Attention - Historical Origins Flashcards
What year did Donald Norman publish his ‘successful’ book?
1976
what is the broad meaning of attention? the basic definition?
brain’s ability to self regulate input from the environment
what is the brain’s primary computational task?
to interpret the world and act on it
what does selective attention involve?
the brain deciding attend to certain stimuli and blocking out other competing stimuli
why do humans need to have selective attention?
because we do not have enough cortical mass to deal with all the information our senses are providing
what are the two types of attention? which one is cog psych focusing on?
sustained and selective attention
selective
the human system is referred to as a “….” system?
limited capacity
what does a limited capacity system not do?
treat all stimuli equally
who came up with the cocktail party problem? when?
Cherry, 1953
what does the cocktail party problem refer to?
focuses on how humans have the capacity to follow a conversation in a crowded environment… how we “pick out” the relevant convo
what did cherry specifically theorise?
that the process of sound waves being created, travelling to the eardrum, and then being processed in the brain only happens to the sound waves that we are interested in
what is a “channel” ?
sensory pathway acting as a source of information
what did cherry’s study of dichotic listening and shadowing involve the participant doing?
participants listened to two channels of information and were asked to repeat one back (attend to one of the channels)
but would then ask them if they recalled information about channel 2
what other tweaks did cherry make to his study? and which changes were noticed ?
- switched channel 2 from english to german - not noticed
- switched from male to female - noticed
- reversed speech: “something weird” - noticed
- switched from voice to pure tone - noticed
what was the main finding of cherry’s first study? what was noticed on the unattended channel?
no memory for unattended message
Only superficial (physical) features in cherry’s experiment were perceived - what does this mean?
things that distinguished voice, non voice, male or female were perceived, while semantic content (language, meaning) was not
How did Neisser 1967 classify between two classes of cognitive processes
pre-attentive - occurs without need for attention
focal attention - processes that only occur if you attend to something
Using Neisser’s definitions, what was and was not perceived in cherry’s study?
- sensory (physical) features were processed pre-attentively
- meaning requires focal attention
what is the phase difference?
the arrival of sound waves to the left and right ear at slightly different times in order to localise sound in space
what is a criticism of Cherry’s experiments?
while he was interested in what is perceived, he actually measured what was remembered
who proposed filter theory in 1958? what is the main theory?
Broadbent
- attention acts as a filter to select stimuli for further processing
what are the first 4 stages of filter theory proposed by Broadbent?
- senses make it through to 2. short term store which then go to the 3. selective filter, and this filter selects the one channel that makes it into the 4. limited capacity channel
what is the short term store for broadbent?
a fragile, raw, acoustic trace where the audio echo hangs around for a brief period
what was found re filter switching times/ filter theory… how?
split span experiments divided recall into two conditions 1. temporal order and 2. ear by ear recall (preferred)
argued that the increased recall capacity of the ear by ear recall is evident for filter switching times, as temporal order would call for 5 filter switches while ear by ear recall only needs 1
T or F, it was thought that attentional selection was based on simple physical features (location in space, voice etc)
True
what was a key conclusion of the extraction of meaning after Broadbent’s research?
meaning requires access to limited capacity channel, only extracted if stimulus is attended
what did the Dear aunt jane (Gray and Wedderburn 1960) experiment show?
that preferred recall follows semantic context, not presentation ear as was proposed by Broadbent
for the filter theory, why should the dear aunt jane experiment not work?
because meaning is supposedly only understood once the material has passed the filter, so if the filter blocks out meaning, the content or semantic context shouldn’t be able to influence how you recall the items
what did moray 1959 manipulate and show regarding filtering?
participants were to attend to (shadow) channel 1, but in channel 2, their name was presented and often detected even on the unattended channel
disproves that meaning is only extracted on the attended channel
what are the two camps in the early v late selection debate?
Early (Treisman 1961)
- Sensory analysis —-> Filter —-> Semantic analysis (LTM) —> report
Late (Deutsch & Deutsch, Norman)
- Sensory analysis —-> Semantic analysis (LTM) —-> Filter —-> report
what is the basis of Treisman’s attenuation model?
that the filter works to “turn down” the volume of the unattended channel, so that the attended channel goes through to semantic analysis at ‘full strength’ while unattended channel does make it through to this stage but to a weaker degree. She argues that certain stimuli such as highly salient (name) and semantically related material (dear aunt jane) gets through filter
how did Treisman investigate and provide support for early selection?
two channels of speech, but both has indications to “tap” at various points. successful taps were higher on attended channel, but not zero on unattended channel as such supposedly showing support for the filter attenuating stimuli instead of blocking it
what is the basis of the late selection theory?
that if the filter is able to respond to semantic knowledge, then it makes more sense that it is further down the stream after semantic analysis takes place
for late selection theory, what needs to happen for things to get into conscious awareness
2 sources of activation (sensory analysis and pertinence) need to intersect in the memory system for something to get through the filter into conscious awareness
what are the two sources of activation in Norman’s late selection theory?
bottom up mechanism - stimulus driven (sensory analysis)
top down mechanism - pertinence (relevance to task)
Mckay 1973 investigated late selection… how did they do so? what did they find?
two channels
shadow channel had sentence that finished with ambiguous word
the unattended channel was manipulated to provide the ambiguous word with different meanings eg (bank - river or money).
then completed recognition task and results showed participants were more likely to recognise the sentence based on the clarity that the unattended channel provided . eg, people who heard river were more likely to saw they heard that sentence on the shadowed channel
thus showing that meaning was processed and can bias subsequent performance on memory task
how did some psychs in 1975 investigation late selection using classical conditioning?
paired word within category with shock to classically condition Galvanic skin response
then conducted shadowing task where words from that category (eg fruit category) were presented on unattended channel but still created GSR. as words that were not used in the conditioning but were in the same category generated GSR, there is a level of semantic understanding happening at least to point that category membership is extracted
