Attention

Question 1

What is Dichotic listening?

Answer 1

• Dichotic listening is a research method where 2 different messages are transmitted to the two ears, and the participant is asked to only listen to one message and ignore the other
• The observations made where that when the participant was asked qs, they knew very little about what was said in the other ear, could identify attributes such as gender, and couldn’t report the language
• Final conclusion was that the information in the unattended message is processed to a very shallow degree

Question 2

What is Broadbent’s filter model?

Answer 2

• Chunks of sensorial information are represented as balls
• Attentional selection is symbolised as a y-shaped tube through which information must pass through
• Information then enters through the sensory channels and is filtered as it proceeds
• Tube accepts one ball at a time, which a flap acting as a filter

Question 3

Whatt did Treisman find?

Answer 3

• Information that is unattended is not entirely blocked
• So attention acts as a selective filter
• In dirochet listening, fragments from the ignored channel were reported if things congruent with the context of the attended message - implies that some of the unattended info must’ve been processed to a certain extent

Question 3

What is the cocktail party phenomenon?

Answer 3

• A highly pertinent stimuli (e.g name) can suddenly capture one’s attention in a noisy environment
• This disagrees with broadbent’s theory as the effect of high priority doesn’t work though the filter model which only processes one thing at a time
• In dirochet listening, participants were able to report if their name was presented on the ignored channel

Question 4

What is attentional bottleneck and its relevance to Broadbent and Treisman?

Answer 4

• Attentional bottleneck always (Broadbent) or typically (Treisman) occurs before the stage of pattern recognition
• Attentional bottleneck refers to the limited capacity to process information, leading to a filtering/selectional process
• Unattended stimuli can only be processed if attention is switched or recognition threshold of information is low
• Unattended information is usually not (Treisman) or never (Broadbent) processed to the level of meaning

Question 4

What is Treisman’s attenuation model?

Answer 4

• The model shows that firstly, physical properties of sensor info are analysed (voice)
• The knowledge about words is accessed (if they know what is means), looks at the frequency of how much they’ve heard the words, and its relevance
• Then, the filter checks whether it is relevant to current priorities/expectations
• If the signal passes both filters, the meaning is analysed

Question 5

Where is the output sensorial processing placed?

Answer 5

• Output of selection processing is places in short-term memory and information in short-term memory is quickly lost and this loss acts as ‘attentional bottleneck”

Question 6

What is negative priming?

Answer 6

• A display with 2 dimensions is presented and participants are instructed to only attend to 1 dimension, and ignore the other
• On critical trials, average naming times to the target object are slower if ignored on the prime (previous) trial
• Negative priming is when ignoring a stimulus slows down subsequent redirection of attention to that stimulus
• It suggests that ignored information is not simply discarded, but actively suppressed

Question 7

What was the shift of research perspective?

Answer 7

• Early theories of attention were preoccupied with attempts to locate the attentional bottleneck
• No agreement was reached on the exact location of bottleneck
• So the central assumption was that performance in any non-trivial task is costly and requires mental effort

Question 8

What was Kahneman’s capacity theory?

Answer 8

• The inability to perform two tasks at once is not the results of built-in attentional bottleneck (early, late etc)
• Rather people have a limited-capacity pool of attention to carry out mental activities
• So if an activity is easy, very little attentional capacity is used up, and if difficult, it uses up al or most of the resources
• The capacity available at any given moment depends on : task demands, arousal (alertness, medication etc)and momentary intentions (how important is it to you)

Question 9

What is the Allocation policy?

Answer 9

• Individuals have substantial control over how they allocate their attention, but performance declines if attentional demands exceeds supply
• If two activities share attentional capacity, then one task should affect the other (e.g increasing demand on task 1 should impair performance on task 2)

Question 10

What did Johnston and Heinz investigate?

Answer 10

• The primary task was a light flashing repeatedly and randomly, and participants had to press a button as quickly as possible when they detect it
• Secondary task was that the at the same time, participants had to shadow words simultaneously presented to both ears by ( simple repetition(both ears had same message), according to physical category (shadow the female voice) or according to semantic category (e.g shadow the word that is a city)
• If speed of detecting light is affected by difficult of shadowing, then both tasks draw on a shared attentional pool

Question 11

What were the findings of Johnston and Heniz’s experiment?

Answer 11

• The response times to detect flashing lights were:
  1) fastest when they had to shadow through simple repetition
  2) Slower when they shadowed according to physical criteria
  3) Slowest when they shadowed according to semantic criteria

-Early selection mode which was represented by the physical criteria requires less capacity than late selection mode (semantic criteria)
- Selective attention requires capacity