Attention Flashcards
3 essence parts of attention
Focalization, concentration, consciousnes
Change blindness
Change blindness is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when a change in a visual stimulus is introduced and the observer does not notice it. For example, observers often fail to notice major differences introduced into an image while it flickers off and on again.
When college students werre shown pictures of campus with changes in them, what were the results?
Students even showed change blindness for familiar environments
Rensink Coherence Theory
1) An initial system analyzes visual input into a set of sample visual elements which are short-lived and are continuosly regenerated as long as light enters the eyes
2. Visual attention grabs a subset of elements and enters them into a more coherent object representation that allows changrs to be tracked. At most only a few such representations exist at any time
3. At the same time as objects are being formed, other aspects of the scene are rapidly computed without attention based directly on other visual elements. Together with knowledge in long-term memory; this forms a setting capable of guiding attentions to those items relevant for task at hand
If an innocent and guilty person are wearing same clothes but the guilty commits a crime, are change blindness participants able to detect change in people?
No and also they are more likely to select innocent person as culprit
Inattentional blindness
Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice a fully-visible, but unexpected object because attention was engaged on another task, event, or object or an object that is introduced and is very different
Selective attention
the capacity for or process of reacting to certain stimuli selectively when several occur simultaneously.
Broadbent’s filter model of attention
The early selection model of attention, proposed by Broadbent, posits that stimuli are filtered, or selected to be attended to, at an early stage during processing. A filter can be regarded as the selector of relevant information based on basic features, such as color, pitch, or direction of stimuli.
-FILTER SOLELY ON PHYSICAL FEATURES
In Broadbent’s filter model of attention, there is _________ processing for physical properties.
Parallel
In Broadbent’s filter model of attention, there is _________ processing for meaning, memory, and action.
Serial
After parallel processing, information goes to what and then what?
Short term memory and long term memory and action
Broadbent’s dichotic monitoring task description
- People wear headphones with different noises for each ear and told to focus on one ear only
- recall poorly about unattended ear so no processing possible - we only hear what we attend to
- caution: most people have a right ear advantage though
Perceptual information or Tresiman’s altered model of Broadbents (early)
alternative mechanism, the attenuation theory, in which the filter acts as an attenuator of information, either increasing or decreasing attentional capacities towards it. This slight modification has the unattended channel passing through all processing stages, only weakened rather than completely blocked.[13] As the unattended channel includes weakly attended to information, to gain conscious awareness this information must surpass a threshold, which Treisman believed was determined by the words’ meaning.[14] Important words (such as one’s name) would have a low threshold, to easily gain awareness, whereas unimportant words (such as “lamp”) would have a higher threshold to prevent them from gaining awareness inappropriately. In this way, the threshold for each word acts as a filtering mechanism, relying on semantic features
Deutch’s semantic aspect of broadbent’s model (late)
how unattended information can gain one’s awareness.[12] Suppose you were at a social gathering having a conversation with some friends, when you hear someone mention your name and it grasps your attention. This unattended-to information somehow gained your awareness. This fueled the development of the memory selection model, which shares the same basic principle of early selection models that stimulus features are selected via their physical properties.[2] Attended and unattended information passes through the filter, to a second stage of selection on the basis of semantic characteristics or message content. Items which are selected are incorporated into short-term memory and awareness.[2] The second selection mechanism, rather than the filter, decides what information gains our awareness.
Semantics
Study of meaning in lanaguage
How did corteen and wood use classical conditioning procedure to show that information in unattended channel was being processed at a semantic level?
They used classical conditioning to associate city names with shocks. Later, a headphone was worn and told to listen to right ear. In left ear, there were new and old city names as well as non-city names
- Higher GSR response for associated city names
- Higher GSR responses for new city names as well
How did tipper et al. show that we have to actively inhibit unattended information?
Participants are told to ignore unattended stimuli and name object portrayed in attended stimuli; they vary the unattended stimuli or prime and compare reaction times with probe
- if the unattended and attended stimuli were not related in both of them, then reaction time was faster and slower vice versa
Vicary’s subliminal advertising hoax
Showing popcorn and coca cola stimuli below threshold of awareness increased sales of popcorn and coca cola; later he confessed he falsified his data
Subliminal
Presenting stimulus below threshold of awareness
How do you determine threshold of awareness?
Psychophysics methods
Subliminal priming
subjects are not aware of the stimuli as it occurs quickly (approximately less than 500 ms), yet it still influences them. Subliminal priming is established based on a “primed” stimuli that is below the threshold of conscious detection
In subliminal priming, you respond faster and more accurately for decisions involving ?
Primed target
In an experiment where on each trial, the participant had one of three decisions to make:
1. prime present or not
2.If target was graphically similar to prime like blood and flood
3. If target was semantically similar like blood/flesh
what did Marcel find?
Information about prime was detected and included the semantic aspects of the word (same for all three decisions)
- showed processing of stimuli was possible below a level of awareness
Dehaene and collegues saw that when asked if a number was bigger or smaller than 5, this depended on the prime number how?
If both the prime number and target number were smaller or larger than 5, response was faster. Otherwise, they were slower.
