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
