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.
What results did Muller obtain?
During target detection, targets are detected fastest when the attended region was smallest (one square).
The cueing phase forced them to zoom their attention in and out. Also, during the target detection phase, it was evident that those who were asked to focus on more squares took longer to pick out the target.
TRADE OFF BETWEEN REGION SIZE AND PROCESSING EFFICIENCY
Is there evidence to show that attention is not consistent with the zoom lens theory?
We can use visual attention more flexibly than assumed by the theory.
Study – Present two digits a short distance apart in two locations. On some trials, one digit was presented in the space between the two cued locations.
According to zoom lens theory, the area of maximal attention should include the two cued locations and the space in between. Hence, detection of the digit presented in the middle should have been very good.
Findings – detection of digit presented in the middle was poor. Not consistent with zoom lens theory, but rather show split attention.
How is visual attention like a doughnut?
Suggests that attention can be split. Attention can be directed to 2 regions of space not adjacent to each other -> attention can be more flexibly deployed than suggested by zoom lens metaphor, and can perhaps have multiple spotlights.
Is there evidence to support the doughnut analogy>
Presented participants with stimuli at 5 different locations at the same time. Looks smth like this.
x x
x
x x
When observers were told to attend to the upper-left and bottom-right locations only, there were peaks of brain activation in brain areas corresponding to these locations.
However, there was much less brain activation in areas between the locations, including the centre of the visual field. Can be shaped like a donut, nothing in the middle.
What is neglect and what causes it?
A disorder of visual attention in which stimuli or parts of stimuli presented to the side opposite the brain damage are undetected and not responded to; the condition resembles extinction but is more severe.
Damage to the right hemisphere.
What symptoms do neglect patients exhibit?
When they copy a drawing, they typically leave out most of the details from the left side of it.
- Failure to attend to stimuli presented to the left side of the visual field and have no conscious awareness of them.
Stimuli presented to the left side of the visual field are not processed. True or false?
False. The stimuli still receive some processing.
After getting patient to report pictures, the patients had to identify degraded pictures. Performed better on old picture that had been presented to the left visual field than on new pictures. Thus, the old pictures had received some processing during the first phase of the experiment.
List some factors that determine if one would be easily distracted or not.
Anxiety
Salience of distractors
Demands of current task (perceptual load theory)
Proximity of task-irrelevant stimuli to task-relevant stimuli
What does the perceptual load theory propose and assume?
Assumes that attentional capacity is limited.
Attentional capacity is primarily allocated to the attended information. Residual capacity can then be allocated to unattended stimuli.
For demanding tasks, perceptual load is high, and hence less residual capacity for unattended stimuli.
Is there evidence that supports the perceptual load theory?
Had subjects search for a letter in a circle (eg X or N)
IV1: Low-load vs high-load (high load had other non-target characters placed randomly in the circle)
IV2: Distractor vs no distractor.
Found that the cartoon character was only distracting in the low-load condition. Shows that when perceptual load is low, little attentional capacity is required to attend to the information present (letter to be identified). Hence, it leaves one with a large amount of residual capacity, which can then be used to attend to unattended stimuli, the cartoon character in this case.
Answer these questions:
Performance of high-anxious participants was impaired by distraction whereas there was no such effect in low-anxious participants. True/False?
Distractors that are task-irrelevant are more disruptive than distractors that are task-relevant. T/F?
Task-irrelevant stimuli close in space to task stimuli are more distracting than those further away. T/F?
True.
False. Task-relevant distractors prove to be more disruptive than task-irrelevant distractors.
True.
What is cross-modal attention, and what misconception does this correct?
The coordination of attention across 2 or more sense modalities.
Shows that attentional processes in each sensory modality DOES NOT operate independently of those in another modality and that such processes are not modality specific.
Name 2 types of illusions associated with cross-modal attention and define them.
Ventriloquist illusion: The mistaken perception that sounds are coming from their apparent visual source. Think about how you used to think that car music came from the front, but actually the music source is the speaker located at the back of the car.
Rubber hand illusion: The misconception that a rubber’s hand is one’s own, it occurs when the visible rubber hand is touched at the same time as the individual’s own hidden hand.
What conditions must be satisfied before the ventriloquist illusion takes place?
Recall: What does SET stand for?
1) Visual and auditory stimuli must occur close together in time.
2) Sources of visual and auditory stimuli must be close together in space.
3) Sounds must match expectations raised by the visual stimulus. (you see the car front whatever it’s called lol -> expect music to be played -> if music is played, good. if something else comes out, run. jk but if something else comes out it doesnt qualify to be a ventriloquist illusion.
When does vision capture sound and when does sound capture vision?
Vision captures sound when the visual modality provides more precise information about spatial location, and this is usually the case.
However, sound does capture vision when the visual modality is severely blurred or poorly localized.
Thus, we combine visual and auditory information effectively by attaching more weight to the more informative sense modality.
What is the body swap illusion?
The participant and experimenter squeeze each other’s hands repeatedly. The participant wears a special helmet equipped with two CCTV cameras so that he/she sees the experimenter’s POV.
Participants perceive that the stimulation caused by squeezing hands originates in the experimenter’s hand rather than their own!
Researchers then moved a knife either close to the participant’s or the experimenter’s hand. The participants showed a greater emotional response when the knife was close to the experimenter’s hand than when it was close to their own hand
