Everyday Example
- Sensory information can be processed differently by individuals and individual reactions may change depending on previous experience. For example, if sitting in a lecture theatre of 30 people and a wasp flies into the room: 10 people might ignore the wasp: 15 people might momentarily register the wasp’s presence and return to listening to the lecture – these people have processed this information and decided it is not important and does not need a response
- However, the remaining 5 people may turn all their attention to the wasp and ignore the lecturer – these 5 people might pay this information higher priority as they have a phobia or have recently been stung and therefore this information is filtered as more important to them than the lecture. This might provoke a flight reaction and some of these people may stand up and leave the room for fear of being stung or a fight reaction where they attempt to ‘swat’ the wasp away.
- In the above example, the information (wasp) has been processed within milli-seconds and each person’s brain has filtered the information in a different way – some have ignored it and some have had a physical or emotional response to it.
Information Processing
- Information processing refers to the way in which our brain deals with the information from the environment around us, our brains are constantly exposed to information from all 5 of our senses.
- Our brain ‘filters’ information by selectively attending to the important information and ignoring other less important information as the healthy brain can only process a certain amount of information at any one time i.e. when concentrating on a task when there are people chatting in the background, our brain will ‘filter’ or ignore the background chatting and focus on the task.
- Information processing is linked to all other cognitive skills and relies on speed at which a person can process and the capacity to process information.
Speed of Information Processing
- The speed at which we process information is the time it takes a person to understand and react to information presented.
- The speed at which we process information is a key element in cognitive processes.
- It is an important skill in new learning and reasoning.
- Slow processing speed may impact on executive functions, memory and new learning.
- Many daily living tasks involve automatic processing where the task has become so familiar that we are able to complete it without much conscious effort.
- Following a stroke even familiar daily living tasks require conscious thought causing patients to fatigue quicker during and following tasks, fatigue will be a factor that will adversely affect speed of processing.
Capacity for Processing
- Our brains have limited capacity and it would be impossible to remember all the information we are exposed to in any one day.
- Therefore our brain ‘filters’ the information that comes via our 5 senses and processes the important information into our short-term memory and ignores the less important information.
- Effective ‘filtering’ of information is difficult for people following a stroke and the person’s brain can get ‘overloaded’ with too much information.
- Difficulties may not be obviously apparent, however, as demands and complexity of tasks increase the person may appear confused or agitated.
Page last reviewed: 15 Jul 2022
