Chapter 4: Attention

Question 1

The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations

Answer 1

Attention

Question 2

Attending to one thing while ignoring others

Answer 2

Selective attention

Question 3

One stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus

Answer 3

Distraction

Question 4

Paying attention to more than one thing at a time

Answer 4

Divided attention

Question 5

A rapid shift in of attention usually caused by a salient stimulus

Answer 5

Attentional capture

Question 6

Movements of the eyes from one location or object to another

Answer 6

Visual scanning

Question 7

Presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears

Answer 7

Dichotic listening

Question 8

Procedure of repeating words as they are heard

Answer 8

Shadowing

Question 9

What did Cherry find in relation to his dichotic listening task?

Answer 9

Participants could easily shadow a spoken message presented to the attending ear but not the unattended ear

Question 10

The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli

Answer 10

Cocktail party effect

Question 11

Explain Broadbent’s model of attention

Answer 11

1. Sensory memory holds incoming information for a fraction of a second
2. The filter identifies the message that is being attended to based on its physical characteristics
3. The detector processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics
4. The output of the detector is sent to short-term memory

Question 12

Why is Broadbent’s model considered an early selection model of attention?

Answer 12

The filter eliminates the unattended information at the beginning

Question 13

What differentiates Treisman’s model of attention from Broadbent’s?

Answer 13

In Treisman’s attenuation model of attention, language and meaning can also be used to separate the message, but the analysis proceeds only as far as is necessary to identify the attended message

Question 14

Why is Treisman’s attenuation model of attention called a “leaky filter” model?

Answer 14

At least some of the unattended message gets through the attenuator

Question 15

Contains words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated (attenuation model)

Answer 15

Dictionary unit

Question 16

Explain MacKay’s late selection model of attention

Answer 16

Proposed that most of the incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be further processed is selected

Question 17

Why is there no answer to the “early-late” attention controversy?

Answer 17

Both have been demonstrated under different conditions

Question 18

Describe the three pieces of evidence that any sort of filtering in auditory selective attention occurs later in the processing stream than one might think.

Answer 18

Moray dichotic listening experiment - participants heard they’re name in the ear they were instructed not to attend to.

Gray and Wedderburn “Dear Aunt Jane” experiment

MacKay’s ambiguous sentence experiment

Question 19

The amount of information people can handle (limit)

Answer 19

Processing capacity

Question 20

Related to the difficulty of a task

Answer 20

Perceptual load

Question 21

Easy, well-practiced tasks that require only a small amount of a person’s processing capacity

Answer 21

Low-load task

Question 22

Difficult tasks that require a large amount of processing capacity

Answer 22

High-load tasks

Question 23

What is the relationship between the load of a task and distraction?

Answer 23

High-load task = less likely to be distracted
Low-load = more likely

Question 24

What is the ability to ignore a task-irrelevant stimulus a function of?

Answer 24

The load of the task and how powerful the task-irrelevant stimulus is

Question 25

Explain an experiment that could be used to prove the Stroop effect.

Answer 25

Naming the colour of a word that spells out a different colour is more difficult than naming the colour of a shape (competing response)

Question 26

The physical properties of a stimulus

Answer 26

Stimulus salience

Question 27

People are unaware of a clearly visible stimuli if they aren’t directing their attention to them

Answer 27

Inattentional blindness

Question 28

The process by which features are combined to create our perception of a coherent object

Answer 28

Binding

Question 29

Explain feature integration theory (FIT)

Answer 29

1. Preattentive stage - features analyzed individually
2. Focused attention stage - independent features are combined causing conscious awareness of the object

Question 30

What type of experiment provides evidence for FIT?

Answer 30

Illusory conjunction experiments

Question 31

Inability to focus attention on individual objects

Answer 31

Balint’s syndrome

Question 32

How are visual searches used to study binding?

Answer 32

Conjunction searches are more difficult than feature searches, providing evidence that attention creates our perception of objects

Question 33

Describe the difference between the dorsal and ventral attention networks

Answer 33

Ventral - attention based on salience
Dorsal - attention based on top-down processes