CH1 Flashcards
The history of research on attention can be broken into five periods:
- Philosophic work preceding the field of psychology
- The period from the founding of psychology (1860) until 1909
- The period from 1910 to 1949, during which behaviourism flourished and interest in
attention waned - The resurgence of interest in attention during the period of the cognitive revolution
from 1950 to 1974 - Contemporary research dating from 1975 to the present.
Vives:
The more closely one attends to stimuli, the better they will be retained.
Learning consists of the formation of associations, and retrieval occurs through
automatic activation of the associated areas or through intentional search.
Malebranche
we have access to ideas/mental representations of the world, but not
the world itself. Attention is needed to make the ideas clear.
Leibnitz:
introduced the concept of apperception: an act that is necessary for an
individual to become conscious of a perceptual event. To him, attention is directed
towards events automatically but is also voluntary: attention is a determination of the
soul to know something in preference to other things.
Hamilton thought that
People were capable of attending to more than one thing at once
Hick-Hyman law
the probability of occurrence of a stimulus influences the
time to respond to whichever one occurs
voluntarism
the study of conscious decision and choice (Wundt)
perception (wundt)
the entry into
the field of attention
apperception
was responsible for entry into the inner focus
Lotze proposed that
conscious attention occurs to varying degrees, with lower processes
such as sensory experience not always accompanied by higher processes involving
comparison of relations between the simple sensations or between them and previous
experiences
Attention contains three essential constituents:
increased clearness of ideas, muscle
sensations, and feelings
Pillsbury emphasized that
the contents of attention can be found both in the environment
and in the past experience of an individual
Task set
the readiness to carry out an instructed
action in response to a given stimulus.
James’ definition of attention is probably the most used:
“the taking possession by the mind,
in clear and vivid form, of one of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains
of thought. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others.”
james suggested several ways in which attention could be classified:
it is directed either to (a) objects of sense (sensorial attention), or to (b) ideal or represented
objects (intellectual attention).
It is either (c) immediate, or (d) derived.
Attention may be either (e) passive, reflex, non-voluntary, effortless; or (f) active and voluntary. The last shows a distinction between exogenous control (attention is drawn automatically) or endogenous control, in which it is voluntary.
Lotze introduced ideomotor action:
the links between movements and their mental
representations are bi-directional, thus allowing the representations to directly produce the
movements. James was a strong advocate of this, and says that sometimes you don’t need
consciousness, and sometimes you do
Jersild:
reported experiments in which subjects had to make a series of judgements
regarding each stimulus in a list as a function of whether a single task was to be performed
for all stimuli or whether two tasks were performed in alternating order. He found that the
time to complete the list was longer for mixed lists than for pure lists of a single task.
Telford:
discovery of the psychological refractory period effect: stimulation of neurons was
followed by a refractory phase during which the neurons were less sensitive to stimulation.
Responses are slower when a stimulus follows the preceding one by a short interval.
psychological refractory period effect
stimulation of neurons was
followed by a refractory phase during which the neurons were less sensitive to stimulation.
Responses are slower when a stimulus follows the preceding one by a short interval.
Vigilance decrement:
mindlessness or a withdrawal of effort from the subject after doing the same task for long periods of time
Cherry:
dichotic listening in which he presented different messages to each ear through
headphones. Participants had to shadow (repeat aloud) one of the two messages, and
afterwards were unable to tell anything about the ignored message. From this finding,
Broadbent developed the filter theory
(Broadbent) the filter theory
information is held in a preattentive temporary store, and only sensory events that have some physical feature in common are selected to pass
into the limited capacity processing system.
filter-attenuation
theory (Treisman)
says that early selection by filtering precedes stimulus identification, but the
filter attenuates the information only on unattended channels.
Deutsch and Deutsch proposed the late-selection theory
unattended
stimuli are always identified and that the bottleneck occurs in later processing
