attention

Question 1

what does the monkey business illusion demonstrate

Answer 1

inattentional blindness

Question 2

what did William James define attention as in 1890

Answer 2

– Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others…”

Question 3

what did Harold Pashler 1998 say attention was

Answer 3

– No-one knows what attention is, and there may not even be an “it” there to be known about

Question 4

what does change blindness demonstrate

Answer 4

Change blindness demonstrates that we can be looking at something but not selectively attending to it
It also demonstrates the power of selective attention

Question 5

What is overt attention

Answer 5

Turning head or eyes to orient towards a stimulus

Question 6

what is covert attention

Answer 6

Paying attention to one thing while appearing to pay attention to another

Question 7

explain how selective attention is multisensory

Answer 7

we can selectively attend to visual, auditory, tactile stimuli – and we can also switch attention between the senses

Question 8

what is the cocktail party effect

Answer 8

where you are in a room with multiple audible conversations, and you are able to focus only on the person currently speaking to you. However, you are also able to instantaneously switch attention

Question 9

what was CHerry’s 1953 experiment on covert attention

Answer 9

Dichotic listening task

Subjects listened to two simultaneous sentences spoken into their two different ears and attended to one sentence and ignored the other. They had to shadow the attended sentences, that is repeat them out loud.

Question 10

what were Cherry’s results

Answer 10

Subjects could not detect most properties of the unattended channel:

• language used
• meaning of the message
• content

Subjects did notice

• Gender of the voice
• Physical attributes, e.g. human vs musical instrument

Question 11

What is the Spotlight model of attention (posner 1980)

Answer 11

Posner argued that attention operates like a spotlight, enhancing sensory processing of objects in the spatial location to which it is directed

Question 12

what did Posner find in his experiment about cueing paradigm

Answer 12

• subjects must maintain fixation on the central cross and see an arrow pointing to the left or right and then a target appears on the left or right
• Subjects simply press left if the target appears on the left and right if the target appears on the right
• Posner found that RTs were faster to validly cued locations and slowest to invalidly cued locations

Evidence of early selection

Question 13

what are the interpretations of the Posner cueing effects

Answer 13

• Attention increases efficiency of information processing by influencing sensory and perceptual processing
• Posner hypothesised that the behavioural effects of cues were caused by neuronal enhancement/suppression in early visual cortical areas – Early selection
• Attention enhances processing of objects occurring in particular spatial locations

Question 14

what did MacKay find in his ambiguous sentences in dichotic listening

Answer 14

Attended stream: ambiguous sentence “They were throwing stones at the bank”
– Unattended stream: biasing word “river” or “money”

• The biasing word had a clear effect
– If “money”, sentence interpreted as financial institution
– If “river” sentence interpreted as side of river
– Change blindness – watch another example…

Question 15

what did Egly et al 1994 do

Answer 15

used a cuing paradigm to direct the attention of participants to different objects and locations.

Question 16

short intervals between the cue and the target leads to….

Answer 16

faster RT

Question 17

However, as the interval between the cue and the target increases…..

Answer 17

slower RT

Question 18

What did Tipper et al 1991 find

Answer 18

In this experiment, Tipper et al. asked whether you could get a similar IOR effect when objects instead of locations were cued. In order to dissociate objects from locations they used moving stimuli.
Boxes rotated in a clockwise direction and one box was cued. They then carried on rotating and a target appeared either in the previously cued box or the previously uncued box.
As you can see from the graph on the right, RTs were slower when the target was presented in a previously cued box, even though that box didn’t occupy the same location as the cue.
This shows that attentional suppression can also operate in an object-based frame of reference.

Question 19

What are in early selection models

Answer 19

stimuli are processed according to their physical attributes and are then selected by attention (note the point at which the many arrows become a single arrow in A) before reaching awareness and receiving more elaborate semantic analysis

Question 20

what is Nillie Lavie’s load theory

Answer 20

Your task is to decide whether the target in the circular array is an X or an N while ignoring the distractor letter off to the side

Question 21

what are the two IV’s of Nillie Lavie’s load theory

Answer 21

Target/distractor congruency
and
Perceptual Load

Question 22

high perceptual load explained

Answer 22

Perceptual capacity is used up by the task of trying to find the target - none left for the distractor!
Support for early selection
(think back to the monkey business illusion)

Question 23

low perceptual load explained

Answer 23

The main task does not use up all your perceptual capacity so there is some left to process the distractors.
Support for late selection

Question 24

how did Nilli Lavie explain the high/low perceptual load

Answer 24

Nilli Lavie explained this by saying that in situations with high perceptual load, your perceptual capacity is more used up by processing the targets and nontargets, and none is left over for distractors. This is a type of early selection – all information is filtered out.
In contrast, when perceptual load is low, you’re not using up all your resources, and there’s some left to process distractors – this is a type of late selection – not all information is filtered out.

Question 25

what was done in Schwartz et al study

Answer 25

subjects perform two conditions. In one (low load) they just had to detect any red shape. In the other (high load) they had to detect specific conjunctions of shape or colour

The main task was flanked by these checkerboard stimuli which produce high levels of activation in visual cortex

They found that visual cortex activation due to the checkerboard stimuli was much higher in the low load condition – the neurophysiological correlate of Nilli Lavie’s behavioural data. Essentially, in the high load condition subjects are so focused on the main task that they are able to filter out the irrelevant checkerboard but this filter doesn’t operate so well in the low load condition. Fascinatingly these effects were observed at the earliest level of visual processing

Question 26

what is Inhibition of return

Answer 26

Inhibition of return refers to an orientation mechanism that briefly enhances the speed and accuracy with which an object is detected after the object is attended, but then impairs detection speed and accuracy