Attention and Awareness- Auditory Flashcards
What is attention?
-The allocation of resources to process sensory and perpetual information
What can attention also act as?
-Acts as a filter (Broadbent) or an attenuator (Treisman), to prevent this limited set of resources from being overloaded
What is the modern theory of attention?
-Acts as a binder of object features and as binder of related information
What is the unique problem that the auditory system have?
-it requires processes that permit a listener to attend to the specific set of sounds without being confused by the overlap of other, irrelevant noises
What is auditory system able to separate?
-Able to separate different, superimposed sounds on the basis of their different source directions
What is one uncertainty surrounding the auditory system?
-The fate of the unattended material
Describe the method of the dichotic listening/shadowing procedure
-Subjects wear a set of headphones and made to hear two messages at the same time, one entering each ear, and asked to shadow (repeat back the words from one message only)
What were the findings of the shadowing procedure
-Unattended material appears not to be processed in a shadowing task
-Only most recent unattended material is available
-While still preserved in the echoic memory
-Listener is normally unable to report significant details concerning the unattended information
male female, or pitch
What did the results of shadowing procedure suggest?
-These results suggest parallel acquisition of all available information, followed by serial processing to determine meaning for one attended message
Describe Broadbent’s filter theory
- Sensory channels have an unlimited capacity
- There is a bottleneck allowing only one piece of information into working memory at a time.
- A selective filter allows in information from only one channel at a time based on the physical characteristics of the message (ear, pitch, etc.).
- Information from unattended channel is completely blocked
What was the issue with bottleneck theory
- Theory had the idea that the unattended material wasn’t significantly processed
- Further research shows there may be more processing that what the results implied
What is the cocktail party phenomenon
-Where in a loud room with people talking, you can hear respond to your name being called out
What can words presented to the unattended ear do?
-Produce priming and physiological effects after hearing shock words
Who proposed the parallel theory?
-Treisman
What was the experiment that Treisman used?
- Treisman instructed subjects to shadow a particular ear into which was played a meaningful message
- The nonshadowed ear received a random string of words
- At some point in delivery, the meaningful message switched ears and the random words were switched into the nonshadowed ear
eg
left ear: In the picnic basket she had peanut butter book, leaf, roof, sample, always
right ear: cat, large, day, apple, friend, every, select, sandwiches and chocolate brownies
