Attention Flashcards
Define orienting.
When individuals choose to attend to a particular stimulus.
What does visual orientation involve?
Moving our eyes so that the attended object is imaged onto the fovea (the part of the retina with the greatest visual acuity).
Define overt attention with regards to vision.
Allocating our attention to a particular aspect of our visual field by directing our gaze towards it.
Define covert attention with regards to vision.
Involves attending to an area in our peripheral vision without actually moving our eyes to directly gaze towards it.
Who was responsible for the discovery of covert attention?
Helmholtz (1986)
Describe the procedures and findings presented by Cherry et al. (1953) in their research into selective auditory attention.
Presented ppts with dichotic presentation of two different streams of spoken prose in each ear. Found that voluntary attention to one ear resulted in better encoding of this voluntary stimulus but degradation of unattended input.
Describe the cocktail effect (Treisman, 1964)
Unattended message isn’t lost completely, just reduced. Best observed in a cocktail party setting where:
a) A relevant convo can be attended to in spite of background noise.
b) Attention can still be captured by an unattended stimulus eg. when hearing your own name mentioned in another unattended convo.
Who was responsible for the ‘cocktail party effect’?
Treisman (1964)
Effect of selective attention on attended and unattended stimuli?
Improves processing of attended target whilst reducing processing of other simultaneously present stimuli.
Define endogenous attention.
TOP-DOWN attention.
Actively choosing to attend to something.
Internally drive, usually by knowledge of the stimulus.
Define exogenous attention.
BOTTOM-UP attention.
When a particularly salient stimuli attracts our attention away from previously attended stimuli.
Summarise the findings of the Posner (1980) task.
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