6-Attention Flashcards
What makes a stimulus capture attention?;
Sudden onset; intense; unexpected in the situation; what we are looking for or trying to do
What has evidence shown to be more likely to capture attention?
Stimuli that shares features with targets (e.g. red moving object when looking for friend in a red jacket)
According to contemporary text, what is attention?;
What about in the language of cognitive psychology?
The concentration and focusing of mental effort;
Selecting what is relevant from sensory input & processing it for appropriate action
Attention is not an entity that exists separately from cognitive processes. Instead, what does it refer to?
The organisation of these processes in line with our goals (or prioritising of cognitive operations)
We have limitations on what can be processed at any one time. Even if we have enough limbs to perform actions for two concurrent tasks, what can’t we do?
Decide on what response to make for one task without causing a delay in the response selection for the other task
What metaphors are used for attentional limitations in relation to structure?;
What metaphors are used in relation to process?
Bottlenecks, gates, stores, boxes & arrows;
Capacity, resources, types of task demand
According to Neumann & Allport, attentional limitations are the byproducts of the need to what?;
In what way do attentional limitations serve an adaptive function, according to Neumann?
Co-ordinate action and ensure that the correct stimulus information is controlling the intended responses;
We avoid the behavioural chaos that would result from an attempt to simultaneously perform all possible actions
What tasks in the labs are often used to test selective attention?;
How is this test usually made more difficult?
Participants respond to a relative stimulus & ignore a currently present irrelevant stimulus;
By switching which stimulus is relevant or irrelevant; must select a stimulus from two strongly competing alternatives (e.g. stroop effect)
How do researchers often test divided attention?;
What gets manipulated?
Participants divide their attention over two or more concurrent tasks;
The priority of tasks & the temporal overlap of various task components ( one task is done & other has to wait)
We need to maintain or sustain attention in many tasks, but we must be flexible enough to what?
Shift attention when required
In regards to shifting attention, describe the difference between Endogenous control & Exogenous control
Endogenous is voluntary & directed by current goals (e.g. tuning out of a dull conversation & tuning into another); Exogenous is an automatic response to an important stimulus (hearing your best friend’s name in a conversation)
Experiments have been done where objects or clothes are changed in a scene, or a person carrying a billboard changes, and participants fail to notice. What are these examples of?
Change blindness
Recent neurophysiological evidence suggests separate systems for processing “what” vs. “where”. At what level does attention usually operate at?;
So what do change & inattention blindness tell us?;
Which metaphor then, is limited in its view?
The level of objects, not just regions of space (e.g. gorillas in the basketball game not attended to despite being in the field of vision);
Attention is more than where the eyes are directed;
Spotlight metaphor (e.g. everything in view is illuminated)
In dichotic listening tasks, what can be reported about the unattended message?
Physical features, such as speech vs. music, gender, pitch & tone of voice
What did early evidence from dichotic listening tasks reveal about the meaning of the unattended message?
Couldn’t detect that unattended message was in a different language, or report meaning of unattended message, but could sometimes hear their own names
Describe Broadbent’s filter theory;
Describe his Early selection structural model
Perceptual features (voice, etc) used to filter out irrelevant message; Filter stops information flow through the system (select what’s relevant early on based on a minimal amount of processing)
How did later evidence through Mackay’s homograph experiment contradict Broadbent’s early selection model?;
What does this suggest?
When presented with a homograph containing the word “bank”, participants were more likely to choose river meaning (rather than money) if it had occurred in unattended message;
They must have processed the meaning of river, even though they couldn’t say they had heard it.
Explain the Late Selection theory
The unattended material is processed all the way to meaning access before being discarded
Treisman & Geffen had participants tap when designated target words appear in either shadowed or unattended message. Target detection in attended ear was 87% vs. 8% in unattended ear. Which theory does this seem inconsistent with?;
What did inconsistent evidence about this suggest?
