attention

Question 1

what is attention, and what is auditory attention, describe the dichotic listening task

Answer 1

Attention is the process of selectively focusing on specific information in the environment while ignoring other information. It involves concentrating one’s mental resources on particular stimuli or tasks, enabling us to process information more effectively.

auditory attention is where we can perceive superimposed sounds as a result of different sound localizations

dichotic listening task: 2 earphones, one plays random words, and the other is a message played, a sentence.
You ignore one of them and follow the message that makes more sense.
Initially, play both and see if you can recall both
They found that you can repeat back up to about 2s worth in the ear you are not attending to once the message stops.
Both ears report it for about 2s.
Echoic memory – dying echo, it fades away fast for the unattended ear.
We can pick up structural things- gender, pitch.

Early on, we have this parallel acquisition, when we hear multiple noises, we pick up a lot of information structurally, even if we don’t pay attention to it? This is the followed by serial processing of information that you want to attend to

Question 2

what is the filter theory and what is one problem to this theory

Answer 2

have a sensory register that picks up information, then there’s a gate that filters in the information we pay attention too

but this thought to not be true

Sensory register picks up info from different streams and then there is a gate that opens for one type of info we want to attend to.

We do this on the basis of physical characteristics, we know where the person is, their voice, physical aspect we can continue to attend to.

Initially it was though that info for the unattended channel was not processed at all

problem
-sometimes selected messages/what we pay attention to is not just limited to the physical characteristics instead there may be processing of semantic content eg in a room full of people, you can hear your name from the end of the room (you are processing this infomraiton because it has meaning to you).

Question 3

whats Treisman’s attenuation theory

Answer 3

this theory states that the unwanted message is not completely filtered and instead is attenuated (less than the attended message), this means that it is still possible for this message to undergo semantic processing

Question 4

what is visual attention, what is the rapid visual serial presentation and the attentional blink

Answer 4

the ability to focus on specific visual details in our environment while ignoring others, helping us to see and understand what’s most important at any given moment.

RSVP
participants are required to detect the first target and then the second target. They did well in detecting the first target, but with the second target, it depended on how many positions were presented after target 1. If it was presented after 1 position or 7,8, they detected it well. However, if it was presented after 2, 3, or 4 positions, they weren’t able to detect it well. This is because of something called the attentional blink - a moment in which we are not able to process information

Question 5

what is visual awareness concerning consciousness

Answer 5

There are many different conscious and unconscious inputs and these conscious inputs can be attended to or unattended. We are only able to consciously report something that is conscious and that we attend to.

Question 6

what is subliminal perception and what types and one examples

Answer 6

Preconscious processing involves stimuli that are below the intensity or duration required to reach the absolute threshold, thus not triggering conscious awareness. influence thoughts, feelings, or actions without the individual consciously recognising them
-embedded images:
*pictures or words that are hidden or flashed quickly
-subaudible messages
*sounds or words are too faint to be heard or are played at extremely high frequency

Blindsight: A phenomenon observed in some individuals with damage to the primary visual cortex, where they can correctly guess the location or nature of a visual stimulus in their “blind” field without conscious visual perception. This indicates that some form of perception occurs without conscious awareness, a form of subliminal processing related to visual pathways.

Question 7

what is the Stroop effect -colors and explain this phenomenon and what is the emotional stroop

Answer 7

When people had to name the colour of words, they did it much quicker when the colour matched the word.
While incongruent, it was more difficult.

older adults find the stroop effect to be more difficult than younger adults

explanation;

stroop effect activates 2 pathways at the same time
-ink colour
-reading the words
these 2 competing pathways are active at the same time for the same resources (phonological loop), as a result the task performance suffers (slow reaction time and hesitation)

emotional stroop:
*participants are required to name the colour of the ink for ordinary words and words related to their anxiety
*when anxiety-related words appeared their reaction time was much slower so it clearly shows that emotion has a big impact on cognition.

Question 8

what is the dot-probe paradigm

Answer 8

individuals with depression / anxiety tend to pay closer attention to word / stimuli related to their mental disorder