Chapter 4: Attention

Question 1

How is attention selective?
What differentiates overt versus covert attention?

Answer 1

Allows specific information to be filtered out while promoting other information for further processing

• Attentional capture can be voluntary or reflective depending on STIMULUS SALIENCE

Overt attention: associated with eye movements
-fixations: pausing of the eyes on places or objects of interest
-saccades: eye movement from once fixation point to another

Question 2

What is divided attention? Differentiate between automatic versus controlled processing in this context.

Answer 2

Divided attention between remembering the target and monitoring rapidly presented stimuli

-practice enables people to simultaneously do two tasks that were difficult at first

Automatic processing: occurs without intention and uses relatively little of person’s cognitive resources

Question 3

Describe the precuing task paradigm used by Posner and colleagues (1978).
What are the critical findings from these experiments?

Answer 3

Exogenous cues: cue physical salience reflexively captures attention automatically
Endogenous: voluntarily engages and symbolically direct attention (takes longer to work)

-information processing is facilitated for stimuli at cued location
(spotlight metaphor)

Question 4

What is Attentional Blink? Describe the typical Rapid Serial Visual Presentation Paradigm (RSVP).

Answer 4

Attentional blink: failure to see the second of two targets presented in rapid succession

Understand the dynamics and limitations of attention, the timing of information processing, and the mechanisms underlying conscious perception

Question 5

Define binding in the context of attention.

Answer 5

Process which features such as colour, form, motion and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object

Question 6

Describe Triesman’s (1986) Feature Integration Theory.

Answer 6

Preattentive stage
- Automatic effortless unaware of process, object analysed into features

Focused attention stage
-attention plays key role, features are associated with objects

Illusory conjunctions
-features from different objects are inappropriately combined

Results of experiment: about 20% of trials participants committed illusory conjunctions when reporting shapes

-Features are free floating during pre attentive stage
-Erroneous binding occurs at attentive stage

Question 7

Describe the basic paradigm for a dichotic listening task

Answer 7

The basic paradigm for a dichotic listening task involves the following steps:

1. Ear/channel assignment: Participants wear headphones or earphones, and different auditory stimuli are presented to each ear. One ear is typically designated as the “attended” ear, and the other ear is the “unattended” ear.
2. Stimulus presentation: Different sets of auditory stimuli, such as words, numbers, or tones, are simultaneously presented to each ear. The stimuli are typically presented in a randomized order and may be presented at the same time or with a slight delay between them.
3. Participant instructions: Participants are given specific instructions about which ear to attend to and which stimuli to focus on. For example, they may be instructed to listen and recall the stimuli presented in the attended ear while ignoring or minimizing their attention to the stimuli in the unattended ear.
4. Task performance: After the presentation of the stimuli, participants are asked to perform a task related to the attended stimuli. This could involve recalling or repeating the words, numbers, or other features presented in the attended ear. The task performance serves as a measure of selective attention and processing of the stimuli in the attended ear.

By comparing participants’ performance on the attended ear stimuli with the unattended ear stimuli, researchers can examine the effects of selective attention and the ability to filter and process specific auditory information.

Dichotic listening tasks have been widely used to study attentional processes, including the cocktail party effect, auditory processing in different languages, and the effects of attentional load on stimulus processing.

Question 8

Describe the major components and characteristics of Broadbent’s Filter Model (1958).

Answer 8

-Early selection models: Attention selects stimuli based on physical features and meaning is interpreted after selection

Question 9

Describe the major components and characteristics of the Attenuation Model of Attention (Treisman, 1960).

Answer 9

• Attended and unattended messages separated early in processing but unattended still accessible later in system

Attenuator: Analyze incoming msgs hierarchically in terms of characteristics, language and meaning
-Attended messages let thru with full strength while unattended let through at much weaker strength

Dictionary unit: contains words that have different thresholds for being activated
-uncommon words high threshold (hard to activate) common words low threshold

Question 10

What is the Stroop Effect? How does it relate to the Load Theory of Attention (Lavie, 1995)?

Answer 10

Stroop effect: Name of the word interfere with the ability to name the ink colour
- cannot avoid paying attention to meaning of word

Link to Load Theory of Attention

• Processing capacity : how much information can a person handle at any given moment
• Perceptual load: individual’s amt of cognitive resources needed to carry out a particular task

-ability to ignore task-irrelevant information depends on

-no. of distractors
-nature of distractors (STROOP EFFECT)