Chapter 4- Attention Flashcards
Selective Attention
attending to relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information
Dichotic Listening
participants exposed to two verbal messages simultaneously and are required to answer questions posed in only one of the messages
Cocktail party Phenomenon
the ability to attend to one conversation when many other conversations are going on around you
Shadowing Task
A task in which the subhect is exposed to two messages simultaneously and must repeat one of them
Filter
a hypotetical mechanism that would admit certain messages and block others
Selective Looking
Occurs when we are exposed to two events simultaneously, but attend to only one of them
Early selection
The hypothesis that attentions prevents early perceptual processing of distractors
Late selection
The hypothesis that we percieve both relevant and irrelevant stimuli, and therefore must actively ignore the irrelevant stimuli in order to focus on the relevant ones
Stroop Task
A naming task in which colour names are printed in colours other than they colours they name
Controlled VS Automatic Processes
Processes that demand attention if we are to carry them out properly versus processes that operate without requiring us to pay attention to them\
Dorsolateral Prefrontal cortex
An area of the brain that may exert a top down bias that favours the selection of task relevant information
Anterior cingulate cortex
An area of the brain that may detect conflicting response tendencies of the sort that the Stroop task elicits
Attention Capture
The diversion of attention by a stimulus so powerful that it compels us to notive it even when our attention is focused on something else
Inattentional Blindness
Failure to attend to events that we might be expected to notice
Ecologically Valid
Generalizable to conditions in the real world
Deja Vu
the impression of having previously experienced the situation in which one finds oneself, accompanied by the sense that this is not actually the case
Flanker Task
an experiment in which participants may be influenced by an irrelevant stimulus beside the target
Domain-Specific modules
The hypothesis that parts of the brain may be specialized for particular tasks, such as recognizing faces
Capacity Model
The hypothesis that attention is like a power supply that can support only a limited amount of Inattentional activity
Structural Limits
the hypothesis that attentional tasks interfere with one another to the extent that they involve similar activities
Central Bottleneck
the hypothesis that there is only one path along which information can travel, and it is so narrow that the most it can handle at any one time is the information relevant to one task
Divided Attention
The ability to attend to more than one thing at a time
Mind Wandering
A shift of mental resources away from the task at hand and towards internal thoughts
Sustained Attention to Response Task
A continuous response task in which digits are sequentially presented on a computer screen and participants are asked to press a button in response to this infrequent digit is supposed to be withheld
Commission error
Failure to withhold a response to the infrequent digit in the SART
Default Network
A set of brain areas that are active when an individual does not have a specific task to do and is absorbed in internal thought
Action Slips
the kind of behavioral errors that often occur in everyday life
Parallel Mental Activity
Thinking about something other than the task at hand
Attentional Blink
Failure to notice the second of two stimuli presented within 550miliseconds of each other
Rapid serial visual presentation
presentation of a series of stimuli in quick succession
Set
a temporary top down organization in the brain that facillitates some responses while inhibiting others in order to achieve a certain goal; also referred to as mental set
Task switching
Changing from working on one task to working on another; usually studied in situations in which the switch is involuntary
Switch cost
finding out that performance declines immediately on switching tasks
Embodied
Existing within a body; the term reflects the general view that cognition depends not only on the mind but also on the physical constraint of the body in which the mind exists
Overt Attention
attending to something with eye movement
Covert Attention
Attending to something with no eye movement
Sequential Attention Hypothesis
A hypothesis about the relationship between overt and covert attention that posits a tight relationship between the two whereby covert attention is shifted first and overt eye movement follows
Saccades
the rapid jerky movements made as the eye scans an image
Fixation
holding the eye relatively still in order to maintain an image on the fovea
Nystagmus
Small but continuous movements made by the eye during fixation
Regressions
right to left movements of the eyes during reading, directing them to previously read text
Moving window technique
a method of determining how much visual information can be taken in during a fixation, in which the reader is prevented from seeing information beyond a certain distance from the current fixation
Entry points
the locations to which we direct our eyes before starting to read a section in a piece of complex material such as a newspaper
Smooth pursuit movements
Movements of the eye that, because they are not jerky, enable the viewer to maintain fixation on a moving object
Task related knowledge
An observer’s knowledge of the goals and the task at hand as it guides the eyes during a visual task
Quiet eye
Sustained and steady eye gaze prior to an action or behavior
Location Supression hypothesis
A two-stage explanation for the quiet eye phenomenon:
Preparation stage: quiet eye maximizes information about the target object
Location stage: vision is suppressed to optimize the execution of an action or behaviour
