attention Flashcards
The act of attending to an object to select it apart from the unattended objects
Selection
refers to our conscious ability to attend to the information that is relevant to our goals.
attention
- Involuntary “capture”
- Fast, efficient, and obligatory
Automatic processes
- Conscious attention (voluntary)
- Slow, effortful
controlled processes
participants remember unattended information
breakthrough
items contain matching word and colour dimensions (the word RED is written in the colour red)
congruent
items contain mismatching word and colour dimensions (the word BLUE written in the colour green)
incongruent
change the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials
Proportion Congruent Manipulation
the number of items to search through
set size
increase in difficulty as set size increases
set size effect
when the object of a visual search is easily found, regardless of set size (easily induced by colour)
pop-out effect
even with directed focus, attention limits lead us to miss information
Attention captures a portion of the external world to the internal mind
change blindness
have a ‘live’ quality feeling, almost as if a person is looking at a photo taken from that evening and I was very surprised to learn that I was completely wrong about at least one detail
flashbulb memories
despite competing background noises, a listener can focus on a single channel and still pick out relevant salient information from the background
cocktail party effect
headphones are worn so that one message can be presented to one ear and a different message can be presented to the other ear
dichotic listening paradigm
refers to a stimulus-driven mechanism in which attention is captured by salient change in the environment
bottom-up processing
you can strategically direct your attention to match your current goals and expectations from past experience through memory
Top-down processing
the act by which attention moves across a scene
orienting
is obvious because where you are attending is also where you are looking
Overt attending
attend to things without looking
covert attending
if the time between the onset of the cue and the target is more than about 300 milliseconds (which allows sufficient time to direct an eye gaze), you are actually slower to detect the target at cued locations than at uncued locations
Inhibition of return
allow attention to be physically and automatically oriented
Exogenous cues
allow attention to be consciously directed by interpretation of cue information
Endogenous cues
has been used to model how we search for items in our environment
The visual search paradigm
reflects bottom-up capture of attention riven by the salience of the physical properties of the target
The pop-out effect
you need to search for 2 distinct features (colour and shape) that characterize the target (the red circle)
Conjunctive search
participants are faster at identifying the target in the unaltered old displays, but they are unaware that these displays have been repeated
Implicit memory mechanism
demonstrates that when the focus of attention is placed strongly on a particular stimulus, even highly salient stimulus may go unnoticed
Inattentional blindness
demonstrates that salient changes in the environment often go unnoticed, even when we are looking for them
Change blindness
suggests physical information is filtered before semantic processing, accounting for the dichotic listening task but not the cocktail party effect.
Broadbent’s early selection theory
attempted to compensate by suggesting physical information is just attenuated and if relevant may be brought to the focus of attention
Treisman’s attenuation theory
suggest filtering only occurs after physical and semantic analysis and only selected information goes on for further processing due to limitations in processing capacity
Late filter models
