Attention Flashcards
Determines our ability to focus on certain sources of information and to ignore others
Selective Attention
Determines our ability to do more than one thing at once
Divided Attention
Cognitive demands of a user’s duties
Mental Effort
Strategies a person adopts to control flow of information and task performance
Executive Control
Bottleneck Models of Attention
Specify a particular stage in information processing where the amount of information that we can attend to becomes limited; early selection (close to perception) or late selection (close to response)
Resource Models of Attention
Attention is a limited-capacity resource that can be allocated; can draw from a single resource pool (single resource) or multiple (multiple resource)
Executive Control Models of Attention
Do not hypothesize an attention capacity limitation; decrease in performance comes from need to coordinate and control information processing
Filter Theory
Attention is given a filter and stimuli that are not quickly filtered out are processed one at a time
Filter-attenuation Model
The early filter only attenuates the signal of unattended messages rather than blocks them
Late-selection Model
All information comes into the processing sequence but rapidly decay if not deemed important
Load Theory
Selection is based on perceptual load; high load leads to early selection and low load leads to late selection
Unitary-resource Model
Attention is a limited-capacity resource that can be applied to a variety of processes; doing multiple tasks is not difficult unless the capacity of available resources is exceeded
Measuring performance when attempting to do a primary and secondary task simultaneously
Dual-task Procedures
Idea that attentional resources can fluctuate and change
Malleable attentional resources
Multiple-resource Theory
Attention has multiple subsystems with their own resource pools
EPIC Theory
Executive-Process Interactive Control Theory; decreases in multiple-task performance are due to strategies that people adopt to perform different tasks; assumes no limitation in central cognitive processes
Common auditory test of selective attention
Selective Listening
Selective listening is easy when…
- Target is physically distinct from the distractor
- Spatial separation of messages
- Different intensities
- Different frequency regions on the auditory spectrum
The idea that an observer can selectively attend to a location in the visual field outside of the focus point
Covert Orienting
Shifting visual attention voluntarily is…
Endogenous Orienting
Shifting visual attention involuntarily is…
Exogenous Orienting
Inhibition of Return
Once attention shifts away from an exogenously cued location, there is a tendency to avoid returning to that same location
POC Curve
Performance-operating Characteristic Curve; places task performances on each axis and shows how they relate
Hypothetical point where two tasks can be performed together as efficiently as being performed alone
Independence Point
The distance between the POC curve and the independence point
Performance Efficiency
The cost in performance strictly by having a second task
Cost of concurrence
Increased arousal causes a restriction of attention called…
Perceptual Narrowing
High arousal causes a decrease in vigilance called…
Vigilance Decrement
Vigilance Task
A task in which a user monitors multiple displays and detects relatively infrequent signals over time
