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PSY1004 > Attention > Flashcards

Attention Flashcards

1
Q

What is attention?

A

The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment.

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2
Q

What are the two types of attention?

A

Selective and divided.

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3
Q

What is selective attention?

A

attending to one thing while ignoring others.

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4
Q

What is divided attention?

A

paying attention to more than one thing at a time.

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5
Q

When and why did attention start being studied?

A

1950s due to technological developments and human machine interactions for example, the challenges of optimising procedures for pilots.

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6
Q

What are the two key points of selective attention?

A

We do not attend to a large fraction of the information in the environment.
We filter out a lot of information and promote other information for further processing.

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7
Q

What is one research method when looking at selective attention?

A

Dichotic Listening.

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8
Q

What is Dichotic Listening?

A

Different messages are presented to each ear and the participant “shadows” one message to ensure they are attending to that message. Aims to see if we can completely filter out the message to the unattended ear and attend only to the shadowed.

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9
Q

What were the results of the Dichotic Listening study?

A

Participants couldn’t report the content of the message int he unattended ear but they knew there was a message and the gender of the speaker.

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10
Q

What conclusions can we draw from Dichotic Listening study?

A

The unattended ear its till being processed at some level as change in voice and tone is noticed.

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11
Q

What is the cocktail party effect?

A

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli, especially at a party where there are a lot of simultaneous conversations.

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12
Q

What is an example of an early model of selective attention?

A

Broadbent’s filter model.

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13
Q

What is Broadbent’s filter model?

A

States that messages are filtered before the incoming information is analysed for meaning.

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14
Q

What are the four parts of Broadbent’s filter model?

A

Sensory memory.
Filter.
Detector.
Short-term memory.

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15
Q

What does the Sensory Memory do in Broadbent’s filter model?

A

Holds all incoming information for a fraction of a second before transferring all information to the next stage.

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16
Q

What does the Filter do in Broadbent’s filter model?

A

Identifies attended messages bases on the physical characteristics, only the attended messages are passed onto the next stage.

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17
Q

What does the Detector do in Broadbent’s filter model?

A

Processes all information to determine higher-level characteristics of the message.

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18
Q

What does the short-term memory do in Broadbent’s filter model?

A

Receives output of the detector, holds information for about 10-15 seconds and may transfer it to long-term memory.

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19
Q

What are the limitations of Brodbent’s model?

A

Dear Aunt Jane Experiment: When participants were played “Dear 7 Jane” in the left ear and “9 Aunt 6” in the right ear and asked to shadow the left ear only, most responded with saying “Dear Aunt Jane” this would therefore suggest that the participants were able to shadow a meaningful message that switches from one ear to the other. Therefore going against Broadbent’s model.

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20
Q

Who carried out the Dear Aunt Jane Experiment?

A

Gray & Wedderburn (1960)

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21
Q

What is Treisman’s Attenuation Model?

A

Also known as Intermediate Selection Model, it argues that attended messages can be separated from unattended messages early in the information-processing system. Also says that selection can also occur later.

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22
Q

What is the Attenuator in Treisman’s Attenuator?

A

Replaces Broadbent’s filter, analyses incoming messages in terms of physical characteristics, language and meaning, the attended message is let through the attenuator at full strength while the unattended message is still let through but at much weaker strength.

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23
Q

What is Treisman’s Dictionary Unit?

A

Contains words, each of which has a threshold for being activated. Words that are common or important have low thresholds while words that are uncommon have high thresholds.

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24
Q

What do Late Selection Models argue?

A

Selection does not occur until after meaning has been analysed.

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25
Q

Give an example of a Late Selection Model?

A

MacKay (1973).

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26
Q

What did MacKay (1973) do?

A

In the attended ear, participants heard ambiguous sentences such as, “They were throwing stones at the bank”. In the unattended ear participants hear either “river” or “money”. They then had to choose which statement was closest to the meaning of the attended message, picking between a statement about stones being thrown at the “savings and loan association” or the “side of the river”.

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27
Q

What did MacKay (1973) find?

A

The meaning of the biasing word affected the participants’ choice while participant were unaware of the presentation of the biasing words, suggesting that the meaning of the message is analysed before selection takes place.

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28
Q

What are the components of the Load Theory of Attention?

A

Processing Capacity.
Perceptual Load.

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29
Q

What is processing capacity?

A

How much information a person can handle at any given moment.

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30
Q

What is perceptual load?

A

The difficulty of a given task, i.e. low-load (easy) tasks take up less processing capacity and high-load (difficult) tasks take up more processing capacity.

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31
Q

What is an example of different perceptual loads?

A

You can listen to loud music or audiobooks while driving the car on the motorway, yet you have to pause or turn down the music while parking in a difficult spot. There is remaining perceptual capacity when driving not he motorway as it is an ‘easy’ task whereas there is no remaining perceptual capacity when parking as it is a ‘difficult’ task.

32
Q

What is the Stroop Test?

A

Tests the Stroop Effect by getting participants to read - colour names are written in different colours.

33
Q

What is the Stroop Effect and why does it happen?

A

The name of the word interferes with the ability to name the ink colour. We cannot avoid paying attention to the meanings of the words.
This is because reading is highly trained and automatised.

34
Q

What does Training Effects mean?

A

The more often you do a type of task the better you get at it and the more automatised the task becomes.

35
Q

How do Training Effects help with processing capacity?

A

The more automatised a task is, the less processing capacity it takes up - therefore reduced cognitive load because less executive function is used.

