Chapter 3: Attention

Question 1

Serial Bottlenecks

Answer 1

The points in the paths from perception to action at which people cannot process all the incoming information in parallel.

Question 2

How many motor systems are there for moving our hands, feet, etc

Answer 2

One for each.

• Which is why it is difficult to get the parts of the same system to do to different tasks (Ex. Rubbing stomach with one hand, patting your head with the other).

Question 3

Where can the bottleneck occur in information processing?

Answer 3

Either early in the process or late in the process.

Question 4

Early-selection theories

Answer 4

Theories of attention proposing that serial bottlenecks occur early in information processing.

Question 5

Late-selection theories

Answer 5

Theories of attention proposing that serial bottlenecks occur late in the information processing.

Question 6

Attention

Answer 6

• The allocation of cognitive resources among ongoing processes.
• attention is concerned with where these bottlenecks occur and how information is selected at these bottlenecks

Question 7

Goal-Directed Attention

Answer 7

Attention controlled by one’s goals.

Also called: endogenous control).

Question 8

Stimulus-Driven Attention

Answer 8

Attention controlled by a salient stimulus.

Also called: exogenous control.

Question 9

Describe an example of stimulus-driven Vs. goal-driven attention (Corbetta & Shulman (2002)

Answer 9

The painting example on page 72.

Question 10

What do Corbetta & Shulman argue?

Answer 10

• Somewhat different brain systems control goal-directed attention Vs. Stimulus-driven attention.
• Goal-directed attentional systems more left-lateralized, whereas the stimulus-driven system is more right-lateralized (based off of neural imaging).

Question 11

BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN DIAGRAM ON PG 73.

Answer 11

label AND draw arrows

Question 12

Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex

Answer 12

Directs central cognition.

Question 13

Motor cortex

Answer 13

Controls hands.

Question 14

Parietal cortex

Answer 14

Attends to locations and objects.

Question 15

Anterior cingulate

Answer 15

monitors conflict.

Question 16

Auditory cortex

Answer 16

Processes auditory information.

Question 17

Extrastriate cortex

Answer 17

Processes visual information.

Question 18

Dichotic listening task

Answer 18

A task in which participants in an experiment are presented with two messages simultaneously, one to each ear, and are instructed to repeat back the words from only one of the messages

Question 19

Explain key points of the unintended message in these early Dichotic listening tasks

Answer 19

• Very little of the information in the unintended message gets processed.
• Can tell if the voice was human or noise, male or female.
• Could NOT tell which language was spoken or what the words were (even if the same word was repeated consistently).

Question 20

What is this dichotic listening task compared to?

Answer 20

The Party Effect.

Question 21

Broadbent (1958)

Answer 21

Proposed an early selection theory called: The filter theory

Question 22

Filter Theory

Answer 22

Broadbent’s early selection theory of attention, which assumes that, when sensory information has to pass through a serial bottleneck, only some of the information is selected for further processing, on the basis of physical characteristics, such as the pitch of a speaker’s voice.

Question 23

Explain how the filter theory worked with the dichotic listening task.

Answer 23

the message to each ear was registered but that at some later point the participant selected one message to listen to on the basis of the specified ear, thus filtering out the message in the other ear.

Question 24

People can choose to attend to a message to process based on?

Answer 24

• Physical characteristics

- Semantic Content (meaningfulness)

Question 25

Explain the Gray & Wedderburn (1960) experiment

Answer 25

PG 74!

• “Dog, Scratch, Fleas!”
• Results: People search for meaning.

Question 26

Treisman (1960)

Answer 26

PG 74

• Proposed attenuation theory
• People use physical and meaningful content.

Question 27

Attenuation Theory

Answer 27

Treisman’s early-selection theory of attention, which proposes that some incoming sensory signals are attenuated (weakened) on the basis of their physical characteristics.

Question 28

How would the attenuation theory work in the dichotic listening task?

Answer 28

participants would minimize processing of the signal from the unattended ear but not eliminate it.

