Attention Flashcards
What is attention and give examples?
Definition:taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what may seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thoughts. It’s like a FILTER.
Attention is goal-directed. spotlight/filter. Involved in selection and prioritization of information.
Examples: Focusing, awareness, mental effort (concentration).
Why is attention important and what are the kinds of attention?
- alerting (ability to orient oneself towards a critical stimulus for survival and reproduction)
- vigilance (ability to devote full attention to one stimulus), selective, divided.
Pattern recognition is common between alertness and vigilance.
Allows us to focus on a particular stimulus while ignoring other information.
Adaptive reason for attention: Prevent overloading a limited capacity system.
What are the two theories of attention based on?
Theory 1 :Early or late information processing? Late filter would be better for higher level cognition but early filter could help with overload.
Theory 2: based on quantity of information that is selected.
What is change blindness and give example? What is the difference between change and inattentional blindness?
Change blindness is a phenomenon of visual perception that occurs when a stimulus undergoes a change without this being noticed by its observer. To date, the effect has been produced by changing images displayed on screen as well as changing people and objects in an individual’s environment
Change blindness is the failure to notice an obvious change. Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice the existence of an unexpected item.
Example: gorilla passing when you are focusing on the basketball players (inattentional), curtain changing colors (change).
Describe Broadbent’s early filter attention model
- Sensory registers encode info without any semantic or physic transformation
- Selective filter: assessment of the physical qualities of a stimulus
- Detection process: semantic analysis (extraction of the meaning of a stimuli before transferring the info to working memory).
What are arguments/experiment for the early filter theory?
Hierarchy of information processing (from visual cortex at the back of the brain to the parietal lobe where you identify what you see, etc), experiment on fMRI: looking at lowercase vs capital letter A, distinguishing between the basic shape and the meaning of the letter A.
Dichotic listening: superficial processing of the ignored output (participants may not notice if the person spoke backwards or another language but can register gender which might be more essential for survival).
What is the evidence against the early filter theory model?
Cocktail party effect: You are having a conversation but hear your name. But this could be described as low level as well. But again if you say “Mr. X STOP” that is a bit more high-level.
Name should be higher level processing (you had to learn to do it unlike shape detection?). Names indicate higher semantic processing whereas someone screaming is lower level (because it is basic threat detection).
The word must be salient and relevant but high level anyway. So this cocktail effect is against attention as an early filter.
Attention is guided by meaning, evidence on the semantic processing of the to-be-ignored message in dichotic listening. So, it seems like semantic processing is driving our attention! Against early filter theory!
Please describe two other experiments against the early filter theory!
Classical conditioning paradigm where the word tree is associated with a low intensity electrical shock. With dichotic listening, participants would get a trigger by sweating (galvanic skin response) when they heard the word tree even though it came from the ignored ear. Also for any words related to trees. Not convincing experiment though. Maybe a memory task would be more convincing.
Subliminal Priming: compatible vs incompatible prime target. Bread-butter vs nurse-butter. Response times are lower for compatible prime-targets. Semantic processing/perception which is against the early filter theory. Maybe different paths in the brain where some info is processed faster than others.
How is the late attention filter different from the early filter attention theory? Give example of experiment.
No early selection of the info.
Attention plays a role late in the information processing when right before it enters working memory.
Flanker task: (unattended stimuli) interfered with response. This suggests a higher processing of flankers which is compatible with the idea of a late attention selection. Conflict happening because of two conflicting responses, there is more contrast (similar to stroop task?).
Unattended/subliminal stimuli can be semantically processed but unattended information disappears quickly from working memory.
Describe attention as a flexible filter theory. Is there evidence for it?
Treisman’s attenuation theory: unattended stimuli pass the filter, but they are degraded. So there is a filter but it degreades instead of eliminating information. More attenuation when cognitive demands are high. So there is a hierarchy of analysis.
Accounts well for dichotic listening but does not explain why unattended stimuli would progress to higher stages of processing.
Describe attention as resource pool theory.
Attention as a resource pool, we can devote more or less attention to tasks.
Kahneman experiment with stroop task.
Depending on the task demands and the person’s goals, resources can be deployed to one or more tasks. The more demanding the main task is, the less multitasking you can do.
What are the theories on why attention is limited?
Ego depletion, dual task paradigm, multiplexing, automatic vs controlled processes
Describe ego-depletion theory
Ego-depletion: the brain needs glucose in the blood.
Either dedicated channels of information so modules for specific stuff so no interference between different stimuli or there are but at a very late stage. But it is very costly in terms of evolution but that would be a problem because that is associated with limited neurons.
Describe multiplexing theory
Multiplexing: the use of the same representations for different purposes by multiple processes. So with one module, you can process many kinds of information → problems with cross-talks, interaction between things.
So it is hard to read a text out loud while writing some dictates. If the tasks require different channels, then you can do it. But if the channels are overlapping, then there can be interference. That is why attention may be limited. Learning helps with multitasking.
Describe dual task paradigm theory.
Dual task paradigm: when accomplishing tasks simultaneously, the outcomes are worse than if each task is performed alone.
Tasks’ similarity being more difficult when both tasks share sensory modality, cognitive processes, mental representations or response modality.
Dual-task difficulty can be modulated by: participant’s expertise and the difficulty of the task.
Level of expertise is crucial because underlying processes become automatic so ti requires less attention.
