Stage 1: Selective Attention/Comprehension (Ethical Dilemma: Should Brain Scans be Used to Craft Advertising applies here).

1. People are continuously bombarded by physical and social stimuli in the environment. Since they are unable to fully comprehend all this information, they selectively attend to subsets of environmental stimuli that include salient or important information.

Stage 2: Encoding and Simplification .Before information is stored, it must be interpreted or translated into mental representations. Perceivers assign pieces of information to cognitive categories. People,events, and objects are interpreted and categorized by comparing their characteristicswith schemata.

Stage 3: Storage and Retention .Long-term memory consists of separate but connected categories containing different types of information. Information also passes among the categories.

Stage 4: Retrieval and Response. Ultimately, judgments and decisions are the product of drawing on, interpreting, andintegrating categorical information stored in long-term memory