Attention Flashcards
What is the cocktail party problem?
- In a room with many people but trying to focus on a conversion while a lot of people around you are talking
How do we focus our attention on this conversation?
How do dichotic tasks explain the cocktail party problem?
- Found that unattended auditory information is processed at a lower level than attended information
- Only ⅓ of participants reported hearing their name in the unattended channel
- Easier if voices are physically different
What is Broadbent’s theory of how attention is applied?
- Attention as early selection
- selective filter theory = people do not process unattended stimuli beyond the analysis of basic physical properties.
Sensory register - selective filter - short term memory
What is Deustch and Desutchs theory of how attention is applied?
-Selection happens later
- After processing all the information you pick the stimulus that is most relevant to what you’re trying to do
- Sensory register - short term memory - selection
What treismans theory of how attention is applied?
- Attention as flexible selection
Unattended information is weakened after the sensory register - Location of bottleneck is flexible because it can happen at an stage
When we filter depends on the context
What is The posners cueing paradigm?
People can pay attention to a part of space they aren’t directly looking at (this is called “covert attention”)
Endogenous cues
Exogenous cues
What are Endogenous cues?
You choose to pay attention:
Choosing to pay attention to a particular space makes you react faster to things that happen in that space
- Top down
What are Exogenous cues?
It makes you pay attention
Same result as Endogenous cues
- but only if something in that space happens quickly after you shift your attention to it
- Bottom up
What is the feature integration theory?
- Perceptual features are encoded in parallel and prior to attention
- If an object has unique perceptual feature it may be detected without attention “pop out”
- But if an object shares features it can’t be detected from a single perceptual feature and spatial attention is needed to search all candidates serially
What are illusionary conjunctions in the feature integration theory?
When you think you saw an object with certain features but that object wasn’t there only the features were.
When do illusionary conjunctions occur?
- focused attention is absent
- relevant stored knowledge is absent
- spatial attention is diverted
- display is presented in peripheral vision
Give a strength of the feature integration theory
- explains what happens within the attentional spotlight
Give a weakness of feature integration theory
Does Not explain why the similarity of distractors is influential
What is the guided search/ dual path model?
- There is two paths in which attention is allocated
- In the real world when we search for things we typically have some expectations for where the things are.
- Prior knowledge can make search more efficient
- Bottom up & top down
What is visual search?
- Searching cluttered visual environment for task relevant information is difficult when the target shares one or more features with other things in the image (distracters)
