Chapter 4 - Attention Flashcards
Attention
Focusing on specific features, objects, or locations or on certain thoughts or activities.
one of the major processes determining what you experience, and what you take away from that experience.
William James’s (1890) definition of attention
withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others
selective attention
The ability to focus on one message and ignore all others
Distraction
Occurs when one stimulus interferes with attention to or the processing of another stimulus.
divided attention
The ability to pay attention to, or carry out, two or more different tasks simultaneously.
attentional capture
A rapid shifting of attention, usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement.
visual scanning
Movement of the eyes from one location or object to another.
How and when did modern research on attention begin?
in the 1950s with the introduction of Broadbent’s filter model of attention to explain the results of an experiment done by Colin Cherry
Cherry studied attention using what technique?
dichotic listening
dichotic listening task
dichotic refers to presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears
participant’s task in this experiment is to focus on the message in one ear, called the attended ear, and to repeat what he or she is hearing out loud
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.
Results of dichotic listening task
although his participants could easily shadow a spoken message presented to the attended ear, and they could report whether the unattended message was spoken by a male or female, they couldn’t report what was being said in the unattended ear
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.
Donald Broadbent
created a model of attention (an early selection model) designed to explain how it is possible to focus on one message and why information isn’t taken in from the other message
Broadbent’s filter model of attention
Sensory memory
Filter - the filtering step occurs before the message is analyzed to determine its meaning (why its called early selection)
Detector
Sensory memory
holds all of the incoming information for a fraction of a second and then transfers all of it to the filter
Filter
identifies the message that is being attended to based on its physical characteristics—things like the speaker’s tone of voice, pitch, speed of talking, and accent—and lets only this attended message pass through to the detector in the next stage
Detector
processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics of the message, such as its meaning
The output of the detector is sent to…
short-term memory, which holds information for 10–15 seconds and also transfers information into long-term memory, which can hold information indefinitely
Neville Moray
showed that participants were unaware of a word that had been repeated 35 times in the unattended ear
But when Moray presented the listener’s name to the unattended ear, about a third of the participants detected it - showed that participants had recognized their names even though, according to Broadbent’s theory, the filter is supposed to let through only one message, based on its physical characteristics - the person’s name had not been filtered out, and, most important, it had been analyzed enough to determine its meaning
J. A. Gray and A. I. Wedderburn
“Dear Aunt Jane” experiment
“Dear Aunt Jane” experiment
the attended (shadowed) ear received the message “Dear 7 Jane,” and the unattended ear received the message “9 Aunt 6.” However, rather than reporting the “Dear 7 Jane” message that was presented to the attended ear, participants reported hearing “Dear Aunt Jane.”
the participant’s attention had jumped from one ear to the other and then back again. This occurred because they were taking the meaning of the words into account. (An example of top-down processing!)
Anne Treisman
attenuation model of attention
feature integration theory (FIT)
attenuation model of attention
proposed a modification of Broadbent’s model and she replaced Broadbent’s filter with an attenuator
Attenuator
analyzes the incoming message in terms of physical characteristics, language, and meaning. Attended messages pass through the attenuator at full strength, and unattended messages pass through with reduced strength
the analysis of the message proceeds only as far as is necessary to identify the attended message. For example, if there are two messages, one in a male voice and one in a female voice, then analysis at the physical level (which Broadbent emphasized) is adequate to separate the low-pitched male voice from the higher-pitched female voice. If, however, the voices are similar, then it might be necessary to use meaning to separate the two messages.
physical characteristics
whether it is high-pitched or low-pitched, fast or slow
language
how the message groups into syllables or words
meaning
how sequences of words create meaningful phrases
Because at least some of the unattended message gets through the attenuator, Treisman’s model has been called…
a “leaky filter” model.
dictionary unit
contains stored words and thresholds for activating the words. The dictionary unit helps explain why we can sometimes hear a familiar word, such as our name, in an unattended message
threshold
the smallest signal strength that can barely be detected. Thus, a word with a low threshold might be detected even when it is presented softly or is obscured by other words. - words that are common or especially important, such as the listener’s name, have low thresholds, so even a weak signal in the unattended channel can activate that word
Is Treisman’s an early or late selection model?
Like Broadbent’s model, Treisman’s is called an early selection model because it proposes a filter that operates at an early stage in the flow of information
Donald MacKay
Ambiguous Sentences Experiment
Ambiguous Sentences Experiment
participant listened to an ambiguous sentence, such as “They were throwing stones at the bank,” that could be interpreted in more than one way. (In this example, “bank” can refer to a riverbank or to a financial institution.)
biasing words were presented to the other, unattended ear. For example, as the participant was shadowing “They were throwing stones at the bank,” either the word “river” or the word “money” was presented to the unattended ear.