Late selection;
That the idea of a single structural limitation was not viable, there must be other factors
Rather than filters or structure, where did Kahneman suggest our limitations lie?;
According to this view, the number of concurrent tasks that can be performed depends on what?;
& the pool of available resources is increased under what?;
Processing; attention is the process of allocating resources to inputs;
Difficulty = resource demands;
Arousal (motivation)
If two tasks can’t be done concurrently, then what?
One must be delayed
What does capacity theory propose?;
Task difficulty is evident in resource demands under divided attention. How has this been assessed?;
Did this work out?
General resources;
By measuring relative task demands under different task combinations;
No, couldn’t get consistent estimates of task difficulty
Name some contributions of capacity theory
It’s provided a useful idea of structural + processing limitations & how task demands decrease with practice (automaticity)
Students trained for 6 weeks, 5 h per week, to read stories for comprehension while taking words to dictation, after training, what could they do?;
What does this suggesst?
Read as fast (and comprehend as well) with dictation as they could without dictation;
Extensive practice reduces capacity demands (by restructuring tasks, memorising solutions or establishing production rules for task)
What’s the primary DV for simple visual tasks?;
What’s a better DV for difficult or time-pressured tasks?
Reaction time (increases with task difficulty); Accuracy
According to the Feature Integration Theory (FIT), how is processing of a stimulus into elementary features done?;
What do individual feature maps in the brain do?;
What’s required to bind features into an object?
Automatically, unconsciously & in a parallel way;
Give the location of specific features & project onto a single location map; activity in individual map can be read without focused attention;
Attention
Why is Serial Processing known as inefficient?;
What happens when display size is increased in a conjunction search?
Because you must search for a conjunction of features in a display where all elements have some of the features of interest; have to search items one at a time;
It becomes more difficult
Why is the RT in a feature disjunctive search less than a conjunctive search, and unaffected by search set size?
The target “pops-out”; have pre-attentively taken in; doesn’t require item by item search
On average, when will a target be found in a serial search?
When the target is absent, what happens to the slope on a graph & why?
After half of the items have been examined;
Slope is typically doubled; all items are searched (exhaustive search)
Describe some limitations of the Feature Integration Theory
Features don’t always “pop out” - you need to search for what’s different in change blindness scenes; sometimes configural patterns can over-ride basic features
What two factors neglected in FIT, did Duncan & Humphreys find had large effects on RTs?
Similarity of target to distractors; heterogeneity of distractors: Search is much easier if distractors are similar to each other (homogeneous)
Sudden changes, such as movements, looming stimuli, increases in brightness, can capture attention regardless of our intentions. What adaptive effect is this known as?
Exogenous
What evidence shows that attention is more typically driven endogenously by our intentions?;
In this experiment, if the target is defined as a red object, what will a red cue do?;
Spatial cuing evidence, where a cue is given about the location of an upcoming target;
Capture attention, even if it has not been predictive of the target position, whereas a cue that suddenly appears or has a bright highlight does not capture attention (attention set for red objects)
What does RSVP stand for?;
What is it?;
Rapid Serial Visual Presentation;
Extension of Treisman’s feature conjunction search, but there’s only a single location & is time-pressured
What’s involved in an RSVP?;
What commonly occurs?
Letters, digits or words, visually displayed, one after the other at a rapid rate (typically 100ms); participants look for certain targets (around 15) & asked about them at the end;
Post-target intrusions (e.g. when presented with green Q, blue Y & red X, they’ll report blue X)
Describe the Attentional Blink (AB);
When may the blink be smaller?;
When detecting 2 targets in the RSVP stream, there’s a failure to report T2 when it occurs a few 100ms after T1 (blink extends out to about T1 + 6);
At the T1 + 1 item;
What happens when T2 occurs immediately after T1 & what’s this known as?
T1 & T2 processed as one event; it’s known as lag sparing
AB is found if T1 & T2 are defined in what way?;
Does AB occur if you merely have to detect T1 without reporting its identity?