Question 29

Deutsch & Deutsch (1963)

Answer 29

Late selection theory: all information is processed completely without attenuation.
- claim was that people can perceive multiple messages but that they can say only one message at a time. Thus, people need some basis for selecting which message to shadow.

Question 30

Explain the differences & Similarities between late-selection theories, and early-selection theories.

Answer 30

oth models assume that there is some filter, or bottleneck, in processing. Treisman’s attenuation theory (Figure 3.6a) assumes that a perceptual filter selects which message to attend to (message #1) and that the unselected message (message #2) is therefore attenuated (dashed arrows); thus, only message #1 is fully analyzed for verbal content. In contrast, Deutsch and Deutsch’s late-selection theory (Figure 3.6b) assumes that a response filter operates after both messages have been fully analyzed.

Question 31

Visual Attention

Answer 31

• Can be focused on the fovea, but we can also be attentative to other parts of the visual field while focusing the fovea at another point.

Question 32

Posner, Nissen, & Ogden (1978)

Answer 32

had participants fixate on a constant point and then presented them with a stimulus 7° to the left or the right of the fixation point. In each trial, before the stimulus appeared, participants would see a cue near the fixation point, providing information about where to expect the stimulus. In a third of the trials, the cue would point to the left of the fixation point; in a third, the cue would point to the right; and in the other third, the cue would be neutral, not indicating either direction. The cues indicating left or right were correct 80% of the time (valid cues), but 20% of the time the stimulus appeared on the unexpected side (invalid cues). After neutral cues, the stimulus appeared equally often left and right. The researchers monitored the participants’ eye movements and included only those trials in which the eyes had stayed on the fixation point.

• Results: Participants were faster when the stimulus appeared in the expected location and slower when it appeared in the unexpected location.

Question 33

Posner, Snyder, & Davidson (1980)

Answer 33

people can attend to regions of the visual field as far as 24 degrees from the fovea.

Question 34

Posner (1980)

Answer 34

successful control of eye movements actually requires us to attend to places outside the fovea. That is, we must attend to and identify an interesting nonfoveal region so that we can guide our eyes to fixate on that region to achieve the greatest acuity in processing it. Thus, a shift of attention often precedes the corresponding eye movement.

Question 35

Neisser & Becklen (1975)

Answer 35

performed the visual analogue of the auditory shadowing task. They had participants observe two videotapes superimposed over each other, one showing two pairs of hands playing a hand-slapping game, the other showing some people passing around a basketball. Figure 3.8c illustrates how the superimposed videotapes would have appeared to the participants. They were instructed to pay attention to one of the two films and to watch for odd events, such as the two players in the hand-slapping game pausing and shaking hands. Participants were able to monitor one film successfully and reported filtering out the other. When asked to monitor both films for odd events, the participants experienced great difficulty and missed many of the critical events.

Question 36

Which cues are used in Neisser & Becklen’s experiment

Answer 36

Physical & content cues.

Question 37

Fusiform Face Area

Answer 37

a region of the temporal cortex in the fusiform gyrus (a region known as the fusiform face area), which becomes more active when people are observing faces.

Question 38

Parahippocampal Place Area

Answer 38

another area within the temporal cortex, known as the parahippocampal place area, that becomes more active when people are observing places.

Question 39

O’Craven, Downing, & Kanwisher (1999)

Answer 39

study the neural consequences of attending to one object or the other. Participants in their experiment saw a series of pictures that consisted of faces superimposed on houses. They were instructed to look for either repetition of the same face in the series or repetition of the same house.

Results: When participants were looking for repetition of faces, the fusiform face area became more active; when they were looking for repetition of places, the parahippocampal place area became more active. Attention determined which region of the temporal cortex was engaged in the processing of the stimulus.

Question 40

When attending to a particular spatial location, what is the neural response time in the visual cortex?

Answer 40

70 to 90 ms after the onset of a stimulus.

Question 41

When attending to an object, what is the neural response time in the visual cortex?

Answer 41

a particular object (attending to a chair rather than a table, say) rather than to a particular location in space, we do not see a response for more than 200 ms.

