Attention Flashcards
Inattentional blindness
The failure to perceive a new object or event that occurs in plain sight (in your focus of attention
Measuring inattentional blindness
Participants are told to focus on a cross, then a white square appears next to it. Many do not see it.
Inattentional blindness with meaningful words
People are more likely to complete words with words presented next to the cross in the point of focus even without consciously seeing the word.
Change blindness
A form of inattentional blindness in which people have difficulty detecting the difference between two versions of a picture that are alternately presented.
Flicker technique paradigm
Two similar visual images (e.g., scenes; A, A’) are presented with an interstimulus distracting grey scene. People are innacurate at identifying if there was a change.
Inattentional deafness
A phenomenon in which auditory information is not perceived when a different high-load task is being performed
Selective attention
A form of attentional control in which a single data stream (e.g., an object or voice) is processed while others are ignored.
Cocktail party effect
The ability to attend to a specific voice in an environment in which other competing voices are present as well.
Dichotic listening task
An experimental task designed to assess selective attention. Participants are presented, via headphones, with two different audio streams to each of the two ears and tasked with repeating only one of the streams while ignoring the other.
Early-selection models
A model of attention that posits that unattended information is filtered based on basic physical characteristics without processing meaning.
Late-selection models
A model of attention that posits that unattended information is first processed in terms of its meaning, and then filtered based on irrelevance to the current task.
Attenuator model
A theory of attention in which unattended stimuli are processed but at a reduced level relative to attended stimuli. Meaningful things can pass the filter
Attentional load
A measure of how much processing resources are needed in order to perform a task.
Eriksen Flanker task
Irrelevant distractor and an experimental stimuli : see if the distractor is processed, increasing reaction time
In high load tasks, people tend to be ____more/less distracting by outside stimulus
Less (all processing resources are already used)
Automatic processing
Processing that happens even without the allocation of selective attention, typically for highly familiar stimuli or tasks.
The automatic portion of the stroop task is…
Reading the words
Exogenous attention
Control of attention that is driven by external factors, bottom-up processing, temporo-parietal junction and VFC
Endogenous attention
Control of attention that is driven by internal factors (top down), IPS and FEF
When completing a task, video game players showed ____less/more parietal lobe activation, indicating ___less/more of a need for recruiting attentional networks.
Less
Divided attention
The allocation of processing resources to multiple objects or tasks simultaneously.
Feature-integration theory
A theory of attentional function that holds that attention is necessary in order to bind together discrete features of an object unto a unified whole.
Conjunction errors
A failure to accurately bind together the discrete features of a single object.
Visual search
An experimental task in which participants must search for a target object among distractors.