Attention Flashcards
what is attention?
what are the 5 properties of attention?
what is inattentional blindness?
failure to notice things directly in our perceptual view when we are focused on something else
what is change blindness?
failure to notice a change in a visual scene
what the function of inattentional blindness?
engaging in a cognitive task -> ignore unrelated things
what does change blindness imply about our attentional capacity?
our attentional capacity is limited, we cannot take in everything in a scene
how does inattentional blindness contrast with change blindness?
inattentional: you are paying attention to something else (occupied with a cognitive task)
change: you just missed the change
how does the knowledge/expectations of a change affect inattentional blindness and change blindness differently?
inattentional: being told about an incoming change will prevent the blindness
change blindness: you can’t see the change, even though someone told u it was coming
failures of change blindness
you don’t notice an aspect of a scene has changed
- you lack the attention needed to track changes over time
- normal motion cues are disrupted
failures of inattentional blindness
you don’t notice an unexpected but fully visible item
- you lack the focused attention needed to perceive it
what are the two main types of theories of attention?
- bottleneck: attempts to describe why only some information gets through to conscious awareness
- capacity: theories of divided attneiotn
- describes attention as a limited resource that must be spread among different sources
what is the dichotic listening task?
- listening to two different inputs in each ear
- attended channel: word repeated, pay attention
- unattended channel: word repeated, ignore it
do people attend to the channels differently? what gets filtered?
what are the findings of the dichotic listening task?
what do people notice/remember? what gets filtered out?
pariticipants are not aware of:
- syntax of unattended channel
- changes in language
- content of the message
participants are aware of:
- change from human voice to other sounds
- change of gender of speaker
what is the early selection mdoel?
(broadbent)
stimuli are filtered before information is processed for meaning
- explains why people don’t remember syntax or meaning, but do remember pitch or type of noise
what is the cocktail party effect?
relevant auditory information “pops out” even when you are not actively looking for it
- you hear your name from across the room
explain Triesman’s Attenuation Model
the stimuli that gets filtered is not ignored but attenuated (weakend)
- this message must meet a threshold for conscious awareness
- differen words have different thresholds
- threshold for name is LOW
what can the Triesman’s model explain that Broadbent’s model can’t?
explain the cocktail party effect
explain the Deutsch-Norman Late Selection Model
- initial selection filters for physical characteristics (tone, pitch, etc) (SAME AS EARLY SELECTION)
- SECOND stage of filtering: meaning of the message
what is the multimode model of attention?
selection can be based on multiple ‘modes’
what is the attentional load hypothesis?
synthesizes early and late selection models and capacity models
what is the feature integration theory?
- associated with anne treisman
- used to explain visual search, in which we attempt to locate a target object hidden among distractors
describe the pre-attention stage of the feature integration theory?
features pop out effortlessly
describe the focused attention stage of the feature integration theory?
features are combined to create representations
describe disjunctive search
- single feature enough to find target
- done in aprallel
- not ateniton demanding; ‘pop out’
- efficient
describe conjunctive search
- a combination of features need to find the target
- done by checking each item (serial)
- demands attention
- effortful
how does similarity influence search?
- similarity between target and distractors
- similarity among disractors
