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