4. Attention Flashcards
What does selective attention mean
We usually focus our attention on a few tasks rather than many
What is a dichotic listening task and what is it used for?
People listen to two different recordings, one in each ear, and asked to shadow (repeat out loud) one of them
used to test selective attention
- can tell the unattended message’s pitch (gender) but not the contents
What are 4 theories of selective attention
Filter theory
Attenuation theory
Late selection theory
Capacity + Mental effort
What is Broadbent’s filter theory for selective attention
A filter selects physical information for later processing
- early selection, we should not be able to recall any of the meaning of an unattended message
What is one contradiction to the filter theory of selective attention?
The cocktail party effect (name calling)
What experimental results did Treisman use to critique the filter theory
She used a dichotic listening task that switched the story line between the ears (attended -> unattended), and noticed that the shadowing remained coherent
- thus there must be some form of semantic base for attention
What did Wood and Cowan’s experiment show about if information in the unattended channel can be recognized (changed to backwards speech partway)
Experiment:
Dichotic listening task, but the unattended ear changed to backwards speech partway through
- caused participants to make errors in shadowing
Conclusion:
attentional shift to the unattended message was unintentional and completed without awareness
What type of participants in Cowan and Bunting’s research were more likely to detect their name in the unattended message?
those with lower working-memory capacity
- less able to focus attention
What is the attenuation theory for selective attention? And what does it mean for a word to be primed?
Proposed by Anne Treisman
Instead of a filter, unattended messages “have their volume turned down”
Then we also have some lowered thresholds for recognizing certain words and so these require little mental effort
Some words have perma lowered thresholds (etc. your name)
Some words can be primed: ready to be recognized (etc. cat in “the dog chased the ….”)
What is the late selection theory
All messages are processed some level of meaning and attentional selection occurs afterwards
What are 3 bottleneck type theories for selective attention
Filter theory
Attenuation theory
Late selection theory
What is Daniel Kahneman’s “mental capacity” model for attention
- attention is the allocation of mental resources to various cognitive tasks
- availability of resources is due to arousal
- allocation is based on interests + evaluation of demands to mental capacities
What are 2 kinds of limitations that norman and bobrow identified to that affect our ability perform any cognitive tasks, wrt. attention
effort (focus) and quality of incoming data (data limited)
What affects how much mental capacity a task requires?
- familiarity (practice)
- difficulty of the task itself
What is the stroop effect and why does it occur
asked to name words + colours
reading words is automatic: requires no attention and cannot be inhibited
According to Posner and Snyder, what are three criteria for cognitive processing to be called “automatic processing”
- it must occur without intention
- it must occur without conscious awareness
- it must not interfere with other mental activity
According to Schneider and Shiffrin, what are some characteristics of controlled processing
- usually operates serially
- requires attention
- capacity limited
- under conscious control
What was the experiment that Schneider and Shiffrin conducted to distinguish between automatic and controlled processing?
Experiment:
1. Participants were asked to find letters/numbers in a frame. The other things in the frame were different from what they were asked to find (numbers/letters).
2. Same as 1, but the things were the same
Researchers then varied:
- the amount of time the frame was displayed
- the number of things in the frame
- the number of things in the set that they were asked to find
TLDR:
1. Participant’s performance only affected by time that the frame was displayed
2. Participant’s performance affected by all the variables
Conclusion:
1 requires only automatic processing (parallel), but 2 required controlled processing (serial)
What was Spelke, Hirst, and Neisser’s experiment on Dual Task Performance, and what was their preferred explanation of it?
They trained 2 students to take a dictation exam while reading, and then tested their reading comprehension afterwards. After about 6 weeks, the reading comprehension scores improved a lot, without sacrificing speed.
Preferred explanation: practice let the participants somehow combine these two tasks into one of them.
Rejected explanations:
- multithreading: changing the difficulty of the reading text didn’t change much
- writing was automatic: they had to be conscious
What is the psychological refractory period (PRP)
The time of the slowed response to the second stimulus after responding to a first stimulus
What is the bottleneck that causes the psychological refractory period (PRP) when processing two tasks
A) processing task
B) choosing response
C) making the response
B
What is the attention hypothesis of automation
attention is needed during the practice phase of a task and determines what gets learned after practice
what experiment did Logan and Etherton conduct to support the attention hypothesis of automation
They saw that if they showed two words paired together consistently, participants would learn this pairing + perform a related task faster
however, if they included a distractor (one word was coloured), then participants wouldn’t learn and showed no improvements in performance
What did Strayer and Johnston find when investigating divided attention in drivers
- listening to radio
- repeating words in call
- generating words in call
radio + repeating words didn’t affect performance, but generating words did
call vs. in-person differed in performance
What are spatial cues
things that direct attention to a specific space
What did Posner and colleague’s experiment on spatial cues show for object detection with attention?
They directed participant’s attention with spatial cues and made them detect objects. Valid, invalid, and neutral cues were included
“attention is a spotlight that enhances the detection of events within its beam”
What did Treisman and Gelade’s experiment on visual search show? detecting a blue z
individual feature detection is automatic
conjunction searches, however, required nonautomatic processing
What is a conjunction search (visual search)
When you search for features in some objects, but also had to make sure that all of the required features are present
What is the feature integration theory for visual search
We perceive objects in two stages
1. Preattentive: we register features of objects
2. attention glues the features together
What are illusory conjunctions
occurs when attention is diverted in the second stage of the feature integration theory, and features are “glued” incorrectly together
What is inattentional blindness
When you don’t perceive a stimulus that is literally right in front of you, unless you are paying attention to it
Is hemi-neglect sensory or attentional?
hemi-neglect: damage to parietal lobe, you forget the other half exists
attentional
What part of the brain is involved with disengaging attention (part 1)
posterior parietal lobe
What part of the brain is involved with moving attention (part 2)
Superior Colliculus: in the midbrain
What part of the brain is involved with enhancing attention (part 3)
part of the thalamus
What are 3 steps that Posner and Raichle identified for a person to focus attention on a valid location
disengage
move
enhance
What operation (disengage, move, enhance) is impaired with ADHD
enhance
What did ERPs show for stimuli that were attended to vs not attended to
waveforms that were attended to had a much larger amplitude…
begins 80ms later, enough time for information to travel to the cerebral hemispheres (more present in the brain)
What did Corteen and Wood’s dichotic listening task show for semantic processing in selective attention
unattended message had canadian cities and was paired with a shock
participants showed galvanic skin responses to new city names (some level of encoding realized they were cities?)
What class of brain trauma often leads to an attention disorder
a stroke
What did Bisiach and Luzzatti show for hemispatial visual neglect in memory?
it still exists lol
They asked participants to imagine they were on either sides of a city scene + describe the buildings.
Depending on which side they were imagining, they neglected to report one half of buildings, despite just having done so
strong evidence that it is an attentional disorder
