Attention Flashcards
What is selective attention?
The term for the mechanisms that lead our experience to be dominated by one piece of info rather than another.
Who were the three main theorists of selection theory.
- Broadbent.
- Deutsh and Deutsh.
- Treisman.
Describe stage 1 in the ‘early selection filter theory’.
- In stage 1 the signal is locked onto and irrelevant noise is filtered to prevent overload in stage 2.
- ‘Physical’ properties (such as the pitch or location of sounds) are extracted in a ‘parallel’ manner.
Describe stage 2 in the early selection ‘filter theory’.
- This second stage is limited in capacity, so it can’t deal with all the incoming information at once when there are multiple stimuli.
- Has to process info ‘serially’, rather than in parallel.
Describe the ‘dichotic listening’ task, one of the early methods used to test early selection filter theory.
Two different spoken messages were played at the same time (often one message to each ear over headphones). Listeners concentrated on one message and ignored the other, which was usually enforced by requiring them to ‘shadow’ (repeat aloud) just one of the two messages as rapidly as they could.
In the ‘dichotic listening’ task, what aspects of the ‘ignored’ message the did participants not notice?
- Words repetition.
- Changes in language.
- Meaningful content.
What differences must be present to allow us to tune into different messages (switch attention)?
Clear physical differences such as:
1. Change in pitch (male v. female)
2. Loud tone.
3. Message ending.
Why has early selection theory been challenged?
- Because evidence has shown full or part perception for ‘unattended’ information.
- For example, MacKay (1973) found that non-shadowed words presented to the ‘unattended’ ear could bias the interpretation of ambiguous shadowed sentences.
What about the early selection theory did Deutsch & Deutsch (1963) reject?
- Rejected stage 1 (said no stage 1).
- Rejected stage 2 having limited capacity (they said it is unlimited).
What are two key assumptions of the late selection theory?
- Uses automatic processing.
- All content is processed then the brain selects the correct source to respond to.
Describe the updated stage 2 (the only ‘stage’) in the late selection theory.
After all information is processed in full, this unlimited stage chooses selection for awareness, response and/or memory.
What is the key difference between the early and late selection theories?
Early selection suggests selection of relevant information occurs before the extraction of content and late selection suggests relevant information is selected after the extraction of content.
What did Treisman propose for selective attention?
- She proposed that unattended stimuli were reduced rather than completely filtered out.
- In terms of the two-stage models, the second stage would receive some inputs from unattended and attended stimuli, but these would be weaker for the unattended stimuli.
- Stimuli primed for the current context may have a lower ‘threshold’ for identification.
Provide evidence to support Treisman’s theory.
It has been observed that people often notice their own name in the non-shadowed message during shadowing. On Treisman’s attentuation account, this could arise because we are permanently primed to detect personally significant words, such as our own name, which may therefore require less perceptual information than other words to trigger identification.
List a main benefit of Treisman’s theory.
Sets a precedent for many ideas that were later to prove essential to cognitive psychology, in particular, the effect of priming on psychological processes.