The same way (2 digits) or differently (red letter vs. digit); AB reflects demands of selecting & identifying T1;
Yes
What reduces the AB?;
High discriminability of T1 from the distractors (e.g. T1 red, distractors black);
Is AB just a recall problem?
No, interference is observed when a recognition test of targets is used (so not just memory)
AB occurs only when other items precede and follow T1 and T2, or when what?;
What do adjacent items serve as?;
What are these commonly used for?
T2 is extremely brief ;
Pattern masks that curtail processing of the targets (compete with targets to engage perceptual processing);
To ensure that brief stimuli do not reach awareness (Participants say they didn’t see the masked word, but it may be processed sufficiently to affect responses in tasks)
According to Chun & Potter’s 2 stage AB model, what’s the first stage?;
What’s required in the second stage?;
AB reflects limits on memory consolidation of T2 when what?
RSVP items are identified; stimulus is matched with its memory representation;
Consolidating an item in working memory so that it can be reported (limited in capacity);
When T1 consolidation is not yet completed
What is Chun & Potter’s model consistent with?
Evidence for semantic processing of unreported T2s (e.g., EEG shows there is meaning even though they can’t report it)
If the demands of getting T1 into working memory are the source of the AB, then what is the critical factor in the AB?
The difficulty of processing T1 (manipulating T1 difficulty does affect the AB)
According to Burt, Howard & Falconer, when is the AB with word targets more severe?;
What is this approach called?
If T1 is a low-frequency/rare word (take longer to identify than common words);
Resource depletion account (high resource demands of processing T1)
What do recent theories suggest the AB reflects?;
Difficulties in attentional control mechanisms (processing what is relevant and ignoring what is irrelevant)
What is Attentional Set?;
What is Attentional Engagement?
Preparedness to select target features and reject distractors;
Locking attention onto targets
A common idea is that attentional selection of targets involves increasing their activation, & also what?
Actively inhibiting or suppressing the activation of distractors
Describe Olivers & Meeter’s Boost & Bounce model
The Boost process increases the activation of target; The Bounce process inhibits activation of distractors
Explain the time lag in rise of the Boost & Bounce;
What does this then cause?
The distractor immediately after T1 gets some of the T1 boost and accesses working memory;
A strong bounce effect which persists long enough to affect T2 (thus the inhibition deployed to help target selection actually causes the AB)
What does the boost & bounce model fail to explain?
Effects of T1 difficulty on the AB
Some ideas about RSVP rely on a distinction between recognising an object and knowing about a particular encounter with it. In this regard, what is a Type?;
What’s a token?
A memory representation that is used to identify a stimulus (e.g. identifying a daisy)
A memory of a particular occurrence with a stimulus – related to episodic memory (e.g. memory of encounter with a daisy)
What’s the core principle of Wyble’s Episodic Simultaneous Type Serial Token (ESTST)?;
According to this model, what causes the AB?
The AB reflects a cognitive strategy, not a resource limitation;
Encoding T1 into working memory suppresses concurrent attention to new items (distractors & T2) – similar to B & B model
According to the ESTST model, suppression of attention allows T1 to be encoded as a separate/token event. If several target items are encoded together in WM, what cost occurs?;
So the suppression of attention is part of the mechanism for what?;
What has this model been applied to in RSVP?
They are bound into a single event, with a loss of order information;
Keeping track of events and the order of events;
Repetition blindness
Which account explains all the AB results?;
None of them; there are multiple sources;
In a nutshell, what factors seem to play a role on AB?
Resource depletion (i.e. capacity demands; effects of T1 difficulty; consolidation in WM) & attentional control mechanisms for discriminating between targets & distractors
What do effects in severely time-pressured attentional tasks reflect?
The processing demands for attended stimuli;
What do the nature of deficits like the AB tell us?
What aspects of the task are challenging under time pressure
The AB evidence suggests that consolidation of targets in WM is an operation that can’t be done for what?
More than one target (or target-chunk) at a time (& may be associated with competitive or inhibitory effects for other stimuli)
