Chapter 3 - Attention Flashcards
what is blindsight?
damage to the visual cortex but not the rest of the brain
what is positive priming?
when prior presentation of a stimulus facilitates later recognition
conceptual vs repetition priming?
conceptual: things that are related (salt / pepper)
repetition: almost the exact same presentation
what is selective attention?
the ability to focus on one message and ignore all others (filtering information)
what is dichotic listening?
hearing two different messages in different ears
what is shadowing?
repeating one message in Cherry’s dichotic listening study
describe the bottleneck model
messages enter sensory memory, get filtered, then the detector processes the meaning, then it goes to memory
what is the cocktail party effect?
the ability to attend to one voice out of many others and other noises
what is the attenuation theory?
the idea that some messages are more attended to than others, and they enter a dictionary unit where there are different action potentials for different words depending on meaning
what are the two early selection models?
bottleneck theory and attenuation theory
what is processing capacity?
the amount of information people can handle at one time
what is perceptual load?
the amount of cognitive resources it takes to carry out a task
what type of task is more likely to result in distractions?
low load tasks, because there are less cognitive resources being taken up and more leftover to use on unrelated tasks
what is an interference effect?
incongruence between two components of a stimulus where the dominant process interferes
what is a facilitation effect?
when two components of a stimulus are congruent and facilitate processing
attentional capture vs visual scanning
attentional capture: rapid shift in attention caused by a stimulus
visual scanning: moving eyes from one location to another
covert vs overt attention:
overt: shifting attention by moving eyes
covert: attention without eye movements
stimulus salience
areas of an image stand out and capture attention (colours/lights)
what comes first, eye movements or motor actions?
eye movements precede motor movements
what is precueing?
directing attention without moving eyes
what is the same-object advantage
people respond faster when the object appears where it was cued to
divided attention
attending to two or more things at once
consistent vs varied mapping?
consistent: targets and distractors in diff categories
varied: targets and distractors from same category
automatic vs controlled processing?
automatic: unintentional, easy tasks, no effort
controlled: intentionally controlled focus
inattentional blindness
a stimulus that is not attended to is not perceived, even if you’re looking at it
exogenous vs endogenous
exogenous: drawing of attention (external)
endogenous: directing of attention (internal)
binding
how individual features are combined to create a single percept
what is the preattentive stage?
analyzing into features
what are illusory conjunctions?
wrongfully combining features (Baillants syndrome)
feature search vs conjunction search
feature: target is defined by a single feature
conjunction: target is defined as more than 1 feature (
