Attention Flashcards
What is selective attention?
Attending to only one source of information that is relevant to our goals while ignoring other sources.
What is sustained attention/maintaining vigilance?
To direct cognitive activity on a specific stimulus or task for a longer period of time in order to complete any activity, a sequences action or thought, and to maintain goal orientation.
What is divided attention?
To execute more than one action at a time, shifting attention between two or more channels of information/modalities.
What is selection for?
The human mind is severely limited in processing concurrent information at a conscious level of awareness.
Only a small subset of available information is granted access to the brain processes.
What is attention?
A cognitive mechanism that helps to select and process important or interesting information while irrelevant information is largely ignored.
What is bottom-up or exogenous attention?
- Operates on raw sensory input by rapidly and involuntarily shifting attention to salient visual features of potential importance.
- Stimulus driven signal that makes the object sufficiently different from its surroundings.
What is top-down or endogenous attention?
- Revelant to our behavioural goals based on specific rules of motivational factors.
- Implements our longer-term cognitive strategies, biasing attention toward a specific object or location.
What are the three functions of attention?
- Attention for readiness.
- Attention for selection.
- Attention for detection.
What is attention for readiness?
Attention determines the degree of readiness for spcific events that we expect to happen.
What is vigilance?
The ability to sustain alertness to detect rare events.
- It is hard work, requiring the allocation of significant cognitive resources and inducing signifcant levels of stress.
What is divided attention?
The ability to simultaneously allocate attention to two or more sources of information or tasks.
What is vigilance decrement?
Decline in the ability to remain vigilant for citical signals with time, as indicated by detection performance.
- Affected by ageing, drugs, lack of sleep.
Is it possible to perform different actions simultaneously?
Yes, if the actions infolve different sensory systems/sensory modalities.
However, simultaneously attending to stimuli using the same resources can lead to error and decraesed efficiency.
What factors affect the performance on two tasks at the same time?
- Overall task similarity.
- Similar stimulus modality.
- Similar response modality.
What is serial processing?
Involves switching attention backwards and forwards between two tasks.
(one at a time)
What is parallel processing?
Involves attending to, and processing, two or more tasks at the same time.
What is the multiple-resource model?
Processing system consists of several independent mechanisms or resources.
The model is based on the idea that:
- Multiple attentional resources exista nd in some cases are seperate from each other.
- Different attentional tasks can be performed at the same time without interference.
Tasks requiring different resources are performed together more successfully than those requiring the same resources.
What are the limitations of the multiple-resource model?
- De-emphasises high-level coordination and organisational processes involved in dual-task performance.
- The sequence of processing stages is too rigid: In real life much dual-task processing is flexible and influenced by the individual’s strategies.
- Numerous forms of cognitive processing can occur between perception and responding - but have not been discussed in detail.
What is focused/selective attention?
Attending to only one source of information while ignoring other competing sources.
What is the Dichotic listening technique for investigating selective attention (Cherry, 1953)?
- Person listening to two messages through headphones, one message is presented in one ear, a different message in the other ear.
- Subject told to focus on one message and repeat aloud.
Findings
- Participants hardly remembedered the contents of the unattended message.
- Participants wouldn’t notice if the message changed language, but noticed if the sex of the unattended message changed.
An exception: About 1/3 of the time observers noticed strongly emotional words, their names, and the last words of the unattended message.
Who claimed that participants were unable to detect a word even when it was spoken 35 times within a trial in the unattended message?
Morary (1959)
What is Broadbent’s Attentional Filter Theory (1958)?
- Incoming stimuli briefly held in a sensory register, analyzed by a selective filter based on physical features.
- Only selected stimuli pass through the filter to a limited capacity channel for semantic analysis.
- Unattended stimuli are not processed for meaning and are discarded (attentional bottleneck).
- Early selection theory: “All or nothing” view of selection.
- Uses a bottom-up mechanism.
What is Broadbent’s (1954, 1958) Early Filter Theory?
- We only select one ‘channel’ of information for attention based on the physical characteristics on information.
- Information is not processed semantically (for meaning) until after selection.
What are the limitations of Broadbent’s (1954,1958) Early Filter Theory?
- Oversimplified: The idea doesn’t fully capture how flexible our attention is or how much we use our brain’s higher-level thinking to guide it.
- Information can be processed for meaning before selection.
- Things we’re not paying attention to can still interrupt us and catch our focus, like hearing the sex of a voice or emotional words.
- We can easily switch our attention from one thing to another.
What is the Cocktail Party Effect?
Hearing your name being mentioned somewhere in a crowded room.
- Unattended inputs can intrude and capture attention.
What was concluded through the cocktail party effect?
There is no such selective filter based solely on the physcial features of the stimulus.
What is Treisman’s Attenuation Theory?
- Unnattended information was not 100% elimiated but weakened.
- Unattended information is processed for meaning in a second filter and can be selected if it reaches the threshold level of intensity.
- Top-down processes help distinguish attended speech from competing unattended speech.
- The main message gets through while other information is weakened.
What is the Late Selection Model?
- Attention operates only after stimuli have undergone perceptual analysis.
- Suggests that almost all percievable properties are detected automatically by a large capacity system that operates on all of the stimuli available to our senses.
What is attention for detection?
We can focus intentionally on specific aspects of our environment:
- A certain position in space.
- A specific feature like a particular colour.
What is spatial attention?
The ability to focus on a specific region of the scene.
What is feature based atention?
The ability to focus on a specific feature of the object.
Orienting of attention to a new stimulus/location can be organised into three seperate stages:
- Disengagement from current stimulus/location.
- Shifting of attention toward a new stimulus/location.
- Re-engagement: Attention is focused onto the new stimulus/location.
What does the Zoom Lens Metaphor propose?
- We can deliberately increase/decrease the area of focal attention like zoom lens.
- The wider the area, the less efficient the search is.
What was Awh & Pashler (2000) hypothesis on split attention, and what did they find?
Hypothesis:
- The zoom lens metaphor would suggest that the target in the middle or cued locations should be detected as effectively as those in the cued locations.
Findings:
- Advantage for digits in cued locations compared to middle positions.
- Accuracy was lowest at the far locations.
Conclusions:
- Attention can be split, but efficiency decreases with distance between objects (when objects ar enot next to each other).
What is the Feature Integration Theory (Treisman & Gelade, 1980)?
It describes how we piece together separate features of an object to create a more complete perception of that object.
What happens according to Feature Integration Theory (FIT)?
- Basic visual features are processed rapidly and pre-atentively in parallel.
- Then, a slower serial process with focuses attention provides the ‘glue’ to form objects from features.
What are the types of visual attention involved in Feature Integration Theory (FIT)?
Space-based, object-based, and feature-based processes.
What happens during the pre-attentive stage in Feature Integration Theory (FIT)?
Visual features like orientation, color, contrast, and movement are processed in parallel across separate feature maps.
What happens during the focused attention stage in Feature Integration Theory (FIT)?
Individual features are combined to form a perception of the whole object.
- Attention is required to combine the features, and they are bound together in a “master map” of locations to create a single object.
What is cross-modal attention?
The coordination of attention across two or more modalities.
Cross-modal attention can adjust between different senses and connect important elements from one sense to another.
When listening to a conversation at a noisy gatehring, we do 3 things:
- Attend selectively to the sound of the speakers voice.
- Integrate this auditory information with related visual information.
- Ignore irrelevant events in both modalities.
