Attention and Memory

Question 1

What makes a stimulus capture our attention?

Answer 1

Sudden onset, intense and unexpected in the situation.

Question 2

What is selective attention? What makes selective attention tasks in the lab harder?

Answer 2

Selective attention is when we are asked to respond to only one stimulus and ignore the others. This is made harder if the irrelevant stimulus is the relevant stimulus on preceding tests.

Question 3

What test is an example of a selective attention task?

Answer 3

Stroop test - name the letter colour and ignore the colour word

Question 4

What is divided attention in the labs? What does divided attention tasks show us?

Answer 4

Divided attention tasks occur when participants must divide their attention over two ro more concurrent tasks. This shows us that there are attentional limitations between tasks, which can give us insight into brain architecture, i.e. if we struggle to differentiate two tasks, then it shows that we use similar, overlapping neural pathways for those tasks.

Question 5

Are the same or different brain networks needed for shifting vs sustaining attention?

Answer 5

Different brain networks

Question 6

What are the two types of attention shifts?

Answer 6

Endogenous (top down), goal directed -> e.g. looking for a person in a red hat

Exogenous (bottom up), stimulus driven -> attention is captured by hearing your name in a conversation.

Question 7

What is inattentional blindness?

Answer 7

Inattentional blindness is when people miss other elements of a scene when they are focussing on one element.

Question 8

What is change blindness?

Answer 8

Change blindness occurs when changes in a scene are missed because they occur alongside a brief visual disruption (image flicker, eye movement, occlusions by passing objects, etc.)

Question 9

What is Balint’s syndrome/ simultanagnosia? What causes this?

Answer 9

Patients cannot perceive more than one stimulus at a time, e.g. in a scene with red and green dots, they can only see red dots.
Grouping the stimuli helps - if the red and green dots were joined, they would be able to see both the red and green dots.
Caused by occipital/ parietal lobe damage.

Question 10

Who ‘discovered’ covert attention? What is covert vs overt attention?

Answer 10

Hemholtz coined covert attention when he performed an experiment looking at a large screen on letters and found he could shift his attention to one area with moving his eyes.
Overt -> eyes and attention on the same spot
Covert -> eyes and attention not on the same spot

Question 11

What was the dichotic listening experiment paradigm, and what were the results?

Answer 11

Researchers put headphones on participants and had them listen to two messages (one in each ear) simultaneously. They asked participants to attend to the message in one ear, then asked questions (gender, pitch, meaning, message, etc) about the unattended message. Results showed that participants cannot detect meaning and most other attributes of the unattended message.

Question 12

What theory of attention did the dichotic listening results support/ lead to?

Answer 12

Broadbent’s early filter theory

Question 13

What is Broadbent’s early filter theory?

Answer 13

We filter out the irrelevant message early - structural basis, we don’t let irrelevant information flow through the system.

Question 14

What dichotic listening evidence contradicted Broadbent’s filter theory?

Answer 14

That we hear our names in the unattended message, when theoretically that should be filtered out.

Question 15

What is the theory of late selection (in regards to attention)? What evidence supports this?

Answer 15

Late selection theory asserts that the unattended material is processed all the way to meaning access before being discarded. Mackey’s experiment of homonyms supports this - same paradigm as dichotic listening, but the irrelevant message’s meaning biased which homonym the participants remembered from the relevant message.
Hearing our names in the irrelevant message in dichotic listening tasks also supports this.

Question 16

What is evidence against late selection?

Answer 16

Treisman and Geffen’s study - dichotic listening paradigm, participants asked to tap when they hear a target word -> target detection occurred 87% of the time in the attended message, but only 8% in the unattended message, showing that majority of the unattended message was not being processed.

Question 17

What is processing capacity theory? What is some evidence for this?

Answer 17

Processing capacity theory states that attention issues comes from limitations of processing rather than a structural issue, with the number of concurrent tasks determining the allocation of resources -> i.e. we have a set number of resources that we need to divide between tasks.

• task and capacity demands (number of resources we need to allocate) decreases with practice (aka automaticity)

Question 18

What are the two types of searches?

Answer 18

Feature search (pop out) ->
- don’t need to shift attention to find it, parallel search
- e.g. search for red X among black Os

Conjunction search ->
- e.g. search for red X among black Os and red Os
- serial search - need to scan through each stimulus and check if it matches features
- studied search time as a function of set size

Question 19

Which type of search is affected by set size?