Results of the Ambiguous Sentences Experiment
the meaning of the biasing word affected the participants’ choice
proposed that because the meaning of the word river or money was affecting the participants’ judgments, the word must have been processed to the level of meaning even though it was unattended
supported a late selection model of attention
Which is correct - early or late model of selection?
researchers realized that there is no one answer to what has been called the “early–late” controversy. Early selection can be demonstrated under some conditions and later selection under others, depending on the observer’s task and the type of stimuli presented
Nilli Lavie
load theory of attention
processing capacity
The amount of information input that a person can handle. This sets a limit on the person’s ability to process information.
perceptual load
Related to the difficulty of a task. Low-load tasks use only a small amount of a person’s processing capacity. High-load tasks use more of the processing capacity.
load theory of attention
Proposal 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.
The ability to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli is a function not only of the load of the task you are trying to do but also of how powerful the task-irrelevant stimulus is
Stroop effect
An effect originally studied by J. R. Stroop, using a task in which a person is instructed to respond to one aspect of a stimulus, such as the color of ink that a word is printed in, and ignore another aspect, such as the color that the word names. The Stroop effect refers to the fact that people find this task difficult when, for example, the word RED is printed in blue ink.
the task-irrelevant stimuli are extremely powerful, because reading words is highly practiced and has become so automatic that it is difficult not to read them
Central vision vs Peripheral vision
the area you are looking at vs everything off to the side
objects in central vision fall on a small area of the retina called the
fovea, which has much better detail vision than the peripheral retina, on which the rest of the scene falls
Fixation
a pausing of the eyes on places of interest while observing a scene
saccadic eye movement
eye movements from one fixation point to another—a rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next.
even when you are freely viewing an object or scene without searching for anything in particular, you move your eyes about how often?
three times per second
overt attention
Shifting of attention by moving the eyes
Stimulus Salience
the physical properties of the stimulus, such as color, contrast, orientation or movement
Bottom-up factors that determine attention to elements of a scene
For example, the task of finding the people with blonde hair would involve bottom-up processing because it involves responding to the physical property of color, without considering the meaning of the image
saliency map
Map of a scene that indicates the stimulus salience of areas and objects in the scene.
involves analyzing characteristics such as color, orientation, and intensity at each location in the scene and then combining these values
Higher salience =
standing out (e.g., bright color, contrasting, etc.)
Experiments in which people’s eyes were tracked as they observed pictures have found that the first few fixations are more likely on…
high-salience areas.
Cognitive Factors of scanning a scene illustrates…
and is influenced by…
top-down processing, because scanning is influenced by knowledge and preferences a person brings to the situation
scene schemas—an observer’s knowledge about what is contained in typical scenes
people look longer at things that seem…
out of place in a scene - means that attention is being affected by their knowledge of what is usually found in the scene
observers were more likely to detect stop signs positioned at…
intersections than those positioned in the middle of a block
- 45 percent of the observers’ fixations occurred close to intersections
key finding of these measurements, and also of another experiment in which eye movements were measured as a person prepared tea, is that the person’s eye movements were determined primarily by…
the sequence of actions involved in the task
the eye movement usually preceded a motor action by a fraction of a second - “just in time” strategy
covert attention
Occurs when attention is shifted without moving the eyes, commonly referred to as seeing something “out of the corner of one’s eye.”
Precueing
A procedure in which participants are given a cue that will usually help them carry out a subsequent task. This procedure has been used in visual attention experiments in which participants are presented with a cue that tells them where to direct their attention.
How did Posner use precueing?
to measure covert attention
gave rise to the idea that attention is like a spotlight or zoom lens that improves processing when directed toward a particular location
Egly experiment showed:
when attention is directed to one place on an object, the enhancing effect of that attention spreads to other places on the object
same-object advantage
Occurs when the enhancing effect of attention spreads throughout an object, so that attention to one place on an object results in a facilitation of processing at other places on the object.
William James: “taking possession by the mind in clear and vivid form.”
More than 100 years after James’s suggestion, many experiments have shown that attended objects are perceived to be…
bigger and faster, and to be more richly colored and have better contrast than non-attended objects
Datta and DeYoe created…
“attention maps” that show how directing attention to a specific area of space activates a specific area of the brain
Based on the location of the resulting yellow “hot spot” in the brain, the experimenters were able to predict, with 100 percent accuracy, the “secret” place where the participant was attending.
attentional warping
Occurs when the map of categories on the brain changes to make more space for categories that are being searched for as a person attends to a scene:
looking for a particular category shifts responding to the category and to additional things related to that category, so looking for people also affects responding to groups and clothing
when a person is on the lookout for vehicles, the brain becomes “warped” or “tuned” so that large areas respond best to vehicles and things related to vehicles
Walter Schneider and Richard Shiffrin
Experiments involved divided attention because they required the participant to carry out two tasks simultaneously:
holding information about target stimuli in memory and
paying attention to a series of “distractor” stimuli to determine whether one of the target stimuli is present among these distractor stimuli.
