Attention

Question 1

Is attention easy to define?

Answer 1

NO- lots of different psychologists have different definitions of attention.

Question 2

What was william james contribution?

Answer 2

Used introspection- made huge contributions to the field.
He aligns it with consciousness- however lots of debate- whether consciousness and attention are seperable.

Some researchers show they can be seen as seperate- attention can be modified without consciousness- others argue the other way.

Question 3

What did Allport say about attention?

Answer 3

Attention is so complex/ difficult to understand.

There is no clear definition!

Question 4

What was central to James?

Answer 4

Consciousness- but is consciousness the same as attention?

There is strong case- they aren’t the same thing. (Koch Tsuchiya) 2007

Question 5

Example of unconscious influence ?

Answer 5

Gaze contingent crowding paradigm

Question 6

Evidence for attention without consciousness?

Answer 6

Unconscious attentional modulation (Jiang 2006)

Question 7

What are the ways that attention is a process?

Answer 7

Selective attention: The ability to preferentially process a subset of all available information.

Sustained attention: The ability to maintain a high state of alertness/ arousal/ vigilance.

Question 8

What is selective attention?

Answer 8

The ability to preferentially process a subset of all available information.

Question 9

What is sustained attention?

Answer 9

The ability to maintain a high state of alertness/ arousal/ vigilance.

Question 10

How is attention a resource?

Answer 10

A set of limited resources for cognitive processing.
Divided attention: Our ability to distribute attention over a range of competing inputs.

Question 11

What is divided attention?

Answer 11

Our ability to distribute attention over a range of competing inputs.

Question 12

Selective auditory attention

What tasks were used?

Answer 12

Shadowing/ dichotic listening tasks: Laboratory analogue of the cocktail party phenomenom.

Early experiments showed that participants could tell the experimenters very little about the information being presented to the non-shadowed ear.

Question 13

What happens in the dichotic listening tasks?

Answer 13

You have headphones on- have different things going into each ear.
You then have to shadow one ear- you are told which to shadow.
You then have to repeat back what’s been spoken to through that ear.
It’s a way of finding out what was taken in- when you are not attending to it.

Practical application- used during the war- try and put info into both ears.

Question 14

Selective auditory attention

Shadowing/ dichotic listening task

What were the participants unable to do?

Answer 14

Remember the contents of the message.
Recognize the language of the message.
Tell if the speech was reversed.
Tell if the language changed

Question 15

Selective auditory attention

Shadowing/ dichotic listening task

What were the participants able to do?

Answer 15

Tell if the message was a voice or a noise.
Tell if the voice changed from male to female.
Detect a sudden tone.

Question 16

Selective auditory attention

As participants often couldn’t tell what language was being spoken to in the non-shadowed ear- what model was developed?

Answer 16

Early selection filter model

Question 17

Selective auditory attention

Why was the early selection filter model made?

Answer 17

As participants often couldn’t tell what language was being spoken to in the non-shadowed ear

Question 18

Broadbents filter theory

What is in this model?

Answer 18

Perception

Sensory buffer (auditory buffer)

Selective filter (can have lots of channels- only process one thing)

Limited capacity processor (can only process one thing)

Question 19

Broadbents filter theory

What doesn’t the model account for?

Answer 19

cocktail party syndrome

Question 20

Broadbents filter theory

What does the filter select information on the basis of ?

Answer 20

Its gross physical properties (pitch loudness etc)

Question 21

Selective auditory attention-
what evidence is there that information beyond the physical is processed?

Answer 21

Participants show skin conductance responses to shock associated words- despite not reporting to have heard the words.
Participants shadow meaning if channels are switched.

This prompted debate over whether selection occured early vs. late in the information processing stream.

End result- Triesman’s attenuation model.

Question 22

What other model was introduced?

Answer 22

Triesman’s attenuation model

Question 23

What is in Triesmans attenuation model?

Answer 23

Perception

Sensory buffer ( info comes through here)

Attenuator (attenuated channels/ selected channel) - all channels go to the attenuator-one gets boosted, the others get attenuated- this doesn’t mean the others are eliminated.

Semantic analysis (based on variable thresholds)

Question 24

Selective visual attention

How do we selectively only process a subset of visual input?

Answer 24

Only a small area of our retina is capable of processing visual information-with a high degree of acuity.

Compensated for by moving our eye 2-3 times a second.

Eye movements and attention are intimately linked.

The phenomenom of change blindness (aka attentional blindness) reveals just how little information we take in from a scene.

Question 25

Selective visual attention

What do magicians rely on?

Answer 25

The fact we only process information at fixation- misdirection.

Question 26

Selective visual attention

What did Kuhn & Tatler 2005 do?

Answer 26

Devised a trick that relied on misdirection only.

They fitted observers with an eye tracker to see where they were fixating during the trick.

Only participants who fixated the objects at critical points saw them ‘dissapear’

Question 27

Selective visual attention

When individuals are drunk- what do they tend to see when watching videos?

Answer 27

As they can’t fixate & are all over the place- they are more likely to see what you don’t want them to see.

Question 28

How have cognitive psychologists explored the nature of visual attention?

Answer 28

Using visual search tasks!

Question 29

Parallel search vs serial search?

Answer 29

Parallel searches have flat set size functions.

Serial searches have positive set size functions.

Question 30

What have we learnt from visual search experiments?

Answer 30

Basic feature analysis (colour, orientation, intensity)
occurs in parallel so - so targets defined by a single feature (pop out) instantly.

Feature integration occurs next-and attention is the “visual glue” that allows different features to be combined to form a coherent percept.

Conjoint searches have positive set-size functions because each stimulus must be processed one at a time in order to bind the features together (Feature Integration Theory- Triesman 1988)

Question 31

What idea was there about attention being like?

What did Posner develop?

Answer 31

Spotlight/ zoom lense.

Developed a cueing paradigm& demonstrated attentional enhancements without eye movements.

Participants press a button as soon as they see a target in one of the two boxes.

Valid cues- facilitates RTs (faster than where no cue)
Invalid cues inhibited RTs (slower than where no cue)

Question 32

Selective visual attention

What do the experiments demonstrate?

What do the endogenous cues do?

Answer 32

Demonstrate “covert” orienting of attention-without eye movements.

Cues- make participants shift their spotlight to the right- so quicker to respond on valid trials- but slower on invalid trials.

Question 33

what happens when attention isn’t required?

Answer 33

Automaticity often results from extensive practise-
- Reading, the stroop effect
- Driving a familiar route.

Automatic behaviours are a rich source of action slips:

Automatic processing is inevitable & once activated- runs to completion.

Question 34

What is divided attention?

Answer 34

Doing more than one thing at the same time.

Question 35

What three factors influence the extent to which two tasks can be carried out simultaneously?

Answer 35

How similar the tasks are- overlap at any stage (input/ storage/ processing/ output will create problems)

How practised the operator is

How difficult the tasks are- difficult to disentangle difficulty from practise.