attention Flashcards
Selection
The act of attending to an object to select it apart from the unattended objects
Automatic processes
Involuntary “capture”
Fast, efficient and obligatory
Like an ambulance siren catching attention
Controlled processes
Conscious attention
Slow and effortful
Driving is an example
Salient information
Info that is hard to miss or captures your attention immediately
Objects within the spotlight
Faster reaction time and higher accuracy
Cuing paradigms
Test the automatic processes of attention
Our attentional spotlight is automatically attracted to cues
Spotlight model vs filter
Enhance the stimulus : spotlight (more for visual)
Suppress the noise: filter (more for auditory)
Breakthrough
Participants remember unattended information
Broadbent theory
Includes a single filter and explains the findings of the shadow parading but not the breakthrough effect
Stroop task
Pushes our attention skills to its limits. Manipulates the congruency of text colour and text meaning. Demonstrates that attention is facilitated by stimulus relevance
Flashbulb memories
Highly detailed memory but not really accurate always
Bottom up processing
The raw data gathered by our senses. Could also capture your attention automatically
Top down processing
Using a combo of memory, biases, and heuristics to interpret info
Overt attending
Process of looking to where you are attending
Covert orienting
Attending to something without looking at it
Inhibition of return (IOR)
Prevent your gaze from revisiting a previously attended location. Scans for new areas. Can be slower to detect targets at the cued area
Visual search paradigms
A task where the participant is required to locate a target among a set of distractor items
Pop out effect
Bottom up attention. Search time is unaffected by set size
Conjunctive search
No pop out, must examine 2 or more items and as set size increases so does the search time
schema
A representation depicting the range of plausible objects and likely configurations of those objects within particular scenes
Cocktail party effect or selective attention
Despite competing noises you can focus on a single info
Dichotic listening paradigm
Headphones where one ear presents attended info and other with unattended info
Inattentional blindness
Our limited attentional resources can result in missing out some very imp details
Change blindness paradigm
A change has occurred in the visual scene but the observer does not notice
Bottleneck
Only a limited amount of attentional info based on physical traits can be passed on for further processing (broadbent)
Broadbent early selection theory
Our attentional filter is located early in the process. Info is filtered out before semantic processing
Attenuation theory by treisman
Unattended info is not completely filtered but rather turned down or attenuated. They are assigned weights
Late filter model
Suggests filtering occurs after the physical and semantic analysis and only selected info goes for further processing due to limitations in processing capacity
