to truly be understanding of their students and what they expect of them. The material presented about the three kinds of attention processes helps me to understand why it is so difficult for some of my students to stay on task.

7) I am drawn to the information about saccadic eye movement when thinking about what I could take back to the classroom and use. The book does a great job of explaining how this affects readers. I am trying to think of some strategies that could help my poor readers who might be struggling because of their saccadic movements. I am thinking of trying a blank index cards for the students to use as a guide to follow the text. I am wondering if this would help the eye movement.

8) I am not sure if there is a faster, cheaper, or better way of understanding the brain. It is too beneficial to not continue to research and discover more about our brain and how it functions.

In reading about visual and auditory processing it is truly amazing to think about all of the different things that are taking place when we process ordinary day to day stimulus. The bottom-up processing along with the top-down processing was one of the most applicable points when relating back to my experience in the classroom. I think this relates back to how a student is able to look at a word and use context clues to decode the word. I know it is so much easier for my lower level students to decode unfamiliar words when they are surrounded by clues to help them. This also takes me to the visual processing idea that a picture is worth a thousands words. For some of my students, a visual of a word helps them to process the word and form a connection with the word. In summary, I can conclude that both top-down and bottom-up processing play a huge role in the development of our students and their cognitive processes. This takes me back to chapter one where it discusses parallel processing. Basically our minds do a tremendous job of handling the many different signals and painting a clear picture for us.
I can also take the information about the processing into consideration when wondering why some of my students are not tuning in. Some students have trouble with verbal instruction and now I am wondering if that could not be related to a delay in their ability to process visual and auditory information simultaneously.
What I am most unclear about is the feature-analysis theory. Is this saying we are recognizing items simply by their basic features. Does it apply to all items or just curves and lines? I was seeing it as a skill that is used in the classroom where students are asked to group items using their attributes. The most obvious example would be polygons. Am I making this harder than it is?

Chapter 2

The information in chapter 2 was informative when reflecting on how my third grade students process information. I believe this information to be in line with the research that supports the different learning styles. There are definitely visual and auditory learners present in our classrooms.
I found the information about prosopagnosia to be amazing. The idea that a person can identify various parts of a person's face independent of one another, instead of forming a unified complete face is foreign to me. Did anyone else find this interesting?