Chapter 4 - Attention

Question 1

Attention

Answer 1

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.

Question 2

William James’s (1890) definition of attention

Answer 2

withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others

Question 3

selective attention

Answer 3

The ability to focus on one message and ignore all others

Question 4

Distraction

Answer 4

Occurs when one stimulus interferes with attention to or the processing of another stimulus.

Question 5

divided attention

Answer 5

The ability to pay attention to, or carry out, two or more different tasks simultaneously.

Question 6

attentional capture

Answer 6

A rapid shifting of attention, usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement.

Question 7

visual scanning

Answer 7

Movement of the eyes from one location or object to another.

Question 8

How and when did modern research on attention begin?

Answer 8

in the 1950s with the introduction of Broadbent’s filter model of attention to explain the results of an experiment done by Colin Cherry

Question 9

Cherry studied attention using what technique?

Answer 9

dichotic listening

Question 10

dichotic listening task

Answer 10

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

Question 11

Shadowing

Answer 11

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.

Question 12

Results of dichotic listening task

Answer 12

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

Question 13

cocktail party effect

Answer 13

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli, especially at a party where there are a lot of simultaneous conversations.

Question 14

Donald Broadbent

Answer 14

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

Question 15

Broadbent’s filter model of attention

Answer 15

Sensory memory

Filter - the filtering step occurs before the message is analyzed to determine its meaning (why its called early selection)

Detector

Question 16

Sensory memory

Answer 16

holds all of the incoming information for a fraction of a second and then transfers all of it to the filter

Question 17

Filter

Answer 17

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

Question 18

Detector

Answer 18

processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics of the message, such as its meaning

Question 19

The output of the detector is sent to…

Answer 19

short-term memory, which holds information for 10–15 seconds and also transfers information into long-term memory, which can hold information indefinitely

Question 20

Neville Moray

Answer 20

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

Question 21

J. A. Gray and A. I. Wedderburn

Answer 21

“Dear Aunt Jane” experiment

Question 22

“Dear Aunt Jane” experiment

Answer 22

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!)

Question 23

Anne Treisman

Answer 23

attenuation model of attention

feature integration theory (FIT)

Question 24

attenuation model of attention

Answer 24

proposed a modification of Broadbent’s model and she replaced Broadbent’s filter with an attenuator

Question 25

Attenuator

Answer 25

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.

Question 26

physical characteristics

Answer 26

whether it is high-pitched or low-pitched, fast or slow

Question 27

language

Answer 27

how the message groups into syllables or words

Question 28

meaning

Answer 28

how sequences of words create meaningful phrases

Question 29

Because at least some of the unattended message gets through the attenuator, Treisman’s model has been called…

Answer 29

a “leaky filter” model.

Question 30

dictionary unit

Answer 30

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

Question 31

threshold

Answer 31

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

Question 32

Is Treisman’s an early or late selection model?

Answer 32

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

Question 33

Donald MacKay

Answer 33

Ambiguous Sentences Experiment

Question 34

Ambiguous Sentences Experiment

Answer 34

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.

Question 35

Results of the Ambiguous Sentences Experiment

Answer 35

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

Question 36

Which is correct - early or late model of selection?

Answer 36

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

Question 37

Nilli Lavie

Answer 37

load theory of attention

Question 38

processing capacity

Answer 38

The amount of information input that a person can handle. This sets a limit on the person’s ability to process information.

Question 39

perceptual load

Answer 39

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.

Question 40

load theory of attention

Answer 40

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

Question 41

Stroop effect

Answer 41

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

Question 42

Central vision vs Peripheral vision

Answer 42

the area you are looking at vs everything off to the side

Question 43

objects in central vision fall on a small area of the retina called the

Answer 43

fovea, which has much better detail vision than the peripheral retina, on which the rest of the scene falls

Question 44

Fixation

Answer 44

a pausing of the eyes on places of interest while observing a scene

Question 45

saccadic eye movement

Answer 45

eye movements from one fixation point to another—a rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next.

Question 46

even when you are freely viewing an object or scene without searching for anything in particular, you move your eyes about how often?

Answer 46

three times per second

Question 47

overt attention

Answer 47

Shifting of attention by moving the eyes

Question 48

Stimulus Salience

Answer 48

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

Question 49

saliency map

Answer 49

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

Question 50

Higher salience =

Answer 50

standing out (e.g., bright color, contrasting, etc.)

Question 51

Experiments in which people’s eyes were tracked as they observed pictures have found that the first few fixations are more likely on…

Answer 51

high-salience areas.

Question 52

Cognitive Factors of scanning a scene illustrates…

and is influenced by…

Answer 52

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

Question 53

people look longer at things that seem…

Answer 53

out of place in a scene - means that attention is being affected by their knowledge of what is usually found in the scene

Question 54

observers were more likely to detect stop signs positioned at…

Answer 54

intersections than those positioned in the middle of a block

• 45 percent of the observers’ fixations occurred close to intersections

Question 55

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…

Answer 55

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

Question 56

covert attention

Answer 56

Occurs when attention is shifted without moving the eyes, commonly referred to as seeing something “out of the corner of one’s eye.”

Question 57

Precueing

Answer 57

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.

Question 58

How did Posner use precueing?

Answer 58

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

Question 59

Egly experiment showed:

Answer 59

when attention is directed to one place on an object, the enhancing effect of that attention spreads to other places on the object

Question 60

same-object advantage

Answer 60

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.

Question 61

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…

Answer 61

bigger and faster, and to be more richly colored and have better contrast than non-attended objects

Question 62

Datta and DeYoe created…

Answer 62

“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.

Question 63

attentional warping

Answer 63

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

Question 64

Walter Schneider and Richard Shiffrin

Answer 64

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.

