Chapter 4 - Attention Flashcards
-Attention:
-the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment
-Selective attention:
attending to one thing while ignoring others
Divided attention
paying attention to more than one thing at a time
-Selective Attention
- ability to focus on one message and ignore all others
- we do not attend to a large fraction of the information in the environment
- we filter out some information and promote other information for further processing
distraction
one stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus
attentional capture
rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement
-visual scanning
movements of the eyes from one location to another
Research Method: Dichotic Listening
- one message is presented to the left ear and another to the right ear
- participant “shadows” on message to ensure they are attending to that message
- can we completely filter out the message to the unattended ear and attend only to the shadowed message?
- Results
- participants could not report the content of the message in unattended (overshadowed) ear
- knew that there was a message
- knew the gender of the speaker
- However unattended ear being processed at some level
- cocktail party effect – filtering out other stimuli to hear what you want
- change in gender is noticed
- change to a tone is noticed
Models of Selective Attention
- where does the attention filter occur?
- early in processing
- later in processing
-Early selection model
Braodbent’s filter model
-Intermediate selection model
-Treisman’s attenuation model
-Late selection model
-McKay (1973)
Braodbent’s Filter Model
-Early Selection Model
-filters messages before incoming information are analyzed for meaning
-Sensory memory
- holds all incoming information for a fraction of a second
- transfers all information to next stage
-Filter
- identifies attended message based on physical characteristics (e.g., pitch of the speaker’s voice)
- only attended message is passed on to the next stage
-Detector
-processes all attended information to determine higher-level characteristics of the message
-Short-Term memory
- received output detector
- holds information for 10-15 seconds and may transfer it to long-term memory
-Early-selection model
-filters message before incoming information is analyzed for meaning
Broadbent’s Model Could Not Explain
- participants name gets through
- cocktail party phenomenon
- Participants can shadow meaningful messages that switch from one ear to another
- Dear Aunt Jane (Gray and Wedderburn, 1960)
- Effects of practice on detecting information in unattended ear
- you can be trained to detect unattended ear
- based on the meaning of the message
Treisman’s Attenuation Theory
-Intermediate-selection model
- attended messages can be separated from unattended messages early in the information-processing system
- selection can occur also occur later
-Attenuator
- analyzes incoming messages in terms of physical characteristics, language and meaning
- Attended to message is let through the attenuator at full strength
- Unattended message is let through at a much weaker strength
-Dictionary unit
- contains words, each of which have thresholds for being activated
- words that are common or important have low thresholds
- uncommon words have high thresholds
Late Selection Models
-selection of stimuli for final processing does not occur until after the information has been analyzed for meaning
-McKay (1973)
- in attending ear, participants heard ambiguous sentences
- “They were throwing stones at the bank”
In unattended ear, participants heard either
- “river”
- “honey”
- in test participants had to choose which was closest to the meaning of the attended message
- they threw stones toward the side of the river yesterday
- they threw stones at the savings and loan association yesterday
- the meaning of the biasing words affected the participants’ choice
- participants were unaware of the presentation of the biasing word
Load Attention Theory
- processing capacity – how much information a person can handle at any given moment
- perceptual load – the difficulty of a task
- high-load (difficult) tasks use higher amounts of processing capacity
- lower-load (easy) tasks use lower amounts of processing capacity
Flanker-Compatibility Task
-can participants focus their attention on detecting the target so that the identity of the distractor will not affect their performance?