Attention Flashcards
What is attention?
The mechanisms for continued cognitive processing
-an umbrella term for many things, it is how you ACTIVELY process things
What are the 4 metaphors used to describe attention?
1) Spotlight- focusing on one thing while everything else does not receive attention (William James)
2) Zoom lens: pulls attention into one thing, can change in size
3) Bottleneck: getting everything from one spot to another
4) Filter- screens out some info coming in and only lets some into our attnetion
What is automatic attention?
Anything that you do without having to think about it (texting, driving, writing). Once the stimulus appears, processing begins. It does not require you to take any attention away from other cognitive processes.
What is attentional capture?
Automatic processes capture our attention/processing and automatically continue working on it
What two parts of the brain are involved in controlled attention?
1) Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex
2) Anterior cingulate cortex
What does the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex do?
It is associated with top-down processing and task relevant processing.
KEEPS YOU ON TASK and HELPS AVOID DISTRACTIONS
-involved in choosing what gets your attention when their are competing stimulus
What does the anterior cingulate cortex do?
- DETECTS conflicting responses (ex. stroop effect, colour is written but is in different colour than it actually is)
- DETECTS ERRORS being made (ex. if you press wrong key, your ACC detects this right away)
What did Nilli Lavie explain were the components of attention?
There is a processing capacity and a load
- Processing capacity means there is a limit to the amount of stuff you can handle at once
- Load is what you are involved in and the amount of resources needed to do something
What is the difference between a heavy and light load?
- Walking is a light load, as you add more complex tasks at the same time, the load gets heavier
- The heavier the load, the more resources needed to do that, so the less capacity you have left over to do some second task
What did Miller believe the capacity was for working memory?
7 plus or minus 2 items can be held in your short term memory at once
How does load have implications for teaching?
When a task is easy, you can get students to do multiple tasks. But if a task is hard, you can’t give a second task because it will exceed their processing capacity
What is the Attentional Blink? What does RSVP mean?
The failure to notice the second of two stimuli when presented briefly after the first stimulus
RSVP= rapid, serial, visual, presentation
Ex) show letters one after the other, tell them to look for letter J and L. If these two letters are presented right after one another, you will miss the second one because you are busy processing the first stimulus
(the first target creates the attentional blink which erases the second target)
What is the dual task paradigm?
task in which participant performs two tasks at the same time.
Ex) when we had to try and repeat blaine while video was playing in background
What two types of tasks are there?
Discrete- pressing a button
Continuous
What was the task that Schneider and Shiffrin gave to test divided attention?
- Two targets
- Search through distractors to find targets
- Have to say if the targets were present or not among that set of distractors
With practice, this task became automatic (a controlled task turned into an automatic task)
What happens when we try to switch between tasks instead of doing them at the same time?
Your accuracy and time slows down when you switch tasks, no matter how many times you do it
Who did the distracted driving study?
Strayer and Johnston
How was the distracted driving test done?
Were supposed to keep cursor aligned with target while using phone, press button when cursor turned red (ex. stop sign)
-Compared hand-held phone, hands-free and radio
What were the results of comparing a single task to a dual task while riving?
When there was only a single task (driving), participants were more accurate with the cursor
When there was a dual task (talking on phone while driving) the chance of misses went WAY up
Why is the radio not as influential in terms of distracted driving?
With radio, attention is only marginally on it. It is not a high load task like talking on the phone is
What were the findings of Strayer and Johnston’s distracted driving tests?
- no difference between young and old drivers
- no difference between hand held or hands free
- problem isn’t driving with one hand, it is driving with fewer cognitive resources available
- 4x more likely to have accident if using phone (comparable to driving drunk)
- If you ask people, they will say that they can drive safe while using phone but other people can’t
What is the cocktail party effect?
The ability to focus auditory attention on one stimulus while simultaneously ignoring many others. Ability to hear your name during a party but not to be listening to other convos
What did Colin Cherry study?
Dichotic listening!
- found that people could not report a lot of what was going on in unattended ear (did not notice repeated words, only notice if voice switches from male to female)
- Shadowing: repeat what you are hearing as you hear it
What model did Donald Broadbent come up with?
The Bottleneck model- filter restricts info flow
Sensory Memory –> Filter –> Detector
Info comes in through senses, then filter identifies attended message and lets it through, and the detector processes the chosen info in greater depths to determine meaning. Then short term memory receives output of detector before transferring to long term
-BUT meaning of message gets through even if it is split between attended and unattended ear, so he can’t be right (Dear Aunt Jane)
What was Anne Treisman’s model?
Attenuation Model
- took out idea of filter
- Attenuator analyzes info based on physical characteristics, meaning, how words are grouped together
- attended message gets through full strength, unattended message is weaker (leaky filter model)
- Message is analyzed by dictionary unit which contains stored words, each has a threshold for being activated (listener’s name has low threshold, so can be recognized even if whispered)
What was Donald MacKay’s dichotic listening task?
In attending ear, people heard sentences which included ambiguous words that could have two meanings.
In unattending ear, they heard words or sentences that would disambiguate that sentence (influenced the way you interpreted the sentence in the attending ear)
Meaning of biasing word affected participants interpretation of sentence even though they said they were unaware of biasing words
What are the 4 features of attention?
It is limited, it is selective, it orients, and it searches
What are the two types of orienting?
Overt: shift in attention accompanied by body movement
Covert: attention some where else without body movement
What is eye tracking?
An overt method of orienting
-track eye movements
Saccade: jerky movement one fixation to another
Fixation- stationary eye
How is PRIMING a way of orienting?
There is a fixation point then a cue which captures attention, and then a target such as pressing a button
The Stimulus Onset Asynchrony (SOA) is the time between the cue and the target
Within Priming, what is the difference between valid and invalid trials?
Valid is when there is a cue, and invalid is when there is no cue
What determines eye movements?
1) Exogenous cues
2) Endogenous cues
