attention

Question 1

bottom up attention

Answer 1

(passive modes of attention, exogenous attention)
• Alertness or arousal
• Reflexive attention (e.g. towards a bolt of lightning)

Question 2

top down attention

Answer 2

(active modes of attention, endogenous attention)

• Selective attention (e.g. you choose whether to listen or look at me or not)

Question 3

the eye as a camera

Answer 3

The film (the retina), in the case of the human eye is made up of photoreceptor cell and can be broken down into 2 main areas:

Fovea (more cells with most of them are cones)

Parafovea (less cells and most are rods)

Question 4

our eyes don’t see like we think they do

Answer 4

• Acuity is highest at the centre of the retina
• As something appears further from the centre of the retina, acuity drops off steeply.
• Like the blind spot – our brain fills in the gap and uses our frequent eye movements to “update” and hold visual information

Question 5

saccadic suppression

Answer 5

• To supress the motion blur during the saccades (The eye can travel up to 900 visual degrees per second! ~ 280mph)
• To perceive a stable world

Question 6

overt attention

Answer 6

• Unattended information: everything else that you do not see
• Slow – around 3-4 saccades per second (1 every 300 ms)

Question 7

Hemholtz on covert attention (1867)

Answer 7

Helmhotlz observed that we can enhance perception if we focus our attention on a location in the visual field
But this comes at the expense of other areas of the visual field

• Faster – 50ms to shift
• Function – see later

Question 8

capacity limitation

Answer 8

• Our limited ability to carry out various mental operations at the same time needs a way to prioritise information

Question 9

perceptual gating (selection)

Answer 9

• Conscious perception is always selective, but selection is not always conscious

Question 10

selective/ focussed attention

Answer 10

• Selectively attend to certain stimuli in our environment while ignoring others.
• Present 2 or more stimuli inputs, instruction to respond to just one.

Question 11

divided attention

Answer 11

aka multitasking

• Ability to undertake several tasks at once.
• Present at least 2 stimulus inputs, instruction to respond to all.

Question 12

attentional modalities - vision

Answer 12

Limit on how much we can take in, because things in environment placed in different spatial location

Question 13

attentional modalities - auditory

Answer 13

Streams of sound from different locations

Question 14

welford 1952

Answer 14

• Presented 2 signals in rapid succession, known as the Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) Paradigm
• Participants make speeded response to both
• reaction time to 2nd stimulus depends on how close it is presented to 1st stimulus
• The closer the presentation, the slower the reaction time
• Welford saw this as evidence as what we call a bottleneck (early selection) because processing of one stimulus must be completed before processing of next one can begin

Question 15

cherrys cocktail party effect (1953)

Answer 15

• How can we focus attention onto one conversation in a crowded room?
• Research in this area was initiated by Cherry (1953) who was interested in the Cocktail Party phenomena i.e. that we are able to follow one conversation while several people are talking.

Question 16

shadowing task

Answer 16

Dichotic listening procedure - Shadow means to repeat aloud the message told to attend to. Cherry found:

Question 17

in the shadowing task, ppts were able to

Answer 17

• Perform the task and repeat the correct message
• Filter out the unshadowed message with little information remembered about this message.
• Process the unshadowed physical characteristics (intensity, gender, location)

Question 18

in shadowing task, ppts werent able to

Answer 18

• Detect the meaning of the 2nd stream
• Detect if the 2nd stream was a foreign language or reversed speech.
• Repeat any words in the 2nd stream.

Question 19

broadbent (1958)

Answer 19

Dichotic listening procedure, 3 digits presented to one ear at same time as another 3 digits presented to the other ear:
• Participants would recall numbers ear by ear better than in pairs
• Suggested that the stimuli are accessed in parallel by a sensory buffer
• Buffer filters stimuli on the basis of the physical characteristics.
• The other input remains in the buffer.

Question 20

attention as an early selection process

Answer 20

What does attention do?
• It allows us to selectively process information
• To filter out irrelevant information

• Argues that we cannot identify or process something without attention

Question 21

evaluating broadbent

Answer 21

Filter theory is based on physical properties and therefore rather inflexible…

Question 22

attentuation

Answer 22

• Sometimes unattended things are processed
• Where the filter occurs depends on task demands (Physical cues, syllabic pattern & specific words moving on to analysis of individual words, grammatical structure and meaning)
• Sometimes this means that unattended items leak through the filter as they are processed enough to reach the threshold of conscious awareness

Question 23

late selection

Answer 23

all messages get through, but only one response can be made (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963)

Question 24

inattentional blindness

Answer 24

What we don’t attend to, we are not aware of (Mack & Rock, 1992, Simons & Chabris, 1999)
• typically things such as transients can capture visual attention – but if those resources are fully in use and there are other transients, things may be missed!
• Inattentional blindness is a great demonstration that attention is required for identification

Question 25

change blindness

Answer 25

• If we cannot identify things without attending to them AND attention is a limited resource, it follows that we might not be able to spot “changes” between scenes unless attending to them
• Clearly one way of spotting for changes is by changes in luminance or motion (transients). Change blindness gets past this by presenting an interleaving field between images!
• CB suggests that there is a failure of visual short term memory (VSTM) – which enables us to compare between scenes. This is irrelevant for IB
• CB suggests that we might have a limit in the number of items we can hold in memory.

Question 26

inattentional blindness

Answer 26

the failure to notice something that is completely visible..

involves identifying something that is “irrelevant” to the task.

Question 27

Visual short term memory – Luck and Logan (1997)

Answer 27

Measured capacity of visual STM (they call it visual working memory)

found VSTM has a fixed capacity of four objects, irrespective of how many relevant features those objects comprise.

• Change Blindness and change detection tasks seem to show that there is a clear limit in the information we can hold in VSTM
• That is, there is a limit in what we can “hold” across a temporal gap.

Question 28

limits of attention

Answer 28

• Attention is limited in capacity

* It appears that we can “attend” to a small number of areas at the same time

Question 29

what does covert attention do?

Answer 29

• Covert attention is when we attend somewhere or to something without moving our eyes
• Acts as a filter - Selects stimuli for further processing.
• Is limited in capacity – it appears that it the resource can be divided up depending on the task demands

Question 30

zoom lens theory

Answer 30

the attended region can be adjusted in size and predicts a tradeoff between its size and processing efficiency because of limited processing capacities.

Attention is directed to a given region of the visual field, the area of focal attention can be increased or decreased depending on task demands. The more focal the attention is the clearer it is.