Question 42

Mangun, Hillyard, & Luck (1993)

Answer 42

• Showed that the visual cortex is topographically organized.
• Stimulus in upper left = response in lower right brain.
• Stimulus in lower left = response in lower right brain.
• Stimulus in upper right = response in lower left brain.
• Stimulus in lower right = response in lower left brain.

Question 43

Inattentional blindness

Answer 43

Unaware of unattended areas of the visual field.

• We are often unaware of what is in our direct field of view if we are not paying attention to it.

Question 44

Simons & Chabris (1999)

Answer 44

• Inattentional blindness

They asked participants to watch a video in which a team dressed in black tossed a basketball back and forth while a team dressed in white did the same. Participants were instructed to count either the number of times the team in black tossed the ball or the number of times the team in white did so. Because the players were intermixed, the task was difficult and required sustained attention. In the middle of the game, a person in a black gorilla suit walked through the room.

When participants were tracking the team in white, they noticed the black gorilla only 8% of the time.

Question 45

Inattentional deafness

Answer 45

Raveh & Lavie (2015).

• Presented a surprise tone while participants were searching for a target letter in a display where distracter letters were the same size as the target letter (a high-difficulty task) or where distracter letters were smaller than the target letter (a low-difficulty task). In the high-difficulty condition, participants failed to detect the tone in 55% of the trials, versus a failure rate of only 18% in the low-difficulty condition.

Question 46

Wolfe (1999)

Answer 46

Inattentional amnesia

Question 47

Inattentional amnesia

Answer 47

that the object was really noticed but then immediately forgotten; and indeed, it can be shown that there are effects of object presentation even when the presentation is not noticed.

Question 48

Visual search

Answer 48

Searching for people or objects within a crowd.
How do we go about completing these visual searches?

• parietal cortex activated during such searches.

Question 49

Neisser (1964)

Answer 49

Visual Search Experiment: Find the letter “K”.

• Participants took about 0.6 seconds to scan each line.
• Strong activation in the parietal cortex during these searches.

Question 50

Stimulus-Driven Attention (The Pop-out effect)

Answer 50

If there is some distinctive feature in an array, we can find it without an object-by-object search.

Ex., Finding your friend in a crowd who is using a red umbrella.

Question 51

Treismann & Gelade (1980)

Answer 51

T Vs. Y & I - Z & I experiment.

Took about 400ms for participants to find the “T” in the Y&I portion.

Took about 800ms for participants to find the ‘T” in the Z&I experiment

• Features played a big role in this experiment. The ‘T’ looks similar to the ‘Z’ in regards to its cross-juncture, hence why it took participants longer to find the ‘T’ in the second portion.

Question 52

Binding Problem

Answer 52

The question of how the brain puts together features in the visual field to produce perception of an object.

Question 53

Treisman’s Feature-Integration Theory

Answer 53

Treisman’s proposal that one must focus attention on a stimulus before its individual features can be synthesized into a pattern.

Ex. the visual system can first direct its attention to the location of the red vertical bar and synthesize that object, then direct its attention to the green horizontal bar and synthesize that object.

• When an object has more than one feature to break down, we must first break this item down before searching for it (Letter K), but when an object has only one singular feature (red jacket), we do not have to go through the breakdown process before completing our search.

Question 54

Breakdown is real: Illusory Conjunctions

Answer 54

Illusions that features of different objects belong to a single object.

Question 55

Treismann & Schmidt (1982)

Answer 55

• participants shown a set of black digits on one side of the screen, and then coloured letters appeared on the other side.
• Sometimes, participants would mess up the colour of the letters, sometimes switching them. This caused an illusory conjunction.
• People with damage in the parietal lobe were extremely susceptible to illusory conjunctions.

Question 56

Damage to parietal lobe =

Answer 56

Damage in visual perception

Question 57

Damage (Right Parietal Lobe)

Answer 57

If the stimulus appeared in the left field, however, the patient showed a large deficit if inappropriately cued. Because the right parietal lobe processes the left visual field, damage to the right lobe impairs its ability to draw attention back to the left visual field once attention is focused on the right visual field.