After how many trials did the participants’ performance in the Scneider and Shiffrin experiment (holding target stimuli in memory and paying attention to distractor stimuli) become automatic? After how many did their performance reach 90% accuracy? What was the accuracy at the beginning of the trials?
600
900
55%
automatic processing
Processing that occurs automatically, without the person’s intending to do it, and that also uses few cognitive resources. Automatic processing is associated with easy or well-practiced tasks.
E.g., you have driven somewhere and can’t remember the trip once you get to your destination
the 100-Car Naturalistic Driving Study Dingus et al., 2006):
in what percentage of crashes was the driver inattentive in some way
3 seconds beforehand?
80%
David Strayer and William Johnston:
gave participants a simulated driving task that required them to apply the brakes as quickly as possible in response to a red light - Doing this task while talking on a cell phone caused participants to miss how many more red lights as when they weren’t talking on the cell phone?
Did using a hands-free or a handheld device make a difference?
Twice as many
no.
what percent of college students report that they have texted, browsed the web, sent pictures, or visited social networks during class time?
92%
Experience sampling
A procedure that was developed to answer the question, “what percentage of the time during the day are people engaged in a specific behavior?” One way this has been achieved is by having people report what they are doing when they receive signals at random times during the day.
If you check your phone constantly, one explanation of your behavior involves ____________________ - the best way to ensure that a behavior will continue is to reinforce it ___________________
operant conditioning
intermittently
continuous partial attention - what is it?
how does it affect performance?
Constant switching from one activity to another
impairs performance
people who text more tend to have lower grades
mind wandering
Thoughts that come from within a person, often unintentionally. In early research this was called daydreaming.
Most frequent activities during which mind wandering occurs:
working, talking/conversing, using a computer
Mind wandering is associated with which brain network?
default mode network (DMN)
Inattentional blindness
Not noticing something even though it is in clear view, usually caused by failure to pay attention to the object or the place where the object is located.
Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris had observers view a short film that showed two “teams” of three players each - Observers were told to count the number of passes - After about 45 seconds, one of two events occurred: Either a woman carrying an umbrella or a person in a gorilla suit walked through the “game,” an event that took 5 seconds
- what percentage failed to report that they had seen the woman or gorilla?
46% - nearly half
Inattentional Deafness
Occurs when inattention causes a person to miss an auditory stimulus.
Experiments of inattentional deafness have shown that it is more difficult to detect a tone when engaged in…
a difficult visual search task
Raveh and Lavie showed that being involved in a high-load task increases the chances of missing other stimuli
Change Detection
Detecting differences between pictures or displays that are presented one after another.
Ronald Rensink
Rensink’s flicker paradigm - presented one picture, followed by a blank field, followed by the same picture but with an item missing, followed by a blank field. This sequence was repeated until observers were able to determine what was different about the two pictures.
found that the sequence had to be repeated a number of times before the difference was detected
change blindness
Difficulty in detecting changes in similar, but slightly different, scenes that are presented one after another. The changes are often easy to see once attention is directed to them but are usually undetected in the absence of appropriate attention.
continuity errors
film errors - In the Wizard of Oz (1939), Dorothy’s (Judy Garland’s) hair changes length many times from short to long and back again.
Binding
Process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create perception of a coherent object.
binding problem
The problem of explaining how an object’s individual features become bound together to create a coherent perception
Anne Treisman’s feature integration theory (FIT) stages:
preattentive stage
focused attention stage
preattentive stage
The first stage, in which an object is analyzed into its features.
Because attention is not involved, researchers argue that this stage is automatic, unconscious, and effortless
the features of objects are analyzed independently in separate areas of the brain and are not yet associated with a specific object
focused attention stage
The second stage. According to the theory, attention causes the combination of features into perception of an object.
Anne Treisman’s feature integration theory (FIT) - what are the visual features?
what type of processing is used?
you can think of visual features as components of a “visual alphabet.”
involves mostly bottom-up processing because knowledge is usually not involved - in some situations, however, top-down processing can come into play
Evidence for Feature Integration Theory - (2)
illusory conjunctions and Conjunction search
illusory conjunctions
A situation, demonstrated in experiments by Anne Treisman, in which features from different objects are inappropriately combined.
