Attention Flashcards
What is attention described as?
An information filter
A spotlight
What is the cocktail party effect?
Ones focus changes abruptly due to salient stimulus
Somebody enters the room and calls your name as you are talking with your friends. Your attention immediately diverts to the person who said your name. What effect is this?
Cocktail party effect
What is a KEY STUDY (2) of inattention blindness?
Running track study
Policeman court case
What is inattentional blindness?
When you fail to see something that is plainly visible
You are on a run and run past a car crash scene at the side of the road. You did not notice it until shown CCTV of you running past the scene. What is this an example of?
In-attentional blindness
Who is in-attentional blindness more likely to affect?
A novice over an expert
Can in-attentional blindness occur in anyone?
Yes, even intelligent/vigilant people
What is the key in-attentional blindness running study?
Students asked to follow runner round track
Fight occurred on route
Asked if they saw anything unusual
In the IAB running study, what percentage of students saw the fight in daytime
What percentage saw the fight at night time?
72%
35%
In the IAB running study, what effect did increasing cognitive demand (count how many times the runner tapped his head) have?
Had major influence on IAB
Dropped to 56%
What are 3 reasons for in-attentional blindness?
1) Increased cog demand
2) Individual diffs between people
3) Conspicuity of stimulus
How can expectations cause in-attentional blindness?
Past experiences teach us what is relevant
I.e. expecting something to have a bright label, but on one occasion having a plain label
What is the conspicuity of a stimulus?
The degree to which it jumps to your attention
How can mental workload/task interference affect IAB?
It is MORE LIKELY to occur if part of our attention is diverted to a secondary task
Where are most of our attentional resources directed towards?
The centre
What did Laberge find, when placing targets in the centre of a screen?
People react at a faster rate when purposely spotting it
We preferentially process whatever falls into our…
Beam of focus
What might cause us to shift our attentional spotlight around?
1) Envirnomental cues
2) Exogenous/endogenous cues
What is cueing?
Being informed about an upcoming event
An amber traffic light is an example of…
Cueing
A cue is often followed by…
A target stimulus
A cue is often followed by a target stimulus. This is called
A valid cue
Why might cues show up at locations other than that target?
To be misleading
Exogenous and endogenous cues cause…
The attention to shift around
In an experiment, what might cause a ppt’s attention to shift around?
Endogenous and exogenous cues
What are exogenous cues?
Cues in a location we are NOT CURRENTLY ATTENDING TO
What are endogenous cues?
Cues within our current focus
What is inhibition of return?
Slower RT for targets appearing in previously inspected locations
What is an evolutionary advantage of IOR?
More efficient for foraging
Stops animals searching same spot more than once
Inhibition of return helps us not fixate on one location, and -
View the scene as a whole
Inhibiting responses only happen when there are both…
Valid and invalid cues
When does inhibition of return occur (3)
1) long cue-stimulus gap
2) criterion shift
3) evolved response
What brain imaging method has been used to assess attention?
fMRI
fMRI study into global/local motion
Ppts asked to report whether they saw global/local
Diff areas of brain activated in global vs local
What part of the brain was more active in global motion processing?
a-IPS
Studies into global/local processing suggest that spatial/feature based attention are…
Closely related
What is global processing?
Processing a visual stimulus holistically (as a whole)
What is local processing?
Processing the individual details of a stimulus rather than whole
ERPs can tell us (3)…
a) neural response/diff tasks
b) timing of attention processes
c) between group diffs in attention mechanisms
The Navon task is an example of ….
Global vs local processing
The Navon task found that people are…
FASTER at identifying features at the global than at the local level
What does the STROOP test demonstrate?
Interference in RTs of a task
The store task shows that it is difficult to name the ink colour of a word if there is an….
INCONGRUENCE between colour-word and word-colour
Stroop test
It is difficult to suppress our…
Automatic tendency to read
