Chapter 3 (Attention) Flashcards
What can we conclude about whether people notice the characteristics of the unattended
messages in a selective attention task?
People can sometimes notice the meaning of the unattended message, depending
on the characteristics of the task.
Psychologists have conducted studies in which the participants must detect a stimulus
in a display of many other objects. According to this research, people usually detect:
a feature that is present more quickly than a feature that is absent.
What best describes attention?
: “Attention lets you concentrate your cognitive activity so that you can
focus on information from your memory and your sensory world.”
According to the discussion of saccadic eye movements during reading:
the purpose of this kind of eye movement is to move the eye to a location where
the acuity is especially high for the stimulus you wish to see.
Your eyes are now moving across the page to read this question. However, they
pause briefly to acquire information from this sentence. This pause is called:
a fixation
The orienting attention network, as revealed by recent research:
a) is intimately involved in tasks such as visual search.
b) develops during the first year of life.
c) relies on activity in the parietal region of the right cerebral hemisphere.
Posner and Rothbart propose that the executive attention network is active when
people need to inhibit an automatic response. On this kind of attention task, the
portion of the brain that would be most active is:
the frontal lobe.
Which of the following provides the most accurate summary of the neuroscience
research on attention?
“One kind of attention task activates the frontal lobe, and a different kind
of attention activates the parietal lobe.”
According to Treisman’s feature-integration theory:
automatic parallel processing (distributed attention) may lead to a “pop out” effect.
According to Treisman’s feature-integration theory, when a person is attending to a
scene there are two processing stages:
focused attention and distributed attention.
Suppose that you are looking at a flower garden containing dozens of yellow tulips
and one red tulip, which seems to stand out conspicuously. According to Anne
Treisman’s theory, the explanation for this phenomenon is that:
you automatically processed some features—such as the color of the flower—
during distributed attention.
In the current version of Anne Treisman’s feature-integration theory:
distributed attention and focused attention are not completely different processes.
