Attention and Performance Flashcards
What is attention?
a resource (or pool of slightly different resources) that is available and that can be used for various purposes.
Having a simple primary task means…
- more resources remaining for secondary task
- good secondary task performance
Having a complex primary task means…
- less resources remaining for second task
- poorer secondary task performance
The performer must learn what to attend to and when to attend to it to shift attention between the following:
- 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
What is parallel processing?
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
What is the Stroop effect?
- different aspects of the visual display
- tendency for a certain set of stimuli to require longer completion times (ex. colour words with different colours)
Give an example of parallel processing.
sensory signals from the muscles and joints associated with posture and locomotion
What is the cocktail-party effect?
a phenomenon of attention in which humans can attend to a single conversation at a noisy gathering, neglecting most (but not all) other inputs
What is sustained attention?
- 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
Factors known to affect vigilance include:
- motivation
- arousal
- fatigue
- environmental factors
Controlled processing is…
- slow
- attention demanding
- serially organized
- volitional as a large part of conscious information processing activities
Give an example of controlled processing.
performing 2 information processing tasks together can completely disrupt both tasks
Automatic processing is …
- fast
- not attention demanding
- organized in parallel
- involuntary
How is automaticity developed?
- lots of practice especially under a consistent mapping condition
- most effective in closed skills
Why can fast processing be effective and ineffective?
- effective: when the environment is stable and predictable
- ineffective: can lead to terrible errors when the environment changes the action at the last moment
Does distracted driving affect the response selection stage or the movement programming stage?
- 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
When does the double stimulation paradigm occur?
The subject is required to respond, with separate responses, to each of two stimuli presented very closely together in time.
Why do delays in responding occur during the double stimulation paradigm?
because of the interference that arises in programming the first and second movements as rapidly as possible
What is psychological refractory period (PRP)?
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
Describe the psychological refractory period with reference to the bottleneck.
stimulus 2 enters the bottle 100 ms after stimulus 1, but is delayed at the bottleneck until response to stimulus 1 is programmed
What is the internal focus of attention?
attention directed to locations inside the body, or to motor or sensory information
What is the external focus of attention?
attention directed outside the body to an object or environmental goal.
In almost all situations an _____ focus results in more skilled performance than a _____ focus of attention.
- external
- internal
What is arousal?
the level of excitement produced under stress
