Chapter 4, Attention Flashcards
What is Attention?
The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment.
What processes are used in attention?
- Unconscious processes
- Conscious processes
What is a part of the Conscious processes, and what does it do?
Includes feeling and content of awareness
- Monitors interactions with the environment (can tell how we adapt to situations)
- Links past (memories) and present (sensations). (Gives us a sense of continuity of experience)
- Control and planning of future actions (we know what we want to do, how we want to act based on the first two points).
What is Preconscious?
Items that lie outside our conscious awareness, some may be made conscious (memories, sensations, etc.), some not.
What is Subliminal Perception?
Perception without awareness
What is Priming?
When recognition of certain stimuli is affected by the prior presentation of the same or similar stimuli.
What is Selective Attention?
Attending to one thing while ignoring others. it has a limited capacity and timing and it can filter out some information and promoting other information for further processing.
What is Distraction?
One stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus.
What is Divided Attention?
Paying attention to more than one thing at a time.
What is Attentional Capture?
Rapid shifting of attention is usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement.
Visual Scanning?
Movements of the eyes from one location or object to another.
What is Positive Priming?
Prior presentation of a stimulus facilitates later recognition. It can be:
- Conceptual
- Repetition
What is the Filter Model of Attention?
A model of attention that proposes a filter that lets attended stimuli through and blocks some or all of the unattended stimuli.
What is Dichotic Listening?
The procedure of presenting one message to the left ear and a different message to the right ear.
What is Shadowing?
The procedure of repeating a message out loud as it is heard.
Shadowing is commonly used in conjunction with studies of selective attention that use the dichotic listening procedure.
Who tested Selective attention and how?
Colin Cherry (1953)
How it was tested was through shadowing and Dichotic Listening.
Participants could report they had heard a message and the gender of the speaker but not the content of an unattended message.
What was Broadbent’s Filter Model (Bottleneck Model)?
It was an Early-selection model, which filters messages before incoming information is analyzed for meaning.
How was the Early-selection model structured?
(1. ) Message is transmitted to Sensory Memory
(2. ) Sensory Memory holds info for a fraction of a second and then transfer it
(3. ) The filter then identifies attended messages based on physical characteristics.
(4. ) It is then passed to the Detector which processes higher-level characteristics (e.g. meaning)
(5. ) lastly, it is passed to the Short-term memory which receives the output from the detector, holds it for 10-15 seconds then transfers it to Long-term memory.
What could Broadbent’s Model not explain?
- How does the participant’s name get through
- How participants can shadow meaningful messages that can switch from one ear to another.
- How the effects of practice on detecting information in the unattended ear, as you can be trained to detect in the unattended ear. (also based on the meaning of the message)
What is the Cocktail Party Effect?
The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli, especially at a party where there are a lot of simultaneous conversations.
What was Treisman’s Attenuation Theory?
It was an adaptation of Broadbent’s Filter but instead, the Early-selection model had a Leaky filter model.
This meant that attended messages can be separated from unattended messages early in the information-processing system, selection can also occur later.
How was Treisman’s Early-selection model structured?
(1. ) Messages was transmitted to the Attenuator
(2. ) The Attenuator analyzes incoming messages in terms of physical characteristics, language, and meaning. (a process)
(3. ) The Attenuator then transfers the message to the Dictionary Unit which contains stored words each of which has an activation threshold (mental lexicon)
In Treisman’s Attenuation Theory how are messages let through and what is the final output?
- Attended-to messages are let through the Attenuator at full strength
- Unattended messages are let through at a much weaker strength
- Dictionary unit determines final output based on different activation levels of information. Words that are common or important have low thresholds, while uncommon words have high thresholds.
What were Broadbent and Treisman’s theories considered?
Early-selection models
What is a Late Selection Model of Attention?
A model of selective attention proposes that the selection of stimuli for final processing does not occur until after the information in the message has been analyzed for meaning.
Who was one of the people who suggested a Late-selection Model?
Mckay (1973)
What did Mckay do?
Mckay had participants hear messages in attended and unattended ears, in the attended ear an ambiguous message was played
-“They were throwing stones at the bank”
In the unattended ear, participants heard
- “River”
- “Money”
What did Mckay’s participants have to choose after the initial part of the experiment?
Participants had to choose which was closest to the meaning of the attended messages.
The meaning of the biasing word affected the participant’s choice.
Participants were unaware of the presentation of the biasing words.
Which Model was right between the Early and Late selection Models?
Well, a genuine case can be made for both models under different conditions.
Plus researchers focus on different factors that control attention (e.g. cognitive resources and cognitive load)
So there is no definitive right model.
What is Processing Capacity?
The number of information people can handle
What is Perceptual Load?
The number of cognitive resources needed to carry out a particular cognitive task (task difficulty)
- Low-load task: use a small number of resources (e.g. well-practiced, easy tasks)
- High-load task: uses more cognitive resources (e.g. difficult tasks that are not well-practiced)
What is the Load Theory of Attention?
The proposal is that the ability to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli depends on the load of the task the person is carrying out. High-load tasks result in less distraction.
