Attention Flashcards
What is Inattentional Blindness?
Not spotting an unexpected stimulus that is in plain sight.
A psychological lack of attention that is not associated with any vision defects/deficits.
Outline attention as an information filter
Attention helps us to selectively attend to whats relevant out of the infinite amounts of information.
In the parietal lobe.
What did Treisman conclude about attending to information?
Whether you attend to information at the Hierarchy of Analyses to Working Memory stage of attention depends on the meaning you can draw from the information.
Meaningful information is transferred into WM.
Outline and explain the cocktail party effect
Someone mentions your name and you direct your attention to that speech even though prior to that you hadn’t been aware of anything that that person was saying.
Attentional focus and creation of meaning from the environment influences this effect.
Outline the Posner cueing paradigm
Assesses an individuals ability to perform an attentional shift.
Looking at spatial attention.
What are endogenous cues?
Central, symbolic cues.
E.g. an arrow pointing located in the centre of focus.
What are exogenous cues?
Spatially based cues.
E.g. highlighting of a box to the left/right of the centre of focus.
What is stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA)?
The time between onset of first stimulus and onset of the second stimulus
What is an Inter-stimulus Interval (ISI)?
The time between offset of first stimulus and onset of the second stimulus.
What is inhibition of return?
An inhibitory effect produced by a peripheral cue or target.
Helps to facilitate attention switching.
An exogenous cue followed by a delay suppresses attention.
Why is eye tracking used?
To tell us whether the PP followed the instructions properly.
Outline global and local processing
Global is the whole picture and local is the smaller details.
E.g. lots of small Ps (local) in a shape to make a large H (global).
Interference from local level up to the global level of attention identifying these letters.
Some people experience more interference than others.
Outline the Navon Task
The basic idea of Navon’s study is that when objects are arranged in groups, there are global features and local features. For example, a group of trees has local features (the individual trees) and the feature of a forest (the trees together).
The basic finding of Navon’s work is that people are faster in identifying features at the global than at the local level. This effect is also known as global precedence.
Demonstrates that our spotlight can widen or narrow depending on the task that we are doing.
What is feature-based attention?
All about the integration/conflict of stimulus features
E.g. Stroop task with congruent and incongruent stimuli.
In visual searches, a conjunctive search is a bit more tricky than a parallel search.
Can look at accuracy and reaction times.
How can ERPs help with researching attention shifts?
Identify precise measures of timing attention shifts
Identify where in the brain these attention shifts happen.
