attention Flashcards
dichotic listening
- cherry 1953
wear headphones with different stream in each ear - have to attend to one or both
- recalling from both harder
- certain words draw your attention - fire, your name
- shows attention is a finite resource and not enough to attend to both
posner cuing
shown computer screen with dots on left/right
- given cue to where dot is
- given correct cue 80% of the time
- when wrong cue the reaction time is much shorter
- so attention is helped/hindered by cues
attentional blink
two targets to find - a specific letter in white and the letter X
- when 2nd shown too close to the 1st then change in detection - poorer performance
- this is the attentional blink
psychological refractory period
dual task paradigm
- 2 stimulus which need rapid response
- shown too close and 2nd is delayed
bottleneck theory
at the stage of decision or response selection
- only one thing can go through this bottleneck at a time
multi-tasking
when doing A and B cant achieve full performance
only half performance in each
limited resources
not enough resources to do both tasks
so shows there is a limit
one is improved at a cost to the other
tasks do not always interfere
some can still be done together if they are different tasks
suggests multiple resources
different pools
- Divided by sensory modality?
- There is some evidence that they are aligned to different sensory modalities
wickens 1984
- Proposed many separate pools on 3-dimentions
- Stages of processing
- Input modality
- Nature of reasoning
- Seems intuitively appealing
criticism of pools
- Multiple vs single resources may depend on type of task (Bonnel & Hafter, 1998)
- Detection (no shared resource?)
- Identification (a shared resource?)
high multi-taskers worse in =
- Filtering out irrelevant stimuli
- Ignoring irrelevant contents of memory
- Task switching
- Multi-tasking a lot is bad and will not result in you getting better at it!
- It is harmful to your ability to focus and concentrate
