Automatic processing occurs when: people become less sensitive to unchanging stimuli. stimuli are processed with little, if any, conscious effort. stimuli remain unprocessed even when they are clearly above threshold. attention is focused specifically on a small amount of information.

The answer is: stimuli are processed with little, if any, conscious effort

The only way for an automatic processing to occurs is if we had repeated a certain action or behavior over and over again for a prolonged period of time.

example of this situation is when you're learning to play a piano. In the beginning , most people would have to constantly changing their attention between the sheet music and the piano keys in order to play the song.

After playing it over a long period of time, people could play a certain song on a piano automatically with their eyes closed.

the earth’s crust is broken into separate pieces called tectonic plates (fig. 7.14). recall that the crust is the solid, rocky, outer shell of the planet. it is composed of two distinctly different types of material: the less-dense continental crust and the more-dense oceanic crust. both types of crust rest atop solid, upper mantle material. the upper mantle, in turn, floats on a denser layer of lower mantle that is much like thick molten tar.

each tectonic plate is free-floating and can move independently. earthquakes and volcanoes are the direct result of the movement of tectonic plates at fault lines. the term fault is used to describe the boundary between tectonic plates. most of the earthquakes and volcanoes around the pacific ocean basin—a pattern known as the “ring of fire”—are due to the movement of tectonic plates in this region. other observable results of short-term plate movement include the gradual widening of the great rift lakes in eastern africa and the rising of the himalayan mountain range. the motion of plates can be described in four general patterns:

collision: when two continental plates are shoved together

subduction: when one plate plunges beneath another (fig. 7.15)

spreading: when two plates are pushed apart (fig. 7.15)

transform faulting: when two plates slide past each other (fig. 7.15)

answer; participant observation method;