5: Divided Attention Flashcards
What is divided attention?
Sharing attention between tasks.
Studied by presenting multiple stimuli and instructed to attend to one.
Demonstrates processing limitations of attention.
Introduction
Resource specificity- selective interference.
Resource generality- general interference.
Factors influencing attention- task similarity; task difficulty; practice; automatic processing.
Why is it necessary?
Multitasking:
General method of examining- participants perform multiple tasks, separately or simultaneously.
General findings- performance on one or both tasks suffers when performed together; divided attention only successful if sum of tasks demands doesn’t exceed attentional capacity.
Resource specificity: Task similarity
Some tasks harder to combine than others.
Some resources seem specialised.
Example- reading while listening to the TV.
Both tasks draw on resources for verbal processing; listening to TV likely to exhaust resources; reading performance suffers.
Allport, Antonis & Reynolds (1972)- headphones; shadow list of words against:
- Memory list; words on screen; images on screen.
First condition was the hardest, and third the easiest; more similar the tasks, interference increases.
Resource generality
Still demonstrate interference between unrelated tasks.
Evidence from road accidents- driving (visual and spatial info), talking on the phone (auditory input, speech output).
Task difficulty
Close relationship between task complexity and attentional demand.
Example- able to drive fine while on hands free phone; problems arise if conversation gets complex/weather gets bad etc.
Practice
Spelke, Hirst & Neisser (1976)- two students, trained for 5 hours per week, 4 months.
Two tasks which are hard to combine.
After 6 weeks they could perform very well.
Automaticity:
- Practice decreases resource demands.
- Controlled tasks draw more attention.
- Routine becomes automated; no longer needs supervision.
Posner & Snyder- process becomes automatic if: occurs unintentionally; occurs unconsciously; operated without depletion of resources.
Becomes automatic after extensive practice; Logan (1988)- when it relies on LTM knowledge.
Affects of automaticity:
Automatic processes are uncontrolled, hard to inhibit.
Stroop interference- words printed in different colour; facilitation when ink and colour word match, interference when don’t.
Orienting reflex
When attention is captured by something involuntary.
Move your eyes toward movement in peripheral view.
“Reflexive redirection of attention towards unexpected stimuli.”
Attention capture: Spontaneous redirection to stimuli based on physical characteristics.
May protect from potential danger.
Some neural pathways involved, correspond to the dorsal pathway.
Emotional cues: more likely to direct attention to emotionally arousing stimuli; significant to yourself.
Social cues: tend to look where other people are looking (Kingstone, Smilek etc).
Novel cues: orient attention to novel things (something different occurs); preparatory response for further voluntary processing.