When cued to attend to the right visual field, it takes this patient a long time (about 1300 ms) to switch attention to the left visual field and detect a stimulus there. In contrast, the corresponding switch of attention to the right visual field takes less than 600 ms.

Question 58

Unilateral Visual Neglect

Answer 58

In this condition, patients with damage to the right hemisphere completely ignore the left side of the visual field, and patients with damage to the left hemisphere ignore the right side of the visual field.

-Ex., the performance of a patient with damage to the right hemisphere who had been instructed to put slashes through all the circles (Albert, 1973). As can be seen, the right hemisphere damage caused her to ignore the circles in the left part of her visual field.

Question 59

Right Parietal lobe

Answer 59

responsible for the spatial allocation of attention than is the left parietal lobe and that this is why right parietal damage tends to produce such dramatic effects.

Question 60

Robertson & Rafal (2000)

Answer 60

the right parietal region is responsible for attention to such global features as spatial location, whereas the left parietal region is responsible for directing attention to local aspects of objects.

• EXPLAIN ILLUSTRATION ON PG 88. Shows this concept really well!

Question 61

Space-based Attention

Answer 61

Allocation of attention to visual information in a region of space.

Question 62

Object-Based Attention

Answer 62

Allocation of attention to particular objects.

Question 63

Behrmann, Zemel, and Mozer (1998)

Answer 63

people sometimes find it easier to attend to an object than to a location.

• Bumps Experiment: Participants were quicker to judge whether the numbers of bumps were the same or different when the bumps were on the same object (top and bottom rows), even if the object was partially occluded (bottom row).

Question 64

Inhibition of Return

Answer 64

The decreased ability to return our attention to a location or an object that we have already attended to.

-Advantage to this: This phenomenon confers an advantage in some situations: If we are searching for something and have already looked at a location, we would prefer our visual system to find other locations to look at rather than return to an already searched location.

Question 65

Tipper, Driver, and Weaver (1991) * Difficult. Be able to explain experiments and what they are showing.

Answer 65

• demonstrated inhibition of return in studies that also provided evidence for object-based attention.
• The participants’ attention was first drawn to one of the outer squares when it flickered (Frame 2), and then, 200 ms later, their attention was drawn back to the center square when that square flickered (Frame 3). A probe stimulus was then presented in one of the two outer positions (Frame 4 alternatives), and participants were instructed to press a key as soon as they saw the probe. On average, they took 420 ms to react to a probe at the location of the outer square that had not flickered, versus 460 ms to a probe at the location of the outer square that had flickered. This 40-ms advantage is an example of location-based inhibition of return. People are slower to shift their attention to a previously attended location than to a new location.
• Figure 3.22b illustrates the other condition of their experiment, in which the objects rotated around the screen. At the end of a full rotation (Frame 5), the object that had flickered on one side was now on the other side — the two outer objects had traded positions. In trials like the one illustrated in Figure 3.22b, the question of interest was whether participants would be slower to detect a probe on the right (where the flickering had been — which would indicate location-based inhibition) or a probe on the left (where the flickered object had ended up — which would indicate object-based inhibition). The results showed that participants were about 20 ms slower to detect a probe on the left than on the right — that is, their visual systems displayed an inhibition of return to the same object, not the same location.

Question 66

Right Parietal regions responsible for?

Answer 66

Location-based attention

Question 67

Left Parietal regions responsible for?

Answer 67

Object-based attention.

Question 68

Byrne & Anderson (2001) Experiment

Answer 68

I-mpossibility of multiplying and adding numbers at the same time. Participants in this experiment saw a string of three digits, such as “3 4 7.” Then they were asked to do one or both of two tasks:

• Task 1: Judge whether the first two digits add up to the third and press a key with the right index finger if they do or another key with the left index finger if they do not. In this case, they do, because 3 + 4 = 7.
• Task 2: Report verbally the product of the first and third numbers. In this case, the answer is 21, because 3 × 7 = 21.

Results: Participants took almost twice as long to do either task when they had to perform the other as well.