36
Q

Whata re two example of training effects helping lower processing capacity?

A
  • Frequent video game players are less affected by high visual load.
  • The more often you speak foreign languages, the more automatic it becomes.
37
Q

How do we measure attention?

A

Overt attention is observable attention and can be observed in eye movements.

38
Q

What are the two key features of eye movements we look for when measuring attention?

A

Saccades and Fixations.

39
Q

What are Saccades?

A

Rapid movements of the eyes from one place to another.

40
Q

What are Fixations in terms of eye movements?

A

Short pauses on points of interest.

41
Q

How are Saccades and Fixations studies?

A

Using an eye tracker.

42
Q

Is salience of stimuli top-down or bottom-up processing?

A

Bottom-up.

43
Q

What does stimulus salience mean?

A

Areas and objects that stand out and capture attention. It depends on the characteristics of the stimulus. Colour and motion are highly salient as they stand out a lot from the background.

44
Q

Is Scene Schema a top-down or bottom-up process?

A

Top-down.

45
Q

What does Scene Schema mean?

A

Knowledge about what is contained in typical senses, help to guide fixations from one area of a scene to another.
Eye movements are determined by the task, they precede motor actions by a fraction of a second.

46
Q

Give an example of a bottom-up eye movement and a top-down eye movement?

A

Making breakfast (b-u)
Looking for keys (t-d)

47
Q

How do we measure attention without eye movements?

A

Covert attention is measured using cueing procedure. This is a procedure for testing memory in which a participant is presented with cues, such as words or phrases, to aid the recall of perviously experienced stimuli.

48
Q

What method is used to measure response times during the cueing procedure?

A

Donders’ Subtraction Method.

49
Q

How does location effect response time in the cueing procedure?

A

Participants respond faster to a target at an expected location than at an unexpected location, even when eyes are kept fixed.

50
Q

How does cueing help in magic tricks?

A

Cueing can be used as a form of deception in magic tricks.

51
Q

Is multitasking possible?

A

True multitasking is almost impossible unless all tasks are easy and highly practised.

52
Q

What is divided attention?

A

Practice enables people to simultaneously do two things that were difficult at first. Highly practiced (automatised) tasks allow us to divide our attention to other things.

53
Q

What does the ability to have divided attention depend on?

A

the difficulty of the task.

54
Q

Who did a study on divided attention?

A

Schneider and Shiffrin (1977).

55
Q

What did Schneider and Shiffrin (1977) do?

A

They studied divided attention between remembering target and monitoring rapidly presented stimuli.
They presented participants with one target stimulus in the memory set and four stimuli in each of the 20 frames that were presented quickly. The target stimuli appeared in one of the frames.

56
Q

What did Schneider and Shiffrin find?

A

Performance improves with practice, which extends to a point where participants report that the task has become automatic.

57
Q

What was found about mobile phone use while driving and by who?

A

Strayer and Johnston (2001) found that participants on their phones missed twice as many red lights and took longer to apply the brakes. Same results using “hands-free” cell phone.

58
Q

What are the two things that happen if we don’t attend?

A

Change Blindness.
Inattentional Blindness.

59
Q

What is inattentional blindness?

A

Stimuli that are not attended ar not perceived, even though a person might be looking directly at it.

60
Q

What is change blindness?

A

Difficulty in detecting changes in similar, but slightly different scenes that are presented one after another. the changes are often easy to see once attention is directed to them but are usually undetected in the absence of appropriate attention e.g. the bear walking across the video of people dancing.

61
Q

What is the Binding?

A

Binding is the [process by which features such as colour, form, motion and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.

62
Q

What is Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory?

A

Explains the binding problem: the problem of explaining how an object’s individual features become bound together.

63
Q

What re the two stages of the Feature Integration Theory?

A

Preattentive Stage.
Focused Attention Stage.

64
Q

What is the Preattentive Stage?

A

Object analysed unto features. This is automatic therefore, no effort or attention is required, we are unaware of the process.

65
Q

What is the Focused Attention Stage?

A

Attention plays a key role as features are combined into a perceptual object.

66
Q

Why is it called the Feature INTEGRATION Theory?

A

Every object has multiple features that need to be integrated after feature detectors have processed them individually.

67
Q

What is Illusory Conjunction?

A

A situation in which features from different objects are inappropriately combined. Participants report combinations of features from different stimuli. Illusory conjunctions occur because features are “free floating”, combined in the Focus Attention Stage.

68
Q

What is Balint’s Syndrome?

A

Bilateral parietal lesions which mean the patients fail to apprehend all but one of simultaneously presented objects at the same location. This condition is object-based not location-based - multi-coloured dots are ripely seen if they are connected by lines.

69
Q

What are the two main symptoms of Balint’s Syndrome?

A
  • Inability to focus attention on individual objects.
  • High number of illusory conjunctions reported.
70
Q

How is the Feature Integration Theory a mixture of top-down and bottom-up processing?

A

It is mostly bottom-up processing however, top-down processing influences processing when participants are told what they would see, top-down processing combines with feature analysis to help a person perceive things accurately.

71
Q

What are the two areas (networks) that are neural correlates of attention?

A

Attention network and default mode network.

72
Q

What is the attention network?

A

It is most active during tasks (task-positive).

73
Q

What is the main feature of the attention network?

A

Engaged Attention?

74
Q

What is the default mode network?

A

More active at rest (task-negative).

75
Q

What is the main feature of the default mode network?

A

Mind-wandering.

PSY1004 (4 decks)

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