Attention Flashcards
Auditory & Visual Attention
Describe the procedure of the Spatial Cueing Task (Posner, Nissen, Ogden, 1978)
- Participants fixated on a point in the center of the slide. An arrow pointing left or right appeared above the center.
- Participants pressed a button when a box appeared either to the left or right of the arrow a few seconds later.
- 80% of the time, the box appeared where the arrow pointed, and 20% of the time it appeared opposite of where the arrow pointed.
What is disjunction?
A single-feature search.
What were the results of the inattentional blindness driving study (Strayer et al., 2003)?
Conditional probability: For billboards that were fixated, recognition was 2x better in the single task. Therefore, cell phone conversations reduced attention to fixated objects.
Basically, participants on cell phones recalled half as many billboards as when they were just driving.
What is an example of parafoveal preview?
While reading, knowing the length of the next word in the sentence.
How does the Feature Integration Theory account for visual search findings?
The disjunction search (single feature) uses only the pre-attentive stage. The conjunction search, where there is no “pop out” feature uses focused attention.
What experiment displays an example of inattentional blindness?
Simons and Chabris (1999) gorilla study.
Describe the procedure of the flicker paradigm (Rensink, O’Regan and Clark, 1997)
Participants watch two pictures flash with an 80ms gray field flashing in between. The pictures hold a large difference, and participants are to press a button when they notice this difference.
What were the results of the Spatial Cuing Task (Posner, Nissen, Ogden, 1978)?
Participants were faster at detecting the box when the arrow cued them correctly, and participants were slower than the baseline when cued incorrectly.
What is habituation?
Gradual reduction of orienting response back to the baseline.
How did Treisman and Geffen counter Late Selection Theories in 1967?
Participants were asked to monitor both messages, shadow one, and tap their finger on the target word “travel”.
Late Selection Theories predict similar detection rates from both messages, but the results showed 87% detection for the shadowed messages, and 8% for the other.
How does covert attention help overt attention?
It monitors the environment and determines where to move our eyes to next.
What is meant by “multiple channels” of information?
At any given moment, there are often several events (channels) that we could monitor in our environment.
In the Dichotic Listening Task (Cheery, Moray), what were participants able to recall in the unattended channel?
- Whether it was a pure tone vs. human voice
- Whether the voice was male or female
- When the sex of the speaker changed during test
What theory builds on the Attenuation Theory (Treisman, 1964)?
The Pertinence Model (Norman, 1968)
What is inattentional blindness?
Failure to perceive objects or events that are in plain sight – due to lack of attention.
Roughly how many letter spaces are in foveal vision?
6
What do we do when we get to the serial bottleneck?
We select what information to attend to and filter out the rest (like an on/off switch)
Name two types of attention shifts.
Overt & Covert
What happens in the pre-attentive stage of the Feature Integration Theory?
Perception of primitive features, before any objects are recognized, parallel processing. Free floating, we haven’t yet created a representation of which features belong to which objects. Example: The green apple and red pepper.
What happened when the same voice was used in both channels?
Participants were still able to shadow the “to-be-attended” ear with reasonable success.
Name 4 other names for “central attention”
Central cognition, cognitive control, executive functioning, and executive control.
What happens when participants are asked to complete two tasks that are similar?
There is more interference because similarity means there is the same perceptual modality.
What was the independent variable in the in attentional blindness for important info while driving study (Strayer et al., 2003)?
Single vs. Dual-task driving (within participants)
What do Early Selection Theories (Broadbent, 1958) suggest?
Information is filtered based on physical characteristics, and unselected streams are suppressed, therefore the meaning never reaches awareness.
What is an overt attention shift?
Moving eyes (or ears) toward a stimulus.
What happens in the focused attention stage in the Feature Integration Theory?
Attention directed to the location of an object serves to glue its features into a “unified” object that we recognize; serial processing.
What were the results of the flicker paradigm (Rensink, O’Regan and Clark, 1997)?
It often took participants over 30 seconds to detect the change, even though the change was large and anticipated. This is called change blindness.
With practice, what might happen to something that initially requires controlled attention?
It can become automatic.
What did Treisman and Schmidt (1982) find when participants recalled black numbers and colored letters after only 200ms of presentation time?
Participants were able to recall the numbers, but they had trouble recalling which letters were which colors.
What is the cocktail party phenomenon?
1/3 of participants noticed when their own names were spoken in the unattended channel. This means meaning from an unattended channel reached awareness.
What happened when meaning was derived from the combined input of both channels in the same voice?
Participants Ps recombined words based on semantic characteristics (Gray and Wedderburn, 1960)
What are the two types of automatic input?
The orienting reflex and habituation
What improves detection rates?
Attending to features present in a target event. For example, in the gorilla study, when counting white team passes, detection rates of the gorilla were 42%, versus 83% for the black team.
What is the bottleneck of visual attention?
Retinal acuity
What happened when meaning from the attended ear was transferred to the unattended in the same voice?
Participants followed the meaning.