-In any case, it appears that the participants were not able to overlap the addition and multiplication computations at all.

Question 69

Schumacher (2001)

Answer 69

Perfect time-sharing experiment

• The tasks were much simpler than the tasks in the Byrne and Anderson (2001) experiment.
• Participants simultaneously saw a single letter on a screen and heard a tone and, as in the Byrne and Anderson experiment, had to perform one or both of two tasks:
• Task 1: Press a left, middle, or right key according to whether the letter occurred on the left part of the screen, in the middle, or on the right.
• Task 2: Say “one,” “two,” or “three” according to whether the tone was low, middle, or high in frequency.

Question 70

Perfect time-sharing

Answer 70

The ability to pursue multiple tasks simultaneously without cost to the performance of any task.

Question 71

central bottleneck

Answer 71

The inability of central cognition to pursue multiple lines of thought simultaneously.

Question 72

Automaticity

Answer 72

The ability to perform a task with little or no central cognitive control.

-Ex: Driving (experienced Vs. Novice drivers)

Question 73

Practice can enable a person to complete:

Answer 73

Parallel processing.

Question 74

Spelke, Hirst, & Neisser (1976)

Answer 74

Their participants had to perform two tasks simultaneously: read a text silently for comprehension while copying words dictated by the experimenter.

At first, this was extremely difficult. Participants had to read much more slowly than normal in order to copy the words accurately. After six weeks of practice, however, the participants were reading at normal speed.

They had become so skilled at copying automatically that their comprehension scores were the same as for normal reading.

For these participants, reading while copying had become no more difficult than reading while walking. It is of interest that participants reported no awareness of what it was they were copying.

Much as with driving, the participants lost their awareness of the automated activity.

Question 75

Stroop Effect

Answer 75

A phenomenon in which the tendency to name a word will interfere with the ability to name the colour in which the colour is printed.

Question 76

Who developed the idea of the Stroop Effect?

Answer 76

J. Ridley Stroop.

Question 77

Results of the Stroop Effect

Answer 77

BE ABLE TO EXPLAIN BEFORE EXAM.

Question 78

MacLeod & Dunbar (1988)

Answer 78

Stroop Effect using shapes. Colour names with random shapes.

• Looked at the effect of practice on performance in a variant of the Stroop task.
• 3 conditions:

Congruent: The shape was the same color as its name.

Control: Outlined white versions of the learned shapes were presented when participants were to say the color name for the shape; colored squares were presented when they were to say the actual color of the shape. (The square shape was not associated with any color.)

Conflict: The shape was a different color from its name.

Results: (a) Before practice, color naming is more automatic than shape naming and, as shown in the conflict condition, interferes with shape naming. (b) After 20 days of practice, shape naming is more automatic, like word reading, and it interferes with color naming.

Question 79

executive control

Answer 79

The direction of central cognition, which is carried out mainly by prefrontal regions of the brain.

Question 80

Prefrontal Cortex

Answer 80

that portion of the frontal cortex anterior to the premotor region.

Question 81

Damage to Prefrontal Cortex

Answer 81

• Deficits in executive control.

Ex. A patient who sees a comb on the table may be unable to inhibit the action of picking it up and beginning to comb her hair; another who sees a pair of glasses cannot help putting them on, even if he already has a pair on his face.

Exx. Marked deficits in the Stroop Effect (Have a really hard time not just reading the word).

Question 82

Which two prefrontal regions are important in executive control?

Answer 82

1. ) Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex.

2. ) Anterior Cingulate Cortex.

Question 83

Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex (DLPFC)

Answer 83

Upper portion of the prefrontal cortex thought to be important in cognitive control.

-Important in the setting of intentions and the control of behaviour.

Question 84

Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC)

Answer 84

A medial portion of the prefrontal cortex important in cognitive control and in dealing with conflict.

-Brain-imaging studies show that it is highly active in Stroop trials when a participant must name the color of a color word printed in an ink of conflicting color

Question 85

Children develop what?

Answer 85

More cognitive control as their ACC develops.