Answer 19

Conjunction search - the larger the set size, the slower the search. If the target is absent, the conjunction search RT increases.

Question 20

What is feature integration theory?

Answer 20

Features of a stimulus are automatically processed (pre-attentive vision) into elementary features. Attention is required to bind the features into an object.

Question 21

What are the features of attentive and pre-attentive search?

Answer 21

Pre- attentive ->
- only focusses on features
- parallel search, pop-out
- flat slope (RT not affected by set size)

Attentive ->
- focusses on conjunctions of features (whole object)
- serial search, no pop out
- steep slope (RT affected by set size)

Question 22

What are limitations of the Feature Integration theory?

Answer 22

• features don’t always pop out
• conjunctions can lead to flat search slopes (RT not affected by set size)
• the heterogeneity of distractors had an effect on RT -> search is easier when distractors are similar to each other

Question 23

What is guided search theory?

Answer 23

Guided search says that pre-attentive features (parallel, visual serach) guides subsequent attentive (attentive, conjunctive) search. So, instead of having two ‘conjunctive vs visual’ RT search distributions, there is only one distribution.

Question 24

What are semantic memories?

Answer 24

Memories involving facts - non autobiographical, abstract, not contextual

Question 25

What are episodic memories?

Answer 25

Memories involving emotions, linked to personal experience -> context sensitive, personal, autobiographical

Question 26

What does remembering success depend on?

Answer 26

Good retrieval cues

Question 27

What is the misinformation effect?

Answer 27

People may misremember something that was suggested to them without realising the source of the information.

Question 28

What is the modal model of long term memory?

Answer 28

Sensory memory (sensations) become short term memory when attention is paid to them. Information becomes long term memories when it is stored in short term/ working memories long enough. This happens when you rehearse information. Long term memories become short term memories when they are retrieved.

Question 29

Describe long term vs short term memories.

Answer 29

Long term - high capacity, forgetting occurs due to decay or interference
Short term - low capacity, highly sensitive to the order in which items are presented (recency effect)

Question 30

What are some limitations of the modal model?

Answer 30

• you do not always need to rehearse information to have it stored in LTM, especially highly emotional episodic memories.
• LTM is more about meaningfulness than semantic information

Question 31

What are two explicit memory tasks? Describe them.

Answer 31

Recall and recognition tasks
Initially, participats are shown a list of words, each word presented for a second. Researcher then asks the participants to perform a task on the word, e.g. rate pleasantness. A retention interval than occurs (minutes, hours, days).
Recall - participanst asked to write or say the words from the list, either in or without order
Recognition - present participants with a word, and ask them if it is old (in the list) or new.

Question 32

What are the three types of recall tasks, and what is the DV?

Answer 32

DV - accuracy %
Free recall - produce words in any order
Serial recall - produce words in the order they were presented
Cued recall - cue is provided for each word to help recall

Question 33

What is an advantage and disadvantage of recognition tests?

Answer 33

Advantage - can test items that cannot easily be produced (abstract shapes, etc.), more likely to detect memories that are weaker ir incomplete

Disadvantage - susceptible to response bias

Question 34

How do we account for response bias in recognition tasks?

Answer 34

Using Signal Detection Theory, we subtract the false alarm rate (false positives) from the hit rate.

Low false alarm rate = high accuracy
High false alarm rate = low accuracy

Question 35

Why might we use implicit memory tasks?

Answer 35

People with reduced memory function (brain injuries, etc.) often perform poorly in expicit memory tasks bc they have trouble recalling the information. Oftentimes they are unable to use contextual and source information (don’t know where the information has come form), but they still absorb the information. e.g. Korsakoff’s disease.

Question 36

Describe an implicit memory paradigm?

Answer 36

Priming paradigm - participants perform a study task on a list of words, then get asked if it is a word or not everytime (Lexical Decision test). Then present participants with a meaning question or a word stem question, and you record the word they answer with. You know that person has remembered if a recently encountered word is more readily available or better identified.

Question 37

Describe the experiment performed on Korsakoff’s syndrome patients. Is this implicit or explicit memory?

