7. Mental imagery and attention and performance

Question 1

What is mental imagery?

Answer 1

Mental representations of visual and verbal
information
– Processing of visual (or visuospatial) and verbal
information exhibits different properties

Question 2

What did the study of visual vs verbal imagery include?

Answer 2

(a) geometric condition
study array = actual shape of triangle, square and circle

Test array:

• identical, same configuration (YES)
• Same elements, linear configuration (YES)
• Different elements; same configuration (NO)
• Different elements; Linear configuration (NO)

(b) Verbal condition
(Same as above but instead of shapes the words presented)

Reaction time was slower when there was the same configuration of actual shapes compared to a linear configuration in GEOMETRIC condition. but for the WORD condition, the reaction time was slower in the same and faster in the linear configuration

Question 3

What is change blindness?

Answer 3

Change blindness—inability to notice (salient) changes in a visual scene
We might feel that our visual perception captures all the rich details of the environment, but apparently it doesn’t

Question 4

What do we have a great ability to do?

Answer 4

we have a great ability to
recognize visual scenes
– e.g., Standing (1973): after studying 10000 pictures,
participants accurately recognized 8300 of them!

Question 5

what is the boundary extension?

Answer 5

When we memorize a visual scene, a wider-angle view of the scene tends to be stored in memory

Question 6

What did Mandler & Ritchey (1977) find regarding correct rejection rates?

Answer 6

– When the changed object did not affect the meaning
of a scene: 60%
– When the changed object altered the meaning of a
scene: 94%

Question 7

What do Standing (1973), Intraub and Richardson (1989), and Mandler and Ritchey (1977) studies tell us about the nature of mental visual representations?

Answer 7

When we perceive a visual scene, two types of
representations seem to be formed
– Representation of the meaning of the scene
– Representation of surface properties of the scene
(visual details, color, etc.)

Question 8

What aspects of a visual scene are and are not well represented?

Answer 8

• The meaning (or the gist) of the scene is very
well represented
• The surface properties are not

Question 9

What is attention according to William James?

Answer 9

Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrain state.

Question 10

how much information do we receive and how much do we process?

Answer 10

We often receive more information than we can process simultaneously

Question 11

what is necessary to use our neural and cognitive resources effectively?

Answer 11

In order to use our neural and cognitive resources effectively, it is necessary to select important pieces of information for further processing

Question 12

what is attention (generally)?

Answer 12

The selection mechanism used to select important pieces of information for neural and cognitive processing

Question 13

When does attentional selection occur?

Answer 13

There should be a point in the path from sensation to action at which people cannot process all the information in parallel (attentional “bottleneck”)

Stimulus (beer) -> sensation (yellow white liquid foam) -> perception (BEER) -> action (drink beer)

Question 14

What do the early and late selection theories suggest?

Answer 14

• Different theories about when selection occurs

* Vary depending on how early or late they think the bottleneck is

Question 15

What does the filter theory (early-selection theory) suggest?

Answer 15

• Sensory information has to pass through some bottleneck
• Only some of the sensory information is selected for further processing
• The unattended message is usually not remembered
• However, some information about the unattended message is processed

Question 16

What task was sed to test the filter theory?

Answer 16

Dichotic listening task.

Question 17

Contrary to the filter theory, what information about the unattended message is processed?

Answer 17

– Some non-semantic aspects of the message (e.g., whether the voice was male or female) are remembered later
– This does not support the filter theory

Question 18

What is the cocktail party effect (in the filter theory) and what does this suggest?

Answer 18

You can hear your name mentioned in a crowded bar,
even when you are talking with someone else this suggests that Some semantic information can also pass through a bottleneck without attention

Question 19

What does the attenuation theory suggest (early selection theory)?

Answer 19

Salience of unattended
stimuli is reduced, but they
are not filtered out entirely

Question 20

What do the late selection theories suggest?

Answer 20

The filter occurs after the
perceptual stimulus has
undergone analysis for its
semantic content

Question 21

What was Treisman & Geffen’s (1967) Dichotic listening task?

Answer 21

– Participants had to shadow one message from one ear

– At the same time, they had to detect a target word, which was heard by either ear

Question 22

What did Treisman & Geffen (1967) hypothesise in their Dichotic listening task?

Answer 22

– The attenuation theory: the target will be less frequently detected in an unshadowed ear
– Late-selection theories: the target will be detected equally well in either ear

Question 23

What were the results of Treisman & Geffen’s (1967) Dichotic listening task?

Answer 23

Results (detection accuracy)
– In the shadowed ear: 87%
– In the unshadowed ear: 8%

Supports the attenuation theory

Question 24

What is voluntary attention?

Answer 24

Top-down, goal-directed

Focus of attention is usually the same as the focus of the eyes

Question 25

What is reflexive attention?

Answer 25

Bottom-up, stimulus-driven
Similar processing enhancement is observed when reflexive cues are used
– But only when the target appears soon after the flash (within 50–200 ms)

Question 26

what suggests that voluntary attention is not always the case?

Answer 26

Posner’s cueing paradigm

Question 27

what happens when more time passes between a reflexive cue and a target in reflexive attention?

Answer 27

When more time passes between a reflexive cue and a target, response to the target actually becomes slower

Question 28

What is inhibition of return in reflexive attention?

Answer 28

Inhibition of return (IOR) refers to an orientation mechanism that briefly enhances (for approximately 100–300 milliseconds (ms)) the speed and accuracy with which an object is detected after the object is attended, but then impairs detection speed and accuracy (for approximately 500–3000 milliseconds).

The reflexive attention system has built-in mechanisms to prevent reflexively directed attention from becoming stuck at a location for too long (inhibition of return)

Question 29

what does the feature integration theory suggest?

Answer 29

• People must focus attention on a stimulus before they can synthesize its features into a pattern
• In essence, attention works as glue with which various features are combined into an object

Question 30

what happens when there is no focused attention in the feature integration theory?

Answer 30

Without focused attention, individual features are
perceived but they are not always combined
properly

Question 31

How often do illusionary conjunctions of features occue?

Answer 31

Illusory conjunctions of features (e.g., T) occur almost as frequently as correct combinations (e.g., T)

Question 32

What does dual-task performance question?

Answer 32

Can we do two (or more) things simultaneously without having any interference?

Question 33

What is the answer to the dual-task performance question?

Answer 33

The answer to this question depends on the degree to which tasks involved require attention

Question 34

What is the stroop effect

Answer 34

he Stroop effect refers to a phenomenon in which it is easier to say the color of a word if it matches the semantic meaning of the word