Ch.4-Attention Flashcards
Attention
Actively processing specific information while tuning out other information. A set of cognitive processes and various ways of conceptualizing. Attention is difficult to separate from related cognitive processes like perception.
Cognitive Resources
Limitations in information processing, people seen as information processors. Assigning mental resources- limited mental resources to devote to incoming internal and external information. The difficulty of the task determines how much mental energy and cognitive resources are required.
Selecting Sensory Information
Overwhelming amount of sensory information. Attentional mechanisms allows us to select a subset of the sensory information to focus on. Select information that gets acted on and passed to the next processing stage. One view of attentions is that it controls the transfer of information into working memory.
Limitations in Deploying Attention
People as information processors-limited mental resources to devote to incoming information. Select subset of information coming from multiple sources.
Attention
Actively processing specific information while tuning other information out. Set of cognitive processes and various ways of conceptualizing (models). Difficult to separate from related cognitive processes like perception.
Cognitive Resources
Limitations in information processing, people are seen as information processors. There are limited mental resources to devote to incoming internal/extrnal information. The difficulty of the task determines how much mental energy and cognitive resources are required
Selecting Sensory Information
Overwhelming amount of sensory information. Attentional mechanisms allow us to select a subset of the sensory information to focus on. Select information that gets acted on and passed to the next stage of processing. One view of attention is that it controls the transfer of information into working memory
Dichotic Listening Task
Different information heard simultaneously in opposite ears. Shadown one source to make it the one being attended to compare attended and unattended information in terms of memory.
Dichotic Listening Task (Cherry 1953) Cont’d
Unattended message-participants accurately report whether it was speech (along with the gender of the speaker) or noise.
Could not tell that speech was played backwards
Language (English v German) of the message
Extracting Information from unattended stimuli
Differences in what information is processed from unattended stimuli. Extract basic information from unattended stimuli, no access to higher level information. Where we deploy attention influences the information we process.
Attentional Blink in RSVP
Deficit in reporting Target 2 (T2) when it follows Target 1 (T1) by 200-500ms.
T2 is less likely to be attended to if T1 is attended too
Bottleneck Theories of Attention-Filter Theory (Broadbent)
Filter theory- Available information exceeds person’s capacity to attend to. Attentional filter lets only some information through. Unattended message not processed for recognition or meaning, although some physical characteristics are. Can still process 2 messages simultaneously if the messages do not contain too much information and if they are presented slow enough.
More on Filter Theory Broadbent
The filtering occurs at a very early stage based on the physical characteristics of the incoming sensory information (such as pitch, loudness, or location of sound). Only information that passes through the “filter” moves on for deeper processing, such as semantic analysis (meaning).
Factors that influence what stimulus is attended to
Top-down influences on attentional allocation
Cocktail Party Effect (Moray)
Shadowing of attended message disrupted when name is embedded in either attended or unattended message. Embedded name is remembered. The unattended message can become attended.
The phenomenon in selective attention, where people are able to focus on a single conversation in a noisy environment, such as at a party, even though there are many other conversations happening around them. However, the effect also refers to the ability to hear and attend to specific information, such as hearing your name mentioned in another conversation, even when you are not consciously paying attention to it.
Switching Ears (Treisman)
Attended and unattended messages switched ears. Participants kept shadowing same message (now played in different ear). The participants kept shadowing the message that is now supposed to be unattended.
Modulation by meaning- the selection of what to attend to is based on the meaning of the message, possibility that filter theory does not allow for
Attentuated Attention (attentuation theory) Treisman
Unattended messages “reduced in volume” but some information on meaning is still available.
3 types of analysis on incoming information: Physical properties such as pitch and loudness
Linguistic information extracted (parsing into words and syllables)
Semantic information extracted (meaning of message). Process unattended stimulus only to the level necessary to separate it from attended stimulus.
Attentuation Theory Cont’d
Some stimuli have a lowered threshold. Important words/phrases (name, Fire!) are processed easily and recognizable at low volumes. Theses important units have permanently lowered thresholds for recognition even when unattended
Lowering the Threshold
Priming: introduction of one stimulus influences how people respond to subsequent stimulus. Context that the word is in can lower the recognition threshold for that word “dog-> cat”. Priming operated when processing meaningful messages (reading)
N400
ERP component elicited by semantic surprise of the word given its context. Eg: Doctor-nurse vs doctor-chicken. Stronger response to doctor-chicken as it is surprising given its context compared to the expected (priming) doctor-nurse
Vogel et all experiment 2
T2 related or unrelated to context word.
T1 (doctor) is semantic prime
T2 (nurse vs chicken) is the target word
In attentional blink if presented 200-500ms after T1 usually not reported by subjects
Schema Theory (Nisser/Becklen)
Proposed that unattended information not acquired and left out of cognitive processing.
Neisser and Becklen-superimposed 2 films, participants attend 1 film and do not notice occurences in the other