Answer 37

Patients answered mutli choice trivia questions, with questions being placed back in the bag after use. Repeated questions were better answered, however patients were unable to say that the question had been seen before.

Question 38

Are implicit memory tests semantic tests?

Answer 38

Yes - they do not require episodic retrieval (memory can be accessed without a conscious search process)

Question 39

What is the forgetting curve?

Answer 39

Forgetting occurs exponentially based on delay between study and the test -> more time after learning, more easily forgotten

Question 40

What are the two modes of forgetting?

Answer 40

Decay and interference.

Question 41

Describe decay, the evidence for and the evidence against.

Answer 41

Decay is when memories fade over time when we don’t use them.
Evidence for - sleep vs awake experiment, in which participants were given material to memorise and then tested either after they slept or after a day (sleep is just decay, day is decay and interference) - sleep participants remembered more

Evidence against - sleep study did not account for the role sleep plays in consolidating memories, and it is not feasible to get direct evidence of decay at the neural level.

Question 42

What are the two types of interference?

Answer 42

Proactive - old information blocks the uptake of new information
Retroactive - new information blocks old information

Question 43

Describe a study looking at retroactive interference.

Answer 43

The Rugby study - interviewed rugby player’s recall of a game, then retested them at later time points. Forgetting was not correlated with the time elapsed after the game, but was instead correlated with how many games had been played in the meantime.

Question 44

What does false memories and the misinformation effect show about memory retrieval?

Answer 44

Memory retrieval is a reconstructive process.

Question 45

What is the primacy and recency effects? What type of memory does each reflect?

Answer 45

Primacy effect is when you are more likely to remember the first items presented - long term memory

Recency effect is when you are more likely to remember the last items presented - short term/ working memory

Question 46

What does RSVP stand for?

Answer 46

rapid serial visual presentation - when stimuli is flashed rapidly (100ms each) in one space, often asked to look for/ report stimuli when it occurs.

Question 47

What do results from RSVP experiments show?

Answer 47

• conceptual processing occurs, in which we can extract meaning from the stimuli even when it is presented at such a fast pace (evidence of late stage processing?)
• post target intrusions are common, often report different bindings of colour and shape e.g. saying the X was red when it was blue
• attentional blink occurs

Question 48

What is attentional blink? How long does it last? What is lag 1 sparing?

Answer 48

Attentional blink occurs when we are less likely to recognise a stimulus if it has been presented a few hundred ms after the first target stimulus. Least likely to see T2 if it is 200-300ms after T1. The effect can last up to 600ms after (T1 + 6). Lag 1 sparing is when the blink is not observed for the target if it is presented 100ms after the initial target.

Question 49

What effects attentional blink?

Answer 49

When T1 is easier to identify/ report, as it lowers the amount of space (capacity) it requires in WM.
If other items precede or follow T1 - pattern masks - compete with the target to engage perceptual processing. They are often not reported, but they are processed enough to affect responses in the task.
How briefly T2 is presented.

Question 50

What does attentional blink tell us about cognitive capacities of the working memory?

Answer 50

Shows a ‘hard limt’ on human cognitive capacities.
Suggets that consolidation of targets in the WM is an operation that can’t be done for more than one target at a time.

Question 51

What is task switching (executive control)?

Answer 51

Task switching is when a time (and error) cost is incurred when you switch from one task to another. This occurs due to switching task sets (preparation for one task), in which switch costs arise in establishing the appropriate task set and disengaging in the previous task set -> i.e. need ot stop doing one task to perform the other

Question 52

What is the task switching paradigm?

Answer 52

Participants are given either a block of trials with one task or two different tasks throughout (e.g. responding to numbers and responding to letters, etc.), speed of response is recorded. A severe switch cost of several hundred ms occurs when the task is changed, even if the task switch is predictable.

Question 53

How does the stimuli affect switch cost?

Answer 53

If the stimuli and responses are different, there is a small switch cost (e.g. numbers task switches to letter task).
If the task and responses change to the same stimuli (e.g. respond to the number 1, respond to the number 6) there is a larger switch cost.

Question 54

Does practice assist with switch cost?

Answer 54

Yes, but it does not eliminate switch costs.

Question 55

Is there a higher switch cost going from an easy task to a hard task or going from a hard task to an easy task?

