Attentional blindness experiments

Question 1

Inattentional blindness paradigm

Answer 1

Shown picture stream target with words or non-words covering a picture in the background

Task 1: focus on words and remember them, ignore pictures. Afterwards recall the words (70% accuracy)

Task 2: Focus on the pictures, ignore words. Afterwards surprise recognition task of the unattended words: Unattended words and foils were equally “remembered” (25%, aka no clue)

Question 2

fMRI test where unattended words are lost

Answer 2

If you do not pay attention to the words (suffering from inattentional blindness) you don’t see the distinction between words and non-words, whereas normally you respond a lot stronger to words.

Argues for early selection (but words still a bit stonger than non-words)

Question 3

Attentional blink paradigm

Answer 3

T1 is presented, have to respond/remember, than later there is a house (T2) shown.

In graph (T1-T2 Stimulus Onset Asynchrony, difference btween the two)

T1 is recognized 80% of the time,
T2 25% at 200 ms, gradually increasing to 60% at 800 ms

Question 4

fMRI acitvation in attentional blink

Answer 4

Looked at PPA (house), difference visible between miss and Correct Reject, the PPA activation was only amplified when the target is seen, argues for late selection (Miss is not a strong as a hit, but stronger than correct reject)

Question 5

PPA experiment 2

Answer 5

primary task is detection of face repetion (1-back (low demand), or more difficult 2/3-back (stronger load on WM))
(OR: blur the faces, more perceptual demand)

Meanwhile in the background scenes are shown, either repetition or new ones.

the PPA responds stronger to new scenes than repeated
- But only if PPA is rocessing and recognnizing the scenes

Result:
- In the perceptual demand task, repetition effect is not seen (early selection),

• but in the low demand (1 back) and the WM demand (2/3 back) there is a difference (late selection)

Question 6

Type of attention and effect on processing

Answer 6

The type of attention decides wheter early of late selction occurs.

So eg cognitive attention (memory) has litttle effect and means late selection

But Perceptual attention (more effort to see) has large effect on unattended stimuli processing (causing early selection)