Attention and perception Flashcards
What is Attention?
Attention is the mental process of selectively focusing on certain information while ignoring other stimuli. It’s not just one thing but involves many types of psychological processes.
Explain selective attention
This is how we focus on one thing while ignoring everything else (e.g., listening to one conversation at a noisy party).
Explain divided attention
Divided attention involves trying to focus on more than one task at the same time, such as walking and talking. (multitasking)
Explain Sustained Attention
This refers to maintaining focus over an extended period of time. It can be challenging because mental fatigue sets in after a while.
Example: Monitoring for a butterfly to appear over several minutes can make your mind wander.
Explain Top-Down vs. Bottom-Up Processing
Top-Down: Controlled by your expectations or goals (e.g., looking at traffic lights because you expect them to change). This is active attention.
Bottom-Up: When something unexpected captures your attention, like a loud noise (e.g., a car horn). This is passive attention.
Explain Automatic vs. Controlled Processing
Automatic: Tasks that become second nature, like walking or driving, don’t require much attention once they are learned.
Controlled: Learning new things (e.g., juggling) requires full attention until you get better and the task becomes automatic.
Explain cognitive bias
is when our brain takes shortcuts that cause us to make mistakes in thinking or judgment. Instead of thinking logically or objectively, our brain jumps to conclusions based on our previous beliefs, emotions, or the easiest information we can remember.
These shortcuts, called heuristics, help us make decisions quickly, but they often lead to mistakes or errors in judgment.
Who is William James?
What does it mean that attention isn’t a singular concept?
Because attention works in different ways depending on what we’re doing, it can’t be explained by just one definition.
What is intentional blindess
Focusing on something, which makes you miss other things around you
What is change blindness?
Change blindness is the failure to notice visual changes in a scene, especially when there is a brief pause or gap (e.g., an eye blink or screen change) between the original and changed image. This occurs even though we are expecting a change and demonstrates our limited ability to detect changes in visual environments
What is inattentional blindness?
Inattentional blindness occurs when we fail to notice a visible, but unexpected, event because our attention is focused on a different task. For example, in the basketball video experiment, people miss seeing a bear walking through the scene because their attention is on counting the basketball passes(Practical 7).
What is EEG?
Electroencephalogram –> measuring electrical activity in the brain
Explain controlled experiments
What is auditory stimuli? Give an example
Auditory stimuli are sounds that we hear and process through our sense of hearing. An example would be listening to a conversation, music, or the sound of a car horn.
What does Broadbent’s Filter Model (1958) propose?
It suggests that your brain focuses on simple features of sounds (like pitch or volume) and filters out everything else early on. Only the sounds you focus on get through to your conscious mind.
What does Treisman’s Attenuation Model (1960) propose?
Treisman’s model suggests that instead of completely filtering out unattended information, it is just weakened or “attenuated.” This means some unattended information still gets processed, but to a lesser extent than the information we are focusing on.
What does Deutsch & Deutsch’s Late Filter Model (1963) propose?
It suggests that all information is fully processed (including meaning), but a filter then decides which information is important enough to make you consciously aware of it. For example, even when you’re not focused on something, your brain still processes it and may bring it to your attention if it’s important.
What does Norman’s Model (1968) add to selective attention theory?
Norman’s model says that our brain compares new information with things we already know (from long-term memory). Only important or familiar information makes it through to our conscious attention.
Example: Let’s say you hear your name in a conversation while you’re focused on something else. Even though you’re not paying attention to the conversation, your brain recognizes your name because it’s important to you (from memory), so it grabs your attention.
What is the difference between preattentive and attentive processing? And who made this?
Neisser:
Preattentive processing is fast and automatic, used to quickly analyze basic physical features (like color or shape) without much effort. Attentive processing, on the other hand, is slower and requires full focus to process information more deeply and thoroughly.
Explain the bottle neck theory in selective attention
Bottleneck theories propose that although we initially take in multiple pieces of information at the same time, only one of them gets fully processed at a deeper, conscious level. The “bottleneck” represents the point where most information is filtered out, allowing only one stimulus to get through for focused attention.
Explain dichotic listening tasks
It’s used to study selective attention by presenting two different messages in each ear, with participants instructed to focus on one and ignore the other.
What is the shadowing task? And what kind of task category does it fit under?
shows that people can notice basic characteristics of ignored information, like changes in voice (e.g., male to female), but they don’t process the actual content or meaning. This task fits under the category of dichotic listening tasks, which are used to study how we selectively focus on one source of information while ignoring others.
Explain the split span task
A dichotic listening task where participants are presented with pairs of digits in each ear. They tend to recall all digits from one ear first, showing attention processes one ear at a time (serially).
What is sensory registry?
The sensory registry is the part of the memory system that briefly holds sensory information (like sights, sounds, or smells) just long enough for us to process it. This information is stored for only a few seconds before either being forgotten or passed on for further processing.
Explain modality
A modality refers to a type or channel through which information is received and processed by the brain. Examples of modalities include vision (visual), hearing (auditory), touch (tactile), and smell (olfactory).
Whats the main idea in dual-task paradigm?
It is used to study how attention is divided by having participants perform two tasks at the same time, measuring their performance to assess attention demands.
What did Spelke, Hirst & Neisser (1976) show in their dual-task study?
They showed that performing two tasks simultaneously reduces performance, but with practice, the ability to perform both tasks improves
