Attention Flashcards
Is attention easy to define?
NO- lots of different psychologists have different definitions of attention.
What was william james contribution?
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.
What did Allport say about attention?
Attention is so complex/ difficult to understand.
There is no clear definition!
What was central to James?
Consciousness- but is consciousness the same as attention?
There is strong case- they aren’t the same thing. (Koch Tsuchiya) 2007
Example of unconscious influence ?
Gaze contingent crowding paradigm
Evidence for attention without consciousness?
Unconscious attentional modulation (Jiang 2006)
What are the ways that attention is a process?
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.
What is selective attention?
The ability to preferentially process a subset of all available information.
What is sustained attention?
The ability to maintain a high state of alertness/ arousal/ vigilance.
How is attention a resource?
A set of limited resources for cognitive processing.
Divided attention: Our ability to distribute attention over a range of competing inputs.
What is divided attention?
Our ability to distribute attention over a range of competing inputs.
Selective auditory attention
What tasks were used?
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.
What happens in the dichotic listening tasks?
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.
Selective auditory attention
Shadowing/ dichotic listening task
What were the participants unable to do?
Remember the contents of the message.
Recognize the language of the message.
Tell if the speech was reversed.
Tell if the language changed
Selective auditory attention
Shadowing/ dichotic listening task
What were the participants able to do?
Tell if the message was a voice or a noise.
Tell if the voice changed from male to female.
Detect a sudden tone.
Selective auditory attention
As participants often couldn’t tell what language was being spoken to in the non-shadowed ear- what model was developed?
Early selection filter model
Selective auditory attention
Why was the early selection filter model made?
As participants often couldn’t tell what language was being spoken to in the non-shadowed ear
Broadbents filter theory
What is in this model?
Perception
Sensory buffer (auditory buffer)
Selective filter (can have lots of channels- only process one thing)
Limited capacity processor (can only process one thing)
Broadbents filter theory
What doesn’t the model account for?
cocktail party syndrome
Broadbents filter theory
What does the filter select information on the basis of ?
Its gross physical properties (pitch loudness etc)
Selective auditory attention-
what evidence is there that information beyond the physical is processed?
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.
What other model was introduced?
Triesman’s attenuation model
What is in Triesmans attenuation model?
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)
Selective visual attention
How do we selectively only process a subset of visual input?
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.
Selective visual attention
What do magicians rely on?
The fact we only process information at fixation- misdirection.
Selective visual attention
What did Kuhn & Tatler 2005 do?
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’
Selective visual attention
When individuals are drunk- what do they tend to see when watching videos?
As they can’t fixate & are all over the place- they are more likely to see what you don’t want them to see.
How have cognitive psychologists explored the nature of visual attention?
Using visual search tasks!
Parallel search vs serial search?
Parallel searches have flat set size functions.
Serial searches have positive set size functions.
What have we learnt from visual search experiments?
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)
What idea was there about attention being like?
What did Posner develop?
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)
Selective visual attention
What do the experiments demonstrate?
What do the endogenous cues do?
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.
what happens when attention isn’t required?
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.
What is divided attention?
Doing more than one thing at the same time.
What three factors influence the extent to which two tasks can be carried out simultaneously?
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.
