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 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.
It is based on the goals, tasks and relevance of the situation.
What is bottom-up/exogenous attention?
Operates on sensory input by rapidly and involuntarily shifting attention to salient visual features of potential importance.
What is top-down/endogenous attention?
- The relevance of our behavioural goals impacts where attention is focussed.
- 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 specific events that we expect to happen.
What is vigilance?
The ability to sustain alertness to detect rare events.
What is divided attention?
The ability to simultaneously allocate attention to two or more sources of information or tasks.
Is it possible to perform different actions simultaneously?
Yes, if the actions involve different sensory systems/sensory modalities.
However, simultaneously attending to stimuli using the same resources can lead to error and decreased efficiency.
What is vigilance decrement?
Decline in the ability to remain alert for critical signals with time, as indicated by detection performance.
- Affected by ageing, drugs, lack of sleep.
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?
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?
Our processing system consists of several independent mechanisms or resources.
The model is based on the idea that:
- Multiple attentional resources exist and 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.
What are the findings from the Dichotic listening technique for investigating selective attention (Cherry, 1953)?
- 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.
