4. Attention

Question 1

What does selective attention mean

Answer 1

We usually focus our attention on a few tasks rather than many

Question 2

What is a dichotic listening task and what is it used for?

Answer 2

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

Question 3

What are 4 theories of selective attention

Answer 3

Filter theory
Attenuation theory
Late selection theory
Capacity + Mental effort

Question 4

What is Broadbent’s filter theory for selective attention

Answer 4

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

Question 5

What is one contradiction to the filter theory of selective attention?

Answer 5

The cocktail party effect (name calling)

Question 6

What experimental results did Treisman use to critique the filter theory

Answer 6

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

Question 7

What did Wood and Cowan’s experiment show about if information in the unattended channel can be recognized (changed to backwards speech partway)

Answer 7

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

Question 8

What type of participants in Cowan and Bunting’s research were more likely to detect their name in the unattended message?

Answer 8

those with lower working-memory capacity
- less able to focus attention

Question 9

What is the attenuation theory for selective attention? And what does it mean for a word to be primed?

Answer 9

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 ….”)

Question 10

What is the late selection theory

Answer 10

All messages are processed some level of meaning and attentional selection occurs afterwards

Question 11

What are 3 bottleneck type theories for selective attention

Answer 11

Filter theory
Attenuation theory
Late selection theory

Question 12

What is Daniel Kahneman’s “mental capacity” model for attention

Answer 12

• 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

Question 13

What are 2 kinds of limitations that norman and bobrow identified to that affect our ability perform any cognitive tasks, wrt. attention

Answer 13

effort (focus) and quality of incoming data (data limited)

Question 14

What affects how much mental capacity a task requires?

Answer 14

• familiarity (practice)
• difficulty of the task itself

Question 15

What is the stroop effect and why does it occur

Answer 15

asked to name words + colours

reading words is automatic: requires no attention and cannot be inhibited

Question 16

According to Posner and Snyder, what are three criteria for cognitive processing to be called “automatic processing”

Answer 16

1. it must occur without intention
2. it must occur without conscious awareness
3. it must not interfere with other mental activity

Question 17

According to Schneider and Shiffrin, what are some characteristics of controlled processing

Answer 17

• usually operates serially
• requires attention
• capacity limited
• under conscious control

Question 18

What was the experiment that Schneider and Shiffrin conducted to distinguish between automatic and controlled processing?

Answer 18

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)

Question 19

What was Spelke, Hirst, and Neisser’s experiment on Dual Task Performance, and what was their preferred explanation of it?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

What is the psychological refractory period (PRP)

Answer 20

The time of the slowed response to the second stimulus after responding to a first stimulus

Question 21

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

Answer 21

B

Question 22

What is the attention hypothesis of automation

Answer 22

attention is needed during the practice phase of a task and determines what gets learned after practice

Question 23

what experiment did Logan and Etherton conduct to support the attention hypothesis of automation

Answer 23

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

Question 24

What did Strayer and Johnston find when investigating divided attention in drivers
- listening to radio
- repeating words in call
- generating words in call

Answer 24

radio + repeating words didn’t affect performance, but generating words did

call vs. in-person differed in performance

Question 25

What are spatial cues

Answer 25

things that direct attention to a specific space

Question 26

What did Posner and colleague’s experiment on spatial cues show for object detection with attention?

Answer 26

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”

Question 27

What did Treisman and Gelade’s experiment on visual search show? detecting a blue z

Answer 27

individual feature detection is automatic

conjunction searches, however, required nonautomatic processing

Question 28

What is a conjunction search (visual search)

Answer 28

When you search for features in some objects, but also had to make sure that all of the required features are present

Question 29

What is the feature integration theory for visual search

Answer 29

We perceive objects in two stages
1. Preattentive: we register features of objects
2. attention glues the features together

Question 30

What are illusory conjunctions

Answer 30

occurs when attention is diverted in the second stage of the feature integration theory, and features are “glued” incorrectly together

Question 31

What is inattentional blindness

Answer 31

When you don’t perceive a stimulus that is literally right in front of you, unless you are paying attention to it

Question 32

Is hemi-neglect sensory or attentional?

Answer 32

hemi-neglect: damage to parietal lobe, you forget the other half exists

attentional

Question 33

What part of the brain is involved with disengaging attention (part 1)

Answer 33

posterior parietal lobe

Question 34

What part of the brain is involved with moving attention (part 2)

Answer 34

Superior Colliculus: in the midbrain

Question 35

What part of the brain is involved with enhancing attention (part 3)

Answer 35

part of the thalamus

Question 36

What are 3 steps that Posner and Raichle identified for a person to focus attention on a valid location

Answer 36

disengage
move
enhance

Question 37

What operation (disengage, move, enhance) is impaired with ADHD

Answer 37

enhance

Question 38

What did ERPs show for stimuli that were attended to vs not attended to

Answer 38

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)

Question 39

What did Corteen and Wood’s dichotic listening task show for semantic processing in selective attention

Answer 39

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?)

Question 40

What class of brain trauma often leads to an attention disorder

Answer 40

a stroke

Question 41

What did Bisiach and Luzzatti show for hemispatial visual neglect in memory?

Answer 41

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