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Cognitive Psychology > Attention > Flashcards

Attention Flashcards

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1
Q

Bottom-Up Attention

A

Passive modes of attention

  • Alertness and arousal
  • Reflexive attention (E.g. towards a bolt of lightning)
  • Spotlight attention and visual search (E.g. can only attend to what falls within the fovea)
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2
Q

Top-Down Attention

A

Active modes of attention

  • Selective attention (E.g. you choose whether to listen or look at something)
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3
Q

Retina

A

For the human eye, this is made up of photoreceptor cells and can be broken down into two main areas:

  • Fovea (more cells and most of them are cones)
  • Parafovea (less cells and most of them are rods)
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4
Q

Eye Movements

A

We move our eyes 3 times per second

Have been studied for over 2000 years

Examples: Aristotle, Crum, Brown

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5
Q

Our eyes do not see like we think they do…

A

Acuity drops off as something appears further from the centre

We build up a view of image by amalgamating snapshots

Limits on how we encode information means that what we actually percieve is a lot fuzzier than what we see

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6
Q

Saccade

A

A rapid movement of the eye between fixation points

Saccades can least up to 50 ms, meaning we can be ‘blind’ for 3 hours of the day

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7
Q

Saccadic Suppression

A

We do not percieve our own saccades

This happens to suppress the motion blur during the saccades (the eye can travel up to 900 visual degrees per second)

It happens so that we can percieve a stable world

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8
Q

Overt Attention

A

The focus of attention is what the fovea is currently looking at (arguably)

  • Attended info = information in or around the fovea
  • Unattended info = everything else

Overt Attention:

  • Using your fovea
  • Slow - around 3-4 saccades per second
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9
Q

Covert Attention

A

This is faster than overt - 50 ms to shift

Helmholtz (1867)

  • We can enhance perception if we focus our attention on a location in the visual field
  • However, this comes at the expense of other areas of the visual field
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10
Q

Attention

A

Two primary themes characterise attention:

1) Capacity limitation
2) Perceptual gating (selection)

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11
Q

Attention - Capacity limitation

A

Our limited ability to carry out various mental operations at the same time needs a way to prioritise information

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12
Q

Attention - Perceptual gating (selection)

A

Conscious perception is always selective, but selection is not always conscious

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13
Q

Focused Attention

A

A.k.a. Selective attention

Selectively attend to certain stimuli in our environment while ignoring others
Present 2 or more stimuli inputs, instruction to respond to just one

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14
Q

Divided Attention

A

A.k.a. Multitasking

Ability to undertake several tasks at once
Present at least 2 stimuli inputs, instruction to respond to all

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15
Q

Attention Modalities

A

Vision
- Limit on how much we can take in, because things in environment placed in different spatial location

Auditory

  • Streams of sound from different locations
  • Cannot listen to all at once
  • Can selectively listen (Cocktail Party Effect)
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16
Q

Focused/Selective Auditory Attention - Welford (1952)

A
  • Presented 2 signals in rapid succession
  • PPs make speeded response to both
  • Reaction time to second stimulus depends on how close it is presented to first stimulus
  • The closer the presentation, the slower the reaction

Welford viewed this as support for:

  • What we call a bottleneck (early selection) because processing of one stimulus must be completed before processing of next one can begin
  • A central limit on human processing capability
17
Q

Focused/Selective Auditory Attention - Cocktail Party Phenomena

A

How can we focus attention onto one conversation in a crowded room?

Research in this area was initiated by Cherry (1953) who was interested in the cocktail party phenomena

18
Q

Focused/Selective Auditory Attention - Cherry (1953)

A

Cherry’s Cocktail Party Effect (1953)

Shadowing task
- Dichotic listening procedure - repeat aloud a message they were told to attend to

PPs were able to:
- Filter out the unshadowed message with little information remembered about this message
Process the unshadowed physical characteristics (intensity, gender, location)

PPs were not able to:

  • Detect the meaning of the second stream
  • Detect if the second stream was a foreign language or reversed speech
  • Repeat any words
19
Q

Broadbent (1958)

A

Testing the bottleneck

  • Dichotic listening procedure - 3 digits presented to one ear at the same time as another 3 presented to the other ear

PPs could recall numbers ear by ear better than in pairs

Suggested that the stimuli are accessed in parallel by a sensory buffer

  • Buffer filters stimuli on the basis of the physical characteristics
  • The other input remains in the buffer
  • (Broadbent’s Filter Theory of Attention, 1958;1971)
20
Q

Broadbent’s Filter Theory of Attention (1958;1971)

A

Attention as an early selection process

What does attention do?

