attention Flashcards
Selective attention:
attending to one thing while ignoring others
Capture attention:
a rapid shifting of attention, typically caused by stimulus such as loud noise, bright light, sudden movement
Divided attention:
paying attention to more than one thing at a time
Attentional Warping
the map of categories on the brain changes so more space is allotted to categories that are being searched for
*Participants are asked to watch a movie, different parts of brain light up for different types of stimuli
Activation patterns that are processing different kinds of information changes, More neural real estate is devoted to the goal
Crime Blindness
When you are focused on other tasks, you may fail to see a crime that is happening right in front of you, and should be obvious to you!
Change blindness
people fail to notice when some feature in the environment has changed, including a person with whom one interacts
Selective attention
We don’t attend to a large fraction of the information in the environment
We filter out some information and promote other information for further processing
When attention is selectively focused, we leave little opportunity to notice anything else
attention affects
memory and perception
Does a distraction always have the same effect on our ability to focus on one thing?
NO; the effect from a distraction will be weaker if the task its distracting you from requires a large amount of your attention. Also depends on the type of distractor
So how do people ignore distracting stimuli when they are trying to focus their attention; 2 factors:
Processing capacity:the amount of information people can handle and sets a limit on their ability to process incoming information; and
Perceptual load:difficulty of task
How do we study selective attention:dichotic listening
Early work: participants could not present the information given in the unattending ear
However the unattended ear is being processed as some level:
*Change in perceived gender is noticed
*Change to a tone is notice
broadbents early selection model
1)sensory memory:all information is registered briefly and makes its way through a filter)
2)filter stage:physical characteristics are filtered (voice,pitch,accent)
3)detector:only attended message makes it through the detector where its processed for meaning, rest is discarded
Conclusion: if you are paying attention to something, you process its meaning, if you are not, you only process physical characteristics
Cocktail party effect:
you’re at a party and attending closely to the person in front of you, someone says you name halfway across the room, and you perk up
Dear Aunt Jane experiment
Participants were told to shadow the message presented to the left ear and kind of ignore the other one
Conclusion: some meaning is being processed earlier than broadbent thought
Anne Treisman tweaked Broadbent’s model
She replaced filter with an attenuator(reducing) , and detector with dictionary unit