Question 65

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?

Answer 65

600

900

55%

Question 66

automatic processing

Answer 66

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

Question 67

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?

Answer 67

80%

Question 68

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?

Answer 68

Twice as many

no.

Question 69

what percent of college students report that they have texted, browsed the web, sent pictures, or visited social networks during class time?

Answer 69

92%

Question 70

Experience sampling

Answer 70

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.

Question 71

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 ___________________

Answer 71

operant conditioning

intermittently

Question 72

continuous partial attention - what is it?

how does it affect performance?

Answer 72

Constant switching from one activity to another

impairs performance
people who text more tend to have lower grades

Question 73

mind wandering

Answer 73

Thoughts that come from within a person, often unintentionally. In early research this was called daydreaming.

Question 74

Most frequent activities during which mind wandering occurs:

Answer 74

working, talking/conversing, using a computer

Question 75

Mind wandering is associated with which brain network?

Answer 75

default mode network (DMN)

Question 76

Inattentional blindness

Answer 76

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.

Question 77

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?

Answer 77

46% - nearly half

Question 78

Inattentional Deafness

Answer 78

Occurs when inattention causes a person to miss an auditory stimulus.

Question 79

Experiments of inattentional deafness have shown that it is more difficult to detect a tone when engaged in…

Answer 79

a difficult visual search task

Raveh and Lavie showed that being involved in a high-load task increases the chances of missing other stimuli

Question 80

Change Detection

Answer 80

Detecting differences between pictures or displays that are presented one after another.

Question 81

Ronald Rensink

Answer 81

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

Question 82

change blindness

Answer 82

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.

Question 83

continuity errors

Answer 83

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.

Question 84

Binding

Answer 84

Process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create perception of a coherent object.

Question 85

binding problem

Answer 85

The problem of explaining how an object’s individual features become bound together to create a coherent perception

Question 86

Anne Treisman’s feature integration theory (FIT) stages:

Answer 86

preattentive stage

focused attention stage

Question 87

preattentive stage

Answer 87

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

Question 88

focused attention stage

Answer 88

The second stage. According to the theory, attention causes the combination of features into perception of an object.

Question 89

Anne Treisman’s feature integration theory (FIT) - what are the visual features?

what type of processing is used?

Answer 89

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

Question 90

Evidence for Feature Integration Theory - (2)

Answer 90

illusory conjunctions and Conjunction search

Question 91

illusory conjunctions

Answer 91

A situation, demonstrated in experiments by Anne Treisman, in which features from different objects are inappropriately combined.

Question 92

Why do illusory conjunctions occur?

Answer 92

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

Question 93

Balint’s syndrome

Answer 93

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

Question 94

Conjunction search

Answer 94

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

Question 95

ATTENTIONAL NETWORKS

Answer 95

ventral attention network
dorsal attention network

Question 96

ventral attention network - A network that controls attention based on…

dorsal attention network - A network that controls attention based on…

Answer 96

stimulus salience

top-down processing

Question 97

effective connectivity

Answer 97

How easily activity can travel along a particular pathway between two structures.

changes depending on conditions

Question 98

Synchronization

Answer 98

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.

Question 99

Executive attention network

Answer 99

extremely complex and may involve two separate networks

Question 100

Executive functions

Answer 100

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

Question 101

ATTENTIONAL BLINK

Answer 101

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.

Question 102

Findings of the attentional blink experiment

Answer 102

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.

Question 103

Findings of the change detection experiment:

Answer 103

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.

Question 104

It is difficult to process info of the unattended ear except which two characteristics?

Answer 104

Gender of voice
Language of speaker

Question 105

Split-Scan Experiment - what is it used to investigate?

Answer 105

Are the left and right ear separate channels?

Question 106

Results of the split-scan experiment:

Answer 106

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

Question 107

What did both the “dear aunt Jane” experiment and Moray’s “own name” experiment show?

Answer 107

Meaning of information in unattended ear can be processed

Question 108

What does the attentuator in Treisman’s theory do to the signals?

Answer 108

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)

Question 109

How much info has been processed for meaning in a late selection model when final processing happens?

Answer 109

Final processing of info doesn’t occur until all incoming info has been processed for meaning

Question 110

What does the MacKay - Ambiguous Sentences Experiment support?

Answer 110

late selection models

Question 111

How can there be evidence that supports both early and late selection models?

Answer 111

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

Question 112

Three main factors that influence ability to spread/divide attention:

Answer 112

Practice
Task difficulty
Nature of the task (e.g., talking and texting simultaneously)

Question 113

Strayer & Johnston (2001) driving simulator while on cell phone - two main results:

Answer 113

Missed more red lights (40% more misses)

took longer to apply brakes (59msec longer)

Question 114

Which attentional brain network controls the attention of someone who is trying to locate a blonde friend wearing a red shirt in a crowd?

Answer 114

ventral attention network

Question 115

Many students claim that they are highly skilled at multitasking. What would a cognitive psychologist call this activity?

Answer 115

continuous partial attention

Question 116

Which term best reflects the act of scanning to direct attention?

Answer 116

anticipatory

Question 117

Attentional warping involves what?

Answer 117

an expansion of brain maps

Question 118

What is the key difference between distraction and attentional capture?

Answer 118

intensity

Question 119

Based on research, the driver’s lack of attention 3 seconds before an accident plays a role in how many traffic accidents?

Answer 119

over three-fourths

Question 120

Who developed a test that demonstrates the distractive power of some task-irrelevant stimuli?

Answer 120

Stroop

Question 121

What is the key factor in the cocktail party effect?

Answer 121

filter

Question 122

Suppose you’re scanning a photograph of a class picture and you briefly pause on one face. In doing so, you are showing ___.

Answer 122

fixation