Chapter 4- Attention

Question 0

Selective Attention

Answer 0

attending to relevant information and ignoring irrelevant information

Question 1

Dichotic Listening

Answer 1

participants exposed to two verbal messages simultaneously and are required to answer questions posed in only one of the messages

Question 2

Cocktail party Phenomenon

Answer 2

the ability to attend to one conversation when many other conversations are going on around you

Question 3

Shadowing Task

Answer 3

A task in which the subhect is exposed to two messages simultaneously and must repeat one of them

Question 4

Filter

Answer 4

a hypotetical mechanism that would admit certain messages and block others

Question 5

Selective Looking

Answer 5

Occurs when we are exposed to two events simultaneously, but attend to only one of them

Question 6

Early selection

Answer 6

The hypothesis that attentions prevents early perceptual processing of distractors

Question 7

Late selection

Answer 7

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

Question 8

Stroop Task

Answer 8

A naming task in which colour names are printed in colours other than they colours they name

Question 9

Controlled VS Automatic Processes

Answer 9

Processes that demand attention if we are to carry them out properly versus processes that operate without requiring us to pay attention to them\

Question 10

Dorsolateral Prefrontal cortex

Answer 10

An area of the brain that may exert a top down bias that favours the selection of task relevant information

Question 11

Anterior cingulate cortex

Answer 11

An area of the brain that may detect conflicting response tendencies of the sort that the Stroop task elicits

Question 12

Attention Capture

Answer 12

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

Question 13

Inattentional Blindness

Answer 13

Failure to attend to events that we might be expected to notice

Question 14

Ecologically Valid

Answer 14

Generalizable to conditions in the real world

Question 15

Deja Vu

Answer 15

the impression of having previously experienced the situation in which one finds oneself, accompanied by the sense that this is not actually the case

Question 16

Flanker Task

Answer 16

an experiment in which participants may be influenced by an irrelevant stimulus beside the target

Question 17

Domain-Specific modules

Answer 17

The hypothesis that parts of the brain may be specialized for particular tasks, such as recognizing faces

Question 18

Capacity Model

Answer 18

The hypothesis that attention is like a power supply that can support only a limited amount of Inattentional activity

Question 19

Structural Limits

Answer 19

the hypothesis that attentional tasks interfere with one another to the extent that they involve similar activities

Question 20

Central Bottleneck

Answer 20

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

Question 21

Divided Attention

Answer 21

The ability to attend to more than one thing at a time

Question 22

Mind Wandering

Answer 22

A shift of mental resources away from the task at hand and towards internal thoughts

Question 23

Sustained Attention to Response Task

Answer 23

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

Question 24

Commission error

Answer 24

Failure to withhold a response to the infrequent digit in the SART

Question 25

Default Network

Answer 25

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

Question 26

Action Slips

Answer 26

the kind of behavioral errors that often occur in everyday life

Question 27

Parallel Mental Activity

Answer 27

Thinking about something other than the task at hand

Question 28

Attentional Blink

Answer 28

Failure to notice the second of two stimuli presented within 550miliseconds of each other

Question 29

Rapid serial visual presentation

Answer 29

presentation of a series of stimuli in quick succession

Question 30

Set

Answer 30

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

Question 31

Task switching

Answer 31

Changing from working on one task to working on another; usually studied in situations in which the switch is involuntary

Question 32

Switch cost

Answer 32

finding out that performance declines immediately on switching tasks

Question 33

Embodied

Answer 33

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

Question 34

Overt Attention

Answer 34

attending to something with eye movement

Question 35

Covert Attention

Answer 35

Attending to something with no eye movement

Question 36

Sequential Attention Hypothesis

Answer 36

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

Question 37

Saccades

Answer 37

the rapid jerky movements made as the eye scans an image

Question 38

Fixation

Answer 38

holding the eye relatively still in order to maintain an image on the fovea

Question 39

Nystagmus

Answer 39

Small but continuous movements made by the eye during fixation

Question 40

Regressions

Answer 40

right to left movements of the eyes during reading, directing them to previously read text

Question 41

Moving window technique

Answer 41

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

Question 42

Entry points

Answer 42

the locations to which we direct our eyes before starting to read a section in a piece of complex material such as a newspaper

Question 43

Smooth pursuit movements

Answer 43

Movements of the eye that, because they are not jerky, enable the viewer to maintain fixation on a moving object

Question 44

Task related knowledge

Answer 44

An observer’s knowledge of the goals and the task at hand as it guides the eyes during a visual task

Question 45

Quiet eye

Answer 45

Sustained and steady eye gaze prior to an action or behavior

Question 46

Location Supression hypothesis

Answer 46

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