Attention

Question 1

Steven’s Law is:

Answer 1

the relationship between physical intensity and psychological magnitude (perceived magnitude)

Question 2

selective attention

Answer 2

determines our ability to focus on certain sources of information and ignore others

Question 3

divided attention

Answer 3

determines our ability to do more than one thing at once (ex. driving and talking)

Question 4

mental effort

Answer 4

cognitive demands on the user’s abilities. (if a task requires a lot of mental effort, we call it “attention demanding”)

Question 5

executive control

Answer 5

strategies a person adopts to control the flow of information and task performance

Question 6

bottleneck models

Answer 6

specify a particular stage in the information processing sequence where the amount of information we can attend to is limited

Question 7

early selection in the bottleneck model

Answer 7

the bottleneck is placed on the information closer to perception

Question 8

late selection in the bottleneck model

Answer 8

the bottleneck is placed on the information closer to the response

Question 9

resource models

Answer 9

view attention as a limited-capacity resource that can be allocated to one or more tasks, rather than as a fixed bottleneck. performance decreases as the amount of resources decrease

Question 10

executive control models

Answer 10

Do not hypothesize any capacity limitations. View decrements in performance as a consequence of the need to coordinate and control various aspects of human information processing

Question 11

Filter theory

Answer 11

Proposed by Broadbent. Early selection model in which stimuli enter a central processing channel one at a time to be identified. Extraneous or unwanted messages are filtered out early, before the identification stage. (ex. looking for red squares in a toy box, you will ignore things that are not red)

Question 12

filter-attenuation model

Answer 12

(Triesman, 1964) ) claims an early filter serves only to attenuate the signal of an unattended message rather than to block it entirely

Question 13

late selection model

Answer 13

describes how all information comes into the processing sequence but if they are not important, they decay rapidly

Question 14

load theory

Answer 14

(Lavie, 2005) Whether selection is early or late will depend on whether the perceptual load is low or high
High perceptual load, early selection
Low perceptual load, late selection

Question 15

unitary resource models

Answer 15

hypothesize attention is a limited-capacity resource that can be applied to a variety of processes and tasks

Question 16

dual-task procedures

Answer 16

measure performance when attempting to do a primary and secondary task simultaneously
Increased attention to the primary task reduced performance on the secondary task
These types of studies are good for predicting performance when attempting to perform different combinations of tasks

Question 17

multiple resource theory

Answer 17

instead of one resource of attention, there are several distinct cognitive subsystems and each have their own limited pool of resources