Cognitive Psychology Research Paper

Psychology: Discuss effects of video games on attention
Have you ever spent all night playing the latest version of “Call of Duty” or on “Facebook” thinking that it had only been a few hours? This is due to the fact that your attention has been directed or channelized towards one specific activity. In cognitive psychology, attention is defined as the means by which we actively process a limited amount of information through our senses. Even in a relatively simple video game, a player is taking in an enormous amount of information. This processing can create an emotional connection associated with the playing of the game by stimulating pleasure centers in the brain. Furthermore, people are actively processing a small activity but taking in
A changing characteristic of humans is that they are likely to prefer “rapid pacing” rather than normal pacing by technology development. People are aiming faster technology to make less time taken. Therefore, by playing video games their brains have altered in form as the norm becomes the preference for quick pacing. Then limited attention becomes the norm for them. For example, today in social life, people get stimulated by modern technology and media such as telephones, computers and TV’s. Thus, they are not following any “normal” lifestyle such as reading a book or a newspaper. It then follows that, the “normal” lifestyle becomes challenging to people because it is not “rapid pacing”. This could cause a problem for certain professions in our society not being able to cognitively focus without “rapid pacing”. For instance, doctors and lawyers need to focus on details minute details that hold peoples lives in the balance. A lawyer needs to remember case files and to pull the correct information from them during a trial. This would mean lawyers going through information trying to find one detail to help their client. Doctors would need to consult each other or written sources to diagnose a patient’s ailment. A missed detail or focusing attention on something wrong would result in the wrong treatment possibly leading to death for the
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