Answer 55

Higher switch cost = hard task to easy task
Harder to disengage from the hard tasks task set - suggests disengaging is very important for task switching

Question 56

What is the task cueing paradigm? What does it say about task switching?

Answer 56

Participants were given two tasks (identify if number is odd or even, identify if it is greater or lesser than 5). Participant is informed by a cue 400-4000ms before the trial which task to perform. The switch cost decreased as the interval increased to 2-3 seconds.
-> when people have less time to prepare, they show more task switching effects
-> cueing reduces tasks cost but does not eliminate them

When there was a pause between tasks but only a short cue given before the next task, there was a large switch cost -> implicates the importance of active preparation, not just task disengagement.

Question 57

Do incongruent or congruent responses (in Roger and Mansell’s task switching paradigm) have a shorter reaction time?

Answer 57

Congruent responses have a shorter reaction time

Question 58

Why is there still task switching costs, even if the task has been cued?

Answer 58

Exogenous, response related effects -> still need to look at and make a decision when the stimulus appears on screen.

Question 59

What are the three theories of task switching?

Answer 59

Disengagement theory -> task set inertia, preparation does not play a role in switching.

Endogenous and exogenous factors -> preparation reduces switching costs, but residual costs are due to exogenous (task related) factors.

Endogenous only -> residual costs arrise because participnats did not adequately prepare every trial.

Question 60

What is automaticity, and Kahneman’s capacity theory?

Answer 60

Automaticity is when over learned tasks become automatic as they consume fewer resources. Substantial practice improves performance and reduces task effort.

Question 61

What is the load effect, and what happens to the load effect during automaticity?

Answer 61

Load effect - easier to search for a smaller number of targets.
The load effect disappears after automaticity is developed (in most cases, but it can still have a effect)

Question 62

What are the five characteristics of automatic processes?

Answer 62

Rigid (habitual), without awareness, without conscious deliberation, without expenditure of resources, rapid

Question 63

What is working memory capacity?

Answer 63

7ish objects, disappears after a few seconds.

Question 64

What is the central executive in Baddeley’s WM model?

Answer 64

The attention controller that interfaces between working memory and long term memory. it coordinates the WM, controls encoding and retrieval from LTM, switches attention, manipulates the material in the ‘slave’ systems
-> random number/ letter generation thought to require the CE - under pressure of concurrent CE demands, sequences become less random
-> massively impacted by sleep

Question 65

What is the phonological loop?

Answer 65

A store made up of the verbal store and the subvocal articulatory rehearsal process that maintains verbal sequential information in a phonological (sound based) loop. Information decays after two seconds if it is not rehearsed.

Question 66

What are the four effects that influence the phonological loop?

Answer 66

Phonological similarity effect - confusion in immediate ordered recall for similar sounding words - difficulty with ordered recall.

Irrelevant (unattended) speech effect - listening to audio whilst attending to visually presensted material impairs verbal recall of that material -> audio adds noise to the loop

Word length effect - memory span decliens with the spoken duration fo the word (longer sounding pronunciations), even if syllables are accounted for - reflects the speed of subvocal rehearsal and the rate of refresh

Concurrent articulation effect

Question 67

What is the visuo-spatial sketchpad? What are the two components?

Answer 67

VS sketchpad involves the spatial encoding of material. Concurrent speech does not affect the VS sketchpad.
Two components: visual cache (store visual patterns) and inner scribe (spatially based rehearsal e.g. movement sequences)

Question 68

Which ‘slave’ system on Baddeley’s WM model is in charge of maintaining orientations in space and directing movement?

Answer 68

The Visuo-spatial sketchpad

Question 69

Describe visual working memory, and a visual WM paradigm?

Answer 69

Visual WM is a memory buffer that allows for the retention of visual information (usually 3-4 items). This allows for a continous representation of the visual world that would otherwise be interupted by objects being occluded, eye blinks, etc.
A VWM paradigm involves a change detection task accompanied by asking the participant to listen to auditory information at the same time (to load the phonological loop and ensure only the VS sketchpad is working).

Question 70

What are the two models of visual WM?

Answer 70

Slot model - fixed number of object representations can be held in memory at any one time (e.g. 4)

Resource model - limited supply o of a representational medium is continously distributed between objects - resource dependent.

Evidence that complexity of objects influences visual short term memory capacity favours the resource model