Attention Flashcards
Selective attention (focused attention)
- Attending to a stimulus while ignoring others
Divided attention
- Attending to multiple simultaneous stimuli
Multitasking
- Is a myth; doing more than one task simultaneously degrades performance
- problems with multitasking: reduces productivity, decrease creative thinking, causes stress
Binaural presentation
- Two different messages presented simultaneously to both ears
- almost impossible to shadow (repeat what you’ve heard) a single message
Dichotic presentation
- Two different messages; one presented to each ear
- can accurately shadow messages
- could determine sensory characteristics from unattended ear
- no semantic (meaning-based) processing
Cocktail party effect
- Ability to selectively attend to one message while ignoring all other messages
Filter model (early selection)
- Information filtered before semantic analysis
- sensory store → filter → higher level processing → working memory
- problems: important information from unattended ear was processed, semantically relevant content is not filtered out early on, filtering not based on location but on semantic properties
Attenuation model
- Attenuator analyzes stimuli based on physical characteristics, language, and meaning
- sensory store → attenuator → dictionary unit → working memory
- further processing occurs if information meets pattern recognition threshold in the dictionary unit (common words, high importance, relevance / expectations)
Problem: attended ear presented with sentence and unattended ear presented with words, unattended ear processed meaning (implies late selection)
Late selection model
- Stimuli are filtered after processing based on their physical properties and meaning
- sensory store → higher level processing → filter → working memory
- selection based on importance of recognized item or meaning
Problem: unlikely that all incoming stimuli are processed by deep semantic analysis
Multimode theory
- There may be multiple filters (preattentive and attentive)
- early selection: filtering out necessary stimuli (selective attention)
- late selection: evaluate broad range of incoming information (divided attention)
Feature integration theory
- Attention must be focused on particular stimulus attributes to construct a representation / percept
1. Preattentive stage: rapid, automatic decomposition of stimulus into basic properties (parallel processing)
2. Focus attention stage: spatial location selected and basic properties at this spot are combined to make an object file (serial process)
Feature search
Target defined by one basic property / primitive
→ eg. A green 2 among red 2’s
Conjunction search
Target defined by a combination of two or more basic properties / primitives
→ eg. A green 5 among green and red 2’s, and red 5’s
Spatial configuration search
Target defined by arrangement of features
→ eg. Find a 5 among 2’s
“Pop - out”
- Time needed to find target is very short / constant in a feature search (RT not influenced by number of distractors)
- primitives cause pop-out (colour, brightness, orientation, length etc.)
- target location is identified in preattentive stage (parallel search)
Inefficient search
- Conjunction and spatial configuration searches take longer
- RT increases as number of distractors increases
- more time is spent in focused attention stage (serial search)
Pros and cons of visual search
Pros: evidence of illusory conjunctions (primitives may be incorrectly combined), feature present / feature absent effect (features present are better detected), explains binding (separate aspects of stimulus are combined into holistic percept)
Cons: different-category vs same-category (same category took longer, more errors), attention is more than just a binding agent
Inattentional blindness
- If stimulus is presented but not attended to, it is not perceived
Attentional blink
- When stimuli are presented in a series, one target stimulus interferes with the ability to detect a subsequent target
Change blindness
- An inability to detect changes in an object or a scene