  • It allows us to selectively process information
  • To filter out irrelevant information
  • Argues that we cannot identify or process something without attention

Evaluation:

  • Filter theory is based on physical properties and therefore is rather inflexible
  • Gray & Wedderburn (1960)
21
Q

Attenuation

A

Sometimes unattended things are processed

Where the filter occurs depends on task demands (physical cues, syllabic pattern and specific words moving on to analysis of individual words, grammatical structure and meaning)

Sometimes this means that unattended items leak through the filter as they are processed enough to reach the threshold of conscious awareness

Treisman (1964)

22
Q

Attentional Competing Hypothesis

A

Early Selection - physical characteristics of messages are used to select one message for further processing and all others are lost (Broadbent, 1958)

Attenuation - physical characteristics are used to select one message for full processing and other messages are given partial processing (Treisman, 1964)

Late Selection - all messages get through but only one response can be made (Deutsch & Deutsch, 1963)

23
Q

What is visual attention?

A

Attentional Spotlight:
Focused visual attention within a small region of the visual field but not outside the beam of attentional spotlight (Posner, 1980)

Zoom Lens:
Attention is directed to a given region of the visual field, the area of focal attention can be increased or decreased depending on task demands (Erikson & St. James, 1986)

24
Q

Attention and Selection - Implication

A

We are only ‘aware’ of what we attend to

  • How many things can we attend to?
  • Inattentional and Change Blindness
25
Q

Inattentional Blindness

A

What we don’t attend to we are not aware of

Mack & Rock, 1992; Simons & Chabris, 1999

Typically, things such as transients can capture visual attention - but if these resources are fully in use and there are other transients, things may be missed

26
Q

Change Blindness

A

If we cannot identify things without attending to them AND attention is a limited resource, we might not be able to spot ‘changes’ between scenes unless attending to them

Clearly, one way of spotting for changes is by changes in luminence (transients) - Change blindness gets past this by presenting an interweaving field between images

27
Q

Are change blindness and inattentional blindness the same, as they are both forms of blindness?

A

Resnick (2000) - They are related but different

  • CB involves spotting transitions while IB involves identifying something that is “irrelevant” to the task
  • CB suggests that there is a failure of Visual Short Term Memory (VSTM) which enables us to compare between scenes (this is irrelevant for IB)
  • CB suggests that we might have a limit in the number of items we can hold in VSTM
28
Q

Visual Short Term Memory (VSTM) - Luck & Vogel (1997)

A

Measured capacity of VSTM (they called it visual working memory):

  • 1 - 12 colour patches shown for 100ms; then blank for 900ms; then shown again for 2000ms
  • In one condition there is a verbal load (just to make sure participants are not verbalising the stimuli)
  • Capacity = Approx. 4 items

They also tested if capacity depended on objects or features:

  • They asked PPs to look for:
    a) Change in orientation, b) change in colour and c) change in either (conjunction)
  • There was no difference in performance - this suggests that VSTM capacity is for objects, not features
29
Q

VSTM and Change Blindness/Detection

A

CB and change detection tasks seem to show a clear limit in the information we can hold in VSTM

There is a limit to what we can ‘hold’ across a temporal gap

30
Q

Limits of Attention

A

Attention is limited in capacity

It appears that we can “attend” to a small number of areas at the same time

So our idea of what the world is like is very much incorrect

31
Q

What does covert attention do?

A

Covert attention is when we attend somewhere or to something without moving our eyes

Acts as a filter - selects stimuli for further processing

Is limited in capacity - it appears that whether the resource can be divided up depends on the task demands

Cognitive Psychology (4 decks)

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