Attention

Question 1

define attention

Answer 1

brain’s mechanism of selection. if something is selected it can be processed more thoroughly, in an area related to the processing of that item

Question 2

define exogenous attention

Answer 2

automatic control of your attention by the characteristics of the stimulus

Question 3

define endogenous attention

Answer 3

controlled by your chosen intentions and interest

Question 4

describe a way of testing exogenous cueing

Answer 4

fixation cross in centre of screen. cue appears on one side. test stimulus. cue automatically attracts attention to correct area, so reaction time is faster

Question 5

describe a way of testing endogenous cueing

Answer 5

fixation cross in centre of screen. cue appears in centre. test stimulus. ‘decision’ to pay attention to cue direction. reaction time faster if you pay attention to where it says to.

Question 6

what parts of the brain are involved in exogenous attention?

Answer 6

ventral attention system: bottom-up reorienting

Question 7

what parts of the brain are involved in endogenous attention?

Answer 7

dorsal attention system: top-down visuospatial

Question 8

what happens to endogenous attention with age and why?

Answer 8

decreases due to prefrontal cortex decline.

Question 9

what type of attention shows a slower decrease with age, and what does this seem to be dependent on?

Answer 9

emotion-related. valence-dependent.

Question 10

describe the filter theory of attention

Answer 10

Broadbent, 1958. metaphor of radio communicator. blocks out irrelevant information (early selection). only important messages reach central channel for processing

Question 11

describe how a dichotic listening task works

Answer 11

different speech streams presented simultaneously into both ears. listener asked to shadow (repeat) the message in one ear and to ignore the other

Question 12

what is the cocktail party phenomenon?

Answer 12

highly salient information is attended to (Cherry 1953, Moray 1959)

Question 13

describe the amendments made to the filter theory

Answer 13

intensity of the irrelevant info is diminished but not eliminated (Treisman, 1960). experiment w/ bilingual speakers, can also account for cocktail party phenomenon. late selection: attention filter occurs late in the processing stream (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963)

Question 14

give an example of an experimental paradigm used to test attention

Answer 14

visual search: how do we use attention to search for a target in a visual display - feature integration theory (Treisman & Glade, 1980)

Question 15

describe the visual search task

Answer 15

a perceptual task during which participants actively scan the environment for a particular object (target) amongst other objects (distractors)

Question 16

what are the two different ways of searching?

Answer 16

feature and conjunction

Question 17

describe conjunction search

Answer 17

affected by distractors; bottom-up & top-down processing; conducted in a serial manner; attention needed

Question 18

describe feature search

Answer 18

not affected by distractors; depends on feature saliency; bottom-up processing; conducted in parallel

Question 19

describe some factors influencing conjunction search

Answer 19

set size; presence and absence of target; features and target-distractor similarity; distractor heterogeneity

Question 20

describe resource theory

Answer 20

attention is limited resource distributed appropriately. computer metaphor, attention helps get right info to central processing unit

Question 21

what other theories is resource theory similar to?

Answer 21

spotlight theory (Laberge, 1983) or the Zoom lens model (Eriksen et al, 1985;1986).

Question 22

describe the attentional load theory

Answer 22

Lavie, 1995. amount of processing the unattended stimulus receives depends on how difficult it is to process the attended target

Question 23

describe a dual-task paradigm

Answer 23

tests how limited attention resources are allocated eg. by comparing task performance on two tasks independently or together. outcome depends on if task requires controlled or automatic processing, which depends on amount of practice. serial or parallel processing?