Attention and Performance

Question 1

What is attention?

Answer 1

a resource (or pool of slightly different resources) that is available and that can be used for various purposes.

Question 2

Having a simple primary task means…

Answer 2

• more resources remaining for secondary task

- good secondary task performance

Question 3

Having a complex primary task means…

Answer 3

• less resources remaining for second task

- poorer secondary task performance

Question 4

The performer must learn what to attend to and when to attend to it to shift attention between the following:

Answer 4

• Events in the environment
• Monitoring and correcting his or her own actions
• Planning future actions
• Doing many other processes that compete for the limited resources of attentional capacity

Question 5

What is parallel processing?

Answer 5

Considering the processes occurring in the stimulus identification stage, some sensory information can be processed in parallel and without much interference—that is, without attention

Question 6

What is the Stroop effect?

Answer 6

• different aspects of the visual display

- tendency for a certain set of stimuli to require longer completion times (ex. colour words with different colours)

Question 7

Give an example of parallel processing.

Answer 7

sensory signals from the muscles and joints associated with posture and locomotion

Question 8

What is the cocktail-party effect?

Answer 8

a phenomenon of attention in which humans can attend to a single conversation at a noisy gathering, neglecting most (but not all) other inputs

Question 9

What is sustained attention?

Answer 9

• After a period of time, the task of concentrating on a single target of our attention becomes a progressively more difficult chore
• maintenance of attention over long periods of work

Question 10

Factors known to affect vigilance include:

Answer 10

• motivation
• arousal
• fatigue
• environmental factors

Question 11

Controlled processing is…

Answer 11

• slow
• attention demanding
• serially organized
• volitional as a large part of conscious information processing activities

Question 12

Give an example of controlled processing.

Answer 12

performing 2 information processing tasks together can completely disrupt both tasks

Question 13

Automatic processing is …

Answer 13

• fast
• not attention demanding
• organized in parallel
• involuntary

Question 14

How is automaticity developed?

Answer 14

• lots of practice especially under a consistent mapping condition
• most effective in closed skills

Question 15

Why can fast processing be effective and ineffective?

Answer 15

• effective: when the environment is stable and predictable

- ineffective: can lead to terrible errors when the environment changes the action at the last moment

Question 16

Does distracted driving affect the response selection stage or the movement programming stage?

Answer 16

• The assumption is that the hand operation of a cell phone interferes with the operation of a motor vehicle (movement programming limitation).
• source of the problem lies in the capacity demanded by the phone conversation

Question 17

When does the double stimulation paradigm occur?

Answer 17

The subject is required to respond, with separate responses, to each of two stimuli presented very closely together in time.

Question 18

Why do delays in responding occur during the double stimulation paradigm?

Answer 18

because of the interference that arises in programming the first and second movements as rapidly as possible

Question 19

What is psychological refractory period (PRP)?

Answer 19

If the experimenter presents the second stimulus during the time the system is processing the first stimulus and its response, the onset of the second response can be delayed considerably

Question 20

Describe the psychological refractory period with reference to the bottleneck.

Answer 20

stimulus 2 enters the bottle 100 ms after stimulus 1, but is delayed at the bottleneck until response to stimulus 1 is programmed

Question 21

What is the internal focus of attention?

Answer 21

attention directed to locations inside the body, or to motor or sensory information

Question 22

What is the external focus of attention?

Answer 22

attention directed outside the body to an object or environmental goal.

Question 23

In almost all situations an _____ focus results in more skilled performance than a _____ focus of attention.

Answer 23

• external

- internal

Question 24

What is arousal?

Answer 24

the level of excitement produced under stress

Question 25

The inverted-U principle represents a view of the relationship between _______ and _______.

Answer 25

• arousal

- performance

Question 26

Increasing the arousal level generally _______ performance, but only to a point.

Answer 26

enhances

Question 27

What is the inverted U principle?

Answer 27

increased arousal improves performance only to a point, with degraded performance as arousal is increased further

Question 28

What is perceptual narrowing?

Answer 28

the tendency for the perceptual field to shrink under stress with high arousal

Question 29

Why is perceptual narrowing a important mechanism?

Answer 29

it allows the person to devote more attention to those sources of stimuli that are immediately most likely and relevant

Question 30

When do performers choke under pressure?

Answer 30

when they change their normal routine or fail to adapt to a changing situation, resulting in failed performance

Question 31

What does the attentional control theory suggest?

Answer 31

that increased levels of anxiety tend to reduce “controlled” selective attention activities of the performer and increase the attention to certain potentially lifesaving cues

Question 32

Why would chocking under pressure occur when there is a change in attentional focus?

Answer 32

as pressure builds to perform well in critical situations, athletes who choke often shift from performing in a over learned, automatic type of attentional (external) focus to a more conscious, controlled (internal) focus of attention