Why do illusory conjunctions occur?
occur because in the preattentive stage, each feature exists independently of the others. That is, features such as “redness,” “curvature,” or “tilted line” are, at this early stage of processing, not associated with a specific object - They are, in Treisman’s words, “free floating”
involves mostly bottom-up processing because knowledge is usually not involved
Balint’s syndrome
A condition caused by brain damage in which a person has difficulty focusing attention on individual objects.
parietal lobe damage
results in illusory conjunctions
cannot find the target when a conjunction search is required
Conjunction search
Searching among distractors for a target that involves two or more features, such as “horizontal” and “green.”
useful for studying binding because finding the target in a conjunction search involves scanning a display in order to focus attention at a specific location
ATTENTIONAL NETWORKS
ventral attention network
dorsal attention network
ventral attention network - A network that controls attention based on…
dorsal attention network - A network that controls attention based on…
stimulus salience
top-down processing
effective connectivity
How easily activity can travel along a particular pathway between two structures.
changes depending on conditions
Synchronization
Occurs when neural responses become synchronized in time, so positive and negative responses occur at the same time and with similar amplitudes. It has been proposed that synchronization is a mechanism responsible for enhanced effective connectivity and enhanced communication between two areas that accompany shifts of attention.
Executive attention network
extremely complex and may involve two separate networks
Executive functions
A number of processes that involve controlling attention and dealing with conflicting responses. (e.g., the Stroop effect)
Dealing with conflict in everyday life has been called a number of things, including cognitive control, inhibitory control, and willpower
ATTENTIONAL BLINK
This experiment explores some properties of attention with rapidly changing stimuli. It shows that there is a brief time after paying attention to one stimulus when attention cannot be focused on a subsequent stimulus. This duration is called an attentional blink because it is analogous to being unable to see objects during an eye blink.
Findings of the attentional blink experiment
identification of the second target letter is very low when it quickly follows the first target letter. As temporal separation increases, identification of the second letter improves
suggests that when the observer sees the first target letter, he/she must attend to it to ensure that it will be remembered later. The focusing of attention to that letter apparently requires time, and if the second target letter appears during that time, it is not attended and not reported.
Findings of the change detection experiment:
people do not store many details of a scene in memory. Rather, the critical factor seems to be attention: In order to see an object change, it is necessary to attend to the object.
The blank image swamps the local-motion signal that would ordinarily be caused by a change in an object, so attention is not drawn to the change. The presence of the mask prevents automatic detection of change. Change must now be detected by a slower, higher-level process. Basically, you have to search the scene, object by object until you happen to find the changed object.
Failing to detect that an object has changed has been called change blindness. Researchers think that change blindness is a leading cause of many car accidents.
It is difficult to process info of the unattended ear except which two characteristics?
Gender of voice
Language of speaker
Split-Scan Experiment - what is it used to investigate?
Are the left and right ear separate channels?
Results of the split-scan experiment:
Cond 1: report any order - 65% correct - tended to be reported by ear
Cond 2: report as each pair presented - 20% correct
Suggests that each ear is treated like a separate channel (left ear processed separately from right ear) and it is very difficult to switch attention between channels
What did both the “dear aunt Jane” experiment and Moray’s “own name” experiment show?
Meaning of information in unattended ear can be processed
What does the attentuator in Treisman’s theory do to the signals?
boosts certain signals and weakens others
Messages > attenuator > (strengthened attended message)+(weakened unattended messages) > dictionary unit > memory
Important and common words easily activated - low threshold of activation (Richard, beer, hockey, golf)
Uncommon and unimportant words have a high threshold of activation (fictile, piffle, carnation)
How much info has been processed for meaning in a late selection model when final processing happens?
Final processing of info doesn’t occur until all incoming info has been processed for meaning
What does the MacKay - Ambiguous Sentences Experiment support?
late selection models
How can there be evidence that supports both early and late selection models?
Might be task dependent
Task load: amount of cognitive resources used
High-load task = all cognitive resources used - Only attended items are processed
Low-load task = only some cognitive resources used - cognitive resources are available for unattended items
Three main factors that influence ability to spread/divide attention:
Practice
Task difficulty
Nature of the task (e.g., talking and texting simultaneously)
Strayer & Johnston (2001) driving simulator while on cell phone - two main results:
Missed more red lights (40% more misses)
took longer to apply brakes (59msec longer)
Which attentional brain network controls the attention of someone who is trying to locate a blonde friend wearing a red shirt in a crowd?
ventral attention network
Many students claim that they are highly skilled at multitasking. What would a cognitive psychologist call this activity?
continuous partial attention
Which term best reflects the act of scanning to direct attention?
anticipatory
Attentional warping involves what?
an expansion of brain maps
What is the key difference between distraction and attentional capture?
intensity
Based on research, the driver’s lack of attention 3 seconds before an accident plays a role in how many traffic accidents?
over three-fourths
Who developed a test that demonstrates the distractive power of some task-irrelevant stimuli?
Stroop
What is the key factor in the cocktail party effect?
filter
Suppose you’re scanning a photograph of a class picture and you briefly pause on one face. In doing so, you are showing ___.
fixation
