attention 1

Question 1

what does it mean if attention is goal directed?

Answer 1

used to achieve something

Question 2

what does it mean for attention to vary in effort?

Answer 2

deploying attention can be more/less difficult

Question 3

what does it mean if attention can be shifted?

Answer 3

spotlight metaphor- attend to information in the spotlight

Question 4

what does it mean if attention can be zoomed?

Answer 4

zoom lens metaphor- closer inspection of certain area

Question 5

what does it mean if attention is selective?

Answer 5

can decide to focus on one thing, whilst ignoring another

Question 6

what does it mean if attention is limited?

Answer 6

can only pay a certain amount of attention

Question 7

what does it mean if attention can be captured?

Answer 7

can control your attention to an extent

Question 8

what does it mean if attention can be divided?

Answer 8

can pay attention between different modalities

Question 9

when did modern research begin to focus on attention?

Answer 9

in the 1950s
paradigm shift from behaviourism to cognitivism

Question 10

what happened in Broadbent’s attention research?

Answer 10

wanted to understand if people could understand simultanous messages eg) pilots
asked two questions at the same time, and were told to answer one but ignore the other
no spatial separation of speakers

Question 11

what was the result of Broadbent’s attention research?

Answer 11

only around 50% of questions answered correctly
difficult- even with limited number of possible alternatives

Question 12

what happened in Cherry’s research into attention?

Answer 12

cocktail party problem- How do we recognise what one person says whilst another speaks at the same time?
Condition 1= two messages by the same speaker played to both ears (hear both messages in both ears)
Condition 2= two messages by the same speaker played to different ears (dichotic listening)

Question 13

what were the results of Cherry’s cocktail party problem?

Answer 13

Condition 1= very difficult, but possible after many repetitions
Condition 2= much easier to attend to (for the irrelevant message no content was reported, only basic physical stimulus characteristics processed)

Question 14

What are the stages of Broadbent’s filter theory?

Answer 14

senses
short term store
selective filter
limited capacity channel (P system)
store of conditional probabilities of past events/system for varying output until input is secured>effectors

Question 15

what happens in the short term store?

Answer 15

parallel processing of simple physical stimulus properties

Question 16

what does the filter do?

Answer 16

selects information for further processing
selects based on physical stimulus properties in the short term store

Question 17

what does the limited capacity channel do?

Answer 17

serial processer
one thing processed at a time
current term is the focus of attention in working memory

Question 18

how is Broadbent’s filter theory an early selection theory?

Answer 18

unattended information doesn’t pass the filter
selection occurs before stimuli are identified/recognised/fully analysed/meaning analysed

Question 19

which pieces of research provide evidence against early selection?

Answer 19

own name effect
message switching
conditioning with electric shocks

Question 20

what happened in the own name effect? (Moray)

Answer 20

message presented to right ear was relevant, message presented to left ear was irrelevant
around 1/3 of participants noticed own name presented to irrelevant ear
so some unattended information was analysed for meaning

Question 21

what happened in message switching? (Treisman)

Answer 21

participants reported information from the irrelevant ear when the meaning of the message switched to this ear
suggests unattended information was analysed

Question 22

what happened in conditioning with electric shocks?

Answer 22

Phase 1= words paired with electric shocks
Phase 2= words presented to irrelevant ear
result= words affected the skin conductance responses

Question 23

what theories are alternatives to early selection?

Answer 23

attenuation theory
late selection

Question 24

what is attenuation theory? (Treisman)

Answer 24

filter is not completely selective
some concepts in our ‘mental dictionary’ are more readily)

Question 25

what is late selection theory? (Deutsch and Deutsch)

Answer 25

meaning analysed before the filter
processing of perceptual input is automatic and not capacity limited