Chapter 3 - Attention & Consciousness Flashcards
What is attention?
The ability to selectively concentrate on one aspect of the environment while ignoring other things.
What are the 4 types of attention?
Active vs passive attention.
- Active: controlled in a top-down way by the individual’s goals or expectation.
- Passive: controlled in a bottom-up way by external stimuli.
Focused vs divided attention
- Focused: try to attend to only one source of information while ignoring other stimuli.
- Divided: performing 2 tasks simultaneously
Why does active and passive attention exist?
attention is a limited resource. cannot afford to do active attention on everything.
Describe the shadowing task used by Cherry to study selective auditory attention.
He played different auditory messages in both ears, listeners have to attend to only one. Very little seems to be extracted from the non-attended message, initially suggesting that the meaning of the non-attended message is not processed at all.
Eg: I play PM Lee’s voice and Mr Brown’s voice -> I chose to pay attention to Mr Brown -> cannot say what PM Lee was talking about.
When the message was spoken in a foreign language or was played backwards, did the results change?
no.
If physical changes were made, were they easily detected? Eg: a pure tone
yes
What are the 3 theories that attempt to explain why we have limited abilities in extracting information from 2 sources that are presented simultaneously?
bottleneck concept
1) Broadbent’s theory
2) Treisman’s Attenuation Theory
3) Deutsch & Deutsch Theory
What did Broadbent propose about the location of the bottleneck?
Argued that there is a filter/bottleneck early in processing that allows information from one input or message through it on the basis of its physical characteristics. The other input remains briefly in a sensory buffer and is rejected unless attended to rapidly.
Describe the extraction of auditory messages using Broadbent’s theory.
1) 2 stimuli presented simultaneously are processed by the sensory register (low-level perceptual analysis)
2) However, only the attended input is allowed through the filter and undergoes semantic analysis.
3) You can select the input you wish to pay attention to using physical characteristics (eg gender of speaker, ear of input). The other input remains briefly in a sensory buffer and is rejected unless attended to rapidly. If not, you won’t get any semantic information from this rejected input.
What are some of the limitations associated with Broadbent’s theory?
too inflexible to say that you will not process any meaning from your unattended messages.
how do you explain a scenario whereby you are able to hear someone mentioning your name, even though you were not attending to that conversation?
What did Treisman propose about the location of the bottleneck?
The location of the bottleneck is more flexible than what Broadbent suggested.
Proposed that listeners start with processing based on physical cues, syllable pattern, and specific words and move on to processes based on grammatical structure and meaning. If there is insufficient processing capacity to permit full stimulus analysis, later processes are omitted.
With regard to Treisman’s theory, are later processes COMPLETELY omitted?
No.
Filter only attenuates/reduces the effect of unattended information. Might explain subjects’ awareness of unattended information.
Helps to explain why you can hear things personally relevant to you even though you are not attending to it. Eg when someone calls your name from afar.
What did Deutsch and Deutsch propose about the location of the bottleneck?
Argued that all stimuli are analyzed, but response is influenced by the most important/relevant stimulus. Bottleneck in processing becomes much nearer to the response end of the processing system than what Broadbent proposed in his theory.
What results did Deutsch and Deutsch obtain from the shadowing paradigm?
What they expected: There is complete perceptual analysis of all stimuli, and hence there should be no difference in detection rates .
What actually happened: However, much more target words were detected on the shadow message, hence Deutsch and Deutsch’s view is not consistent with empirical data.
When Coch et al asked listeners to attend to one of 2 auditory messages and detect targets presented on the attended or unattended message, what was found?
ERPs were recorded to provide a measure of processing activity.
ERPs 100ms after target presentation were greater when the probe was presented on the attended message than on the unattended one. Suggests that there was more processing of attended than of unattended targets.
If you were to carry out a dichotic listening task, with 3 digits being presented to each ear, would 3 digits be said or 6?
- Most recalled the digits ear by ear rather than pair by pair.
EG: 498 to one ear, 852 to the other. Recall would be 498, 852 and not 489582 –> not so intuitive as u can see.
What does the dichotic listening task suggest about auditory attention?
Suggests that the digits on one ear were stored briefly while those on the other ear were processed. Consistent with the notion that listeners select auditory stimuli for processing on the basis of their physical features (ie. ear of arrival).
Also consistent with the notion that listeners select auditory stimuli for processing on the basis of their physical feature, and can exhibit more flexibility.
How is there less evidence of a bottleneck when 2 channels are in different modalities?
If one message is auditory, while the other is visual, results can be different.
Listeners heard words over the telephone while doing a visual object-tracking task. The shadowing task didn’t interfere with the object-tracking task. Indicates that 2 dissimilar inputs of different modalities can be processed more fully than assumed by Broadbent.
How do top-down processes and bottom-up processes help one to pay attention to auditory stimuli?
Top-down:
Helps to inhibit brain activity elicited by irrelevant auditory stimuli, hence allowing listeners to focus more on the attended information.
bottom-up: directly by auditory input.
Explain the “winner-takes-all” mechanism.
Processing of one sound (winner) suppresses the brain activity of all other sounds (loser)
Inhibitory processes reduce brain activity associated with voices we want to ignore. Inhibitory processes are more effective when there are clear-cut physical differences between the attended input and the ignored input.
What can visual attention be likened to?
zoom lens, donut, spotlight
How is visual attention like a spotlight?
By Posner. Think of Mike Posner I TOOK A PILL IN IBIZA
Illuminates a relatively small area, little can be seen outside the beam of light. However, this beam of light can be redirected flexibly to focus on any given object.
How is visual attention like a zoom lens?
Eriksen and St James (Think Sony Ericsson and St James power station)
We can volitionally increase or decrease the region of focal attention (can be done at will), just as a zoom lesn can be moved in or out to alter the visual area it covers.
Eg: When driving a car, it is mostly desirable to attend to as much of the visual field as possible to anticipate danger. However, when we spot a potential hazard, we zoom in/focus on it to avoid an accident
What did Muller do that lent support to the zoom lens analogy?
Participants initially saw 4 squares. They were then cued to focus their attention on either 1 square, 2 square or 4 squares.
Four objects were then presented, one in each square. Observers then had to decide whether a target object (eg a white circle) was present in one of the cued squares.