Attention. Week 4 Flashcards
Theoretical brain mechanism which holds information while we process it.
The sensory store
Focusing on specific features, objects, or locations or on certain thoughts or activities.
Attention
The ability to focus on one message and ignore all others.
selective attention
Occurs when one stimulus interferes with attention to or the processing of another stimulus
distraction
The ability to pay attention to, or carry out, two or more different tasks simultaneously.
divided attention
A rapid shifting of attention, usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement.
attentional capture
Movement of the eyes from one location or object to another.
visual scanning
whos definition of attention:
Millions of items … are present to my senses which never properly enter my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. … Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. … It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.
William James’s (1890)
Modern research on attention began in the 1950s with the introduction of Broadbent’s filter model of attention.
True
Model of attention that proposes a filter that lets attended stimuli through and blocks some or all of the unattended stimuli.
Broadbent’s filter model of attention
The procedure of presenting one message to the left ear and a different message to the right ear.
dichotic listening
Colin Cherry (1953 studied attention using a technique called ____
dichotic listening,
The procedure of repeating a message out loud as it is heard. Shadowing is commonly used in conjunction with studies of selective attention that use the dichotic listening procedure.
shadowing
The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli, especially at a party where there are a lot of simultaneous conversations.
cocktail party effect
In Broadbent’s model of attention, the filter identifies the message that is being attended to based on its physical characteristics—things like the speaker’s tone of voice, pitch, speed of talking, and accent—and lets only this attended message pass through to the detector in the next stage.
filter
In Broadbent’s model of attention, the detector processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics of the message, such as its meaning.
detector
Model of attention that explains selective attention by early filtering out of the unattended message. In Broadbent’s early selection model, the filtering step occurs before the message is analyzed to determine its meaning.
early selection model
In Treisman’s model of selective attention, the attenuator analyzes the incoming message in terms of physical characteristics, language, and meaning. Attended messages pass through the attenuator at full strength, and unattended messages pass through with reduced strength.
attenuator
Anne Treisman’s model of selective attention that proposes that selection occurs in two stages. In the first stage, an attenuator analyzes the incoming message and lets through the attended message—and also the unattended message, but at a lower (attenuated) strength.
attenuation model of attention
A component of Treisman’s attenuation model of attention. This processing unit contains stored words and thresholds for activating the words. The dictionary unit helps explain why we can sometimes hear a familiar word, such as our name, in an unattended message.
dictionary unit
According to Treisman, words that are common or especially important, such as the listener’s name, have _____
low thresholds
Uncommon words or words that are unimportant to the listener have ____
higher thresholds
Treisman’s is called an ____ because it proposes a filter that operates at an early stage in the flow of information.
early selection model
A model of selective attention that proposes that selection of stimuli for final processing does not occur until after the information in the message has been analyzed for meaning.
late selection models of attention
The amount of information input that a person can handle. This sets a limit on the person’s ability to process information.
processing capacity
Related to the difficulty of a task. Low-load tasks use only a small amount of a person’s processing capacity. High-load tasks use more of the processing capacity.
perceptual load
A task that uses few resources, leaving some capacity to handle other tasks.
low-load tasks
Proposal that the ability to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli depends on the load of the task the person is carrying out. High-load tasks result in less distraction.
load theory of attention
An effect originally studied by J. R. Stroop, using a task in which a person is instructed to respond to one aspect of a stimulus, such as the color of ink that a word is printed in, and ignore another aspect, such as the color that the word names. The Stroop effect refers to the fact that people find this task difficult when, for example, the word RED is printed in blue ink.
Stroop effect
Scanning is necessary because good ____ occurs only for things you are looking at directly.
detail vision
the area you are looking at.
Central vision
everything off to the side.
Peripheral vision
Because of the way the retina is constructed, objects in central vision fall on a small area called the ___, which has much better detail vision than the peripheral retina, on which the rest of the scene falls
fovea
In perception and attention, a pausing of the eyes on places of interest while observing a scene.
fixation
when you are freely viewing an object or scene without searching for anything in particular, you move your eyes about three times per second.
true
Shifting of attention by moving the eyes. Contrasts with Covert attention.
overt attention
based primarily on physical characteristics of the stimulus
bottom up
based on cognitive factors such as the observer’s knowledge about scenes and past experiences with specific stimuli.
top down
Bottom-up factors that determine attention to elements of a scene. Examples are color, contrast, and orientation. The meaningfulness of the images, which is a top-down factor, does not contribute to stimulus salience. See also Saliency map.
stimulus salience
Map of a scene that indicates the stimulus salience of areas and objects in the scene.
saliency map
Occurs when attention is shifted without moving the eyes, commonly referred to as seeing something “out of the corner of one’s eye.” Contrasts with Overt attention.
covert attention
A procedure in which participants are given a cue that will usually help them carry out a subsequent task. This procedure has been used in visual attention experiments in which participants are presented with a cue that tells them where to direct their attention.
precueing
Occurs when the enhancing effect of attention spreads throughout an object, so that attention to one place on an object results in a facilitation of processing at other places on the object.
same-object advantage
attention directed to a specific location results in enhanced activity at one place in the cortex.
ture
Occurs when the map of categories on the brain changes to make more space for categories that are being searched for as a person attends to a scene.
attentional warping