Attention Flashcards
what is implicit processing
processing in which there is no necessary involvement of conscious awareness (ie rereading a text more rapidly than when read the first time, even if there’s no recollection of reading it before)
what is habituation
A gradual reduction of the orienting response back to baseline, i.e. if the unexpected noise in the quiet library is the ventilation fan coming on, you first notice it but then grow accustomed to it.
What is hemineglect?
a syndrome that leads to behavior such as brushing only the teeth on the right side, washing only the right arm, and shaving only the right side of the face, a disruption in the ability to refocus your attention to one side of your face or the other
In what part of the brain does damage often lead to hemineglect?
hemineglect is often in the right hemisphere, in particular, certain regions of the right parietal lobe
what is controlled attention
deliberate, voluntary allocation of mental effort or concentration
what is selective attention
the ability to attend to one source of information while ignoring other ongoing stimuli around us.
What is the dual task procedure
A method in which two tasks are performed simultaneously, such that the attentional and processing demands of one or both tasks can be assessed and varied, commonly used in studies of attention and attention-dependent mental processing
what is the purpose of the dual task procedure
Done to test how much information the sensory system can handle
results of cherry’s classic shadowing experiments
People were quite accurate in producing “shadows,” although they spoke in a monotone, with little intonational stress, and lagged the message by a second or so. Interestingly, people seem unaware of the strangeness of their spoken shadows and usually cannot remember much of the content of the shadowed message once the task is over.
what is shadowing
receiving conflicting auditory input in both ears, and for example “shadow” the message coming into the right ear, repeating the message out loud as soon as it was heard.
What were the basic ideas behind Broadbent’s Early Selection Model
attention can be tuned or switched to any one of the “messages” coming from the environment based on physical characteristics
what were the serious problems in Broadbent’s early selection model
didn’t take into account the semantic meaning of messages
What did Treisman find?
selecting/filtering was based on meaning and importance of information, all messages receive low-level analysis, top-down effect
what does Treisman mean in that unattended information is “attenuated”
when unattended information yields no important or meaningful information they are weakened in their importance to ongoing processing
What is automatic processing (automaticity)?
occurs without conscious awareness, consumes very little to no mental resources
What are the characteristics of automatic processing?
- happen without intention
- doesn’t reveal itself to conscious awareness
- consumes little to no mental resources
- tends to be fast
what is the stroop effect
the tendency to read the words (red, blue, green) instead of saying the color of the mismatched ink
What causes the stroop effect?
reading words is more of an automatic process so it is difficult to recognize the color ink before reading the word
What is controlled (conscious) processing?
occurs only with intention, open to awareness, consumes attentional resources
What is the role of practice and memory?
the effect of practice is to store relevant information in memory so that the necessary precondition to automatic processing is memory
What is the route to automaticity?
practice and memory
What is an action slip?
unintended, often automatic, actions that are inappropriate for the current situation (disadvantage to automaticity)
What can happen when a process/procedure has become automatic?
once it has become automatic, devoting explicit attention to it can lead to worse performance
What was Norman’s proposal?
proposal that forgetting occurs because other material interferes with the information in memory
What are mistakes?
error in conscious processes, true error in thinking, diagnosing, or decision making (thoughts don’t match up with reality)
What does the stoop effect tell us about automatic and conscious processing?
assesses the ability to inhibit cognitive interference, automatic processes happen much quicker
What was Norman’s proposal?
proposal that forgetting occurs because other material interferes with the information in memory
