1 – Attention 1

Question 1

How did Jiang, Costello, Fang & He (2006) demonstrate the effect of suppressed images on spatial attention?

Answer 1

Subjects were shown two noise patches around fixation point on one eye, and naked picture plus noise on either side of fixation point on other eye. Naked pictures were thus suppressed – i.e. ‘invisible’. But subjects responded to a cue in the site of the naked image (if appropriate to sexual orientation) faster than in the site of noise patch. This is evidence that attention can be deployed without conscious awareness.

Question 2

What is focused or selective attention?

Answer 2

Attending or focussing on one stimulus while ignoring others. E.g. eating food while watching TV and not paying attention to what you’re eating.

Question 3

What is divided attention?

Answer 3

Processing multiple inputs simultaneously. Such that task performance on one channel can deteriorate. E.g. talking on your mobile while driving.

Question 4

What is a dichotic listening task?

Answer 4

Dichotic listening task involves a person wearing a set of stereo headphones with a different audio stream coming into each ear, the person is asked to ‘shadow’ or repeat just one ear.

Question 5

What was Cherry’s (1953) research question?

Answer 5

How can we follow only one conversation when everyone is talking at the same time?

Question 6

What did Cherry (1953) conclude from his dichotic listening studies? Three things

Answer 6

1. Only crude information from the unattended ear is encoded (e.g. sex of speaker, whether speech or noise).
2. When voices are physically similar they are harder to distinguish.
3. Little complex info is encoded: words not recognized when even repeated many times; switch of language from English to German not discernible.

Question 7

What is the ‘locus of selection’?

Answer 7

The locus of selection is the point at which some material is ‘accepted’ or ‘selected’ for further processing, and some material is rejected and no longer processed.

Question 8

What is Broadbent’s filter theory of attention (1958)?

Answer 8

Multiple inputs are coded in parallel, but only one is selected on the basis of physical (not semantic) characteristics.

What we’re not attending to isn’t processed beyond physical level.

Question 9

Broadbent’s filter theory of attention (1958) suggests what kind of locus of selection – early or late?

Answer 9

Early.

Question 10

How did Broadbent (1958) provide evidence for an early locus of selection using data from the reporting of numbers by ear? And what is the problem with this argument?

Answer 10

When left ear hears 496 and right ear hears 852, people report numbers back by ear –e.g. 496852, rather than in the order the numbers were heard 489562. The 852 waits in the buffer.

Problem is: some information from the unattended ear is processed beyond the physical level - otherwise the numbers couldn’t be repeated back.

Question 11

What is a late locus of selection?

Answer 11

The notion that everything is processed to the point of meaning, then accepted or rejected for awareness, memory and response.

Question 12

What kind of bias might explain the Cocktail Party Effect?

Answer 12

Confirmation bias –recording only hits, not misses.

Question 13

What happens when you instruct listeners (through unattended ear) to switch ears (Moray, 1959)?

Answer 13

Only around 10% of these instructions are acted upon.
BUT… if the instructions were preceded by the listener’s name then the probability of switching was much greater (around 33%) –cocktail party effect.

Question 14

Which people are more likely to respond to instructions in unattended ear (Moray, 1959)?

Answer 14

People with low working memory capacity. They’re constantly switching between stimuli.

Question 15

How did Treisman (1960) adapt the dichotic listening experiment to find support for a late filter?

Answer 15

The sentence begins in one ear, then is replaced with nonsense while the sentence continues in the other ear. Pps not conscious of switch. This suggests (apparently) they are attending to meaning, not simply focussing on one ear or the other.

Question 16

What is Treisman’s (1960) attenuation theory of attention?

Answer 16

For things we’re not attending to, the signal strength is attenuated. What is unimportant is ‘turned down’. If something important is heard (e.g. your name), it breaks through.

Question 17

How does Treisman (1960) explain the attentional switchover effect between ears when a story switches ears?

Answer 17

Words in the unattended channel which are more expected are more likely to be processed (priming) – this explains the switchover effect.

Question 18

How does Treisman (1960) explain the occasional semantic processing of ‘unattended’ stimuli?

Answer 18

A leaky filter.

Question 19

What is the contrary view to Treisman’s ‘leaky filter’ hypothesis of processing of ‘unattended’ stimuli?

Answer 19

Slippage. Attention is shifted to allegedly ‘unattended’ stimuli so they are not really unattended.

Question 20

How did Lachter et al. (2005) use primes to provide evidence for slippage?

Answer 20

Attentional shifts take around 50ms. If prime is given in attended channel less than 50ms before a target word in unattended channel, then priming effects disappear (i.e. not enough time to switch between channels). If longer than 50ms, priming effects remain.

Question 21

Explain Lavie’s load account of attention (1995)?

Answer 21

Attention is a capacity. We are more likely to be distracted when the task we are doing has a low perceptual load (as if we have spare attentional capacity which can be captured by irrelevant things). Attention becomes more focussed on one channel under task conditions of high perceptual load. So the selection filter can be early or late depending on ‘spare’ capacity.

Question 22

How does Lavie’s 1995 account resolve the early/late filter debate?

Answer 22

There is a moving locus of selection, which can be early or late –it all depends on the load. When we’re doing sth that takes all our attention, we don’t process new stimulus. If we have spare attentional capacity, we have load to be used by other things.
Early selection happens when we’re overloaded, involved in complex task;
late selection happens when you’re bored.

Question 23

What effect can the pressure of feeling evaluated have on attentional control (Norman, Bouquet & Croizet, 2014)?

Answer 23

Pressure increased the distraction caused by elements of the task –e.g. relevant information within the task –and reduced distraction by features extraneous to the task.

Question 24

What are ‘breakthroughs’ in dichotic listening tasks?

Answer 24

Breakthroughs occur when information in the unattended ear affects performance in such a way to suggest the unattended information is processed, for example when you hear your name in a conversation you are not attending to.

Question 25

What do ‘breakthroughs’ in dichotic listening tasks suggest about early and late selection theories?

Answer 25

breakthroughs suggest attentional selection is not strictly early, that is, information in the unattended channel is processed for more than its physical characteristics.

Question 26

Do ‘breakthroughs’ provide conclusive evidence against early selection theories?

Answer 26

Breakthroughs may not be common enough however to threaten early selection theories. Some evidence suggests breakthroughs may simply be a result of attention being poorly focused (slippage) or captured by the unattended channel in which case the phenomenon does not represent strong evidence for late selection theories.