Attention

Question 1

Flashbulb memories

Answer 1

vivid experiences which have a “live” quality feeling;

not always accurate

Question 2

Attention

Answer 2

taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought

Question 3

Vigilance

Answer 3

maintaining focused attention over a long period of time

Question 4

Two competing needs of attention

Answer 4

focusing limited mental resources on the immediate task;
monitoring ongoing stimuli to evaluate their potential significance and shifting the allocation of mental resources when necessary

Question 5

Selection

Answer 5

the act of attending to an object to select it apart from the unattended objects;
attended items are better remembered

Question 6

Cocktail party effect

Answer 6

despite competing background noises, a listener can focus on a single channel and still pick out relevant salient information from the background

Question 7

Dichotic listening paradigm

Answer 7

the words of attended message are easily and accurately repeated, and some physical features of information are still processed in the unattended ear

Question 8

Bottom-up processing

Answer 8

stimulus driven mechanism in which attention is captured by salient change in the environment;
automatically captures your attention

Question 9

Top-down processing

Answer 9

strategically directing attention to match current goals and expectations from past experience through memory; controlled process

Question 10

Salience

Answer 10

salient (important) pieces of information naturally pop-out

Question 11

Orienting

Answer 11

the act by which attention moves across a scene

Question 12

Overt attending

Answer 12

where you are attending is also where you are looking

Question 13

Covert orienting

Answer 13

attending to things without looking

Question 14

Posner experiment - cover orienting

Answer 14

covert shifts in attention are reflected in the efficiency with which targets are detected at cued locations

Question 15

Inhibition of return

Answer 15

if the time between onset of the cue and the target is more than 300 milliseconds, you are slower to detect the target at cued locations;
promotes orienting towards new and previously unsearched locations

Question 16

Visual search paradigm

Answer 16

models how we search for items in our environment;

locating a target item among a set of distracter items

Question 17

Set size effect

Answer 17

increase in difficulty as number of items increases

Question 18

Pop-effect

Answer 18

reflects bottom-up capture of attention driven by the salience of the physical properties of the target; easily induced by colour; independent of set size

Question 19

Conjunctive search

Answer 19

searching for a target defined by a combination of features;

response time increases with set size

Question 20

Contextual cueing

Answer 20

through experience and accumulation of knowledge, a schema can guide your search;
implicit memory mechanism

Question 21

Inattentional blindness

Answer 21

limited attentional processes can be susceptible to missing out on some very important and salient things

Question 22

Change blindness

Answer 22

even when you are looking for a change, you may not be able to see it; faster at detecting change if we know which part is changing (top-down)

Question 23

Preventing mind wandering

Answer 23

in order to ensure material catches focus, it needs to be made novel and exciting

Question 24

Stroop task

Answer 24

if the participant is asked to read the coloured word, it is done swiftly regardless of colour of the ink;
if the participant is asked to name the coloured ink, it is done slower and more error prone if it is incongruent

Question 25

Proportion congruent manipulation

Answer 25

high proportion (75% congruent, 25% incongruent) = increased Stroop effect;
low proportion (25% congruent, 75% incongruent) = decreased Stroop effect

Question 26

Spotlight model

Answer 26

attention enhances things that fall within its focus;

objects within the spotlight = faster reaction time, higher accuracy

Question 27

Broadbent’s model

Answer 27

early selection theory;
physical characteristics of sensory information are briefly stored and initially analyzed;
incoming information then encounters a bottleneck

Question 28

Treisman’s model

Answer 28

attenuation theory;
unattended information is not completely filtered out, but attenuated, allowing all information to pass through but with different assigned weightings;
first physical filter, second semantic filter

Question 29

Late-selection model

Answer 29

placing a filter at a later stage, after the information has been analyzed for physical and semantic content

Question 30

Hemi-spatial neglect

Answer 30

stroke patient;
only shaves half of his face, eats from right side of plate;
only pays attention to items on the right side of anything in his direct focus

Question 31

Damage to parietal lobes

Answer 31

damage to left parietal can be compensated by right parietal;
if right hemisphere damaged, both sides are affected and left hemisphere cannot compensate