Attention Flashcards
Modes of attention
Active: top down- chooses to pay attention
passive: bottom up - catches attention
Focused attention
- selective
- essential to reduce overload
divided attention
- several tasks at one time
- tells us about capacity
Focused auditory attention - Who and experiment?
Welford (1952)
- bottleneck on human capacity
- 2 signals in rapid succession, not told what to attend to
- hard to make decision bc of bottle neck
- limit on processing
Cherry’s dichotic listening task
- What is shadowing?
Selective attention
- 2 messages, one told to attend to
- could repeat attended message but not other message - the other way filtered out
- Repeating aloud a message
theories of selective attention: Broadbent’s filter theory
- what, experiment, results
- Where is the filter for the model?
- information filtered at the level of our senses
- 1 input selected at filter according to physical properties
Experiment: ppt presented with paired digits in ear ear simultaneously. Recall by pair or set that they went in with
Results: easier to recall by set
– after the sensory store, before working memory
Eval of broadbent
- inflexible: only based on physical characteristics
- no exp for meaning, how do we know what to attend to when there’s no meaning attached
Triesman 1960
Attenuating theory
info not eliminated just reduced, ie some extent processed
if info meaningful = its processed
Deutsch & Deutsch (1963)
late selection
all processed and given meaning
then select the output
~~ COGNITIVELY EXPENSIVE
Focused visual attention
2 theories
Spotlight (Posner,1980): constant, rigid Zoom lens (Erickson,1996) : directed to area, can inc/decrease ~~ if outside the lens, LESS attention is paid to it
divided attention: against 1 processing channel
& Broadent’s redundancy
Allport, Antonis & Reynolds (1972)
- taught piano players to read at the same time
-BUT processing SLOWS and increase in ERRORS
…. Broadent’s redundancy (came back with ): time share & guessing whats next in one task…
factors which can affect divided attention
1) task similarity
2) task difficulty
3) effect of practice ~ can develop strategies which become automatic
Schneider & Shiffrin - 2 forms of attention
Automatic: no conscious awareness, no limit on capacity, hard to modify once learnt (atomicity)
Controlled: limited in capacity, require attention & much more flexible
What does stroop task show
conflict between auto and controlled attention
Attention failures
1) Change blindness
2) Inattentional blindness
