Chapter 4: Attention Flashcards
The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations
Attention
Attending to one thing while ignoring others
Selective attention
One stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus
Distraction
Paying attention to more than one thing at a time
Divided attention
A rapid shift in of attention usually caused by a salient stimulus
Attentional capture
Movements of the eyes from one location or object to another
Visual scanning
Presenting different stimuli to the left and right ears
Dichotic listening
Procedure of repeating words as they are heard
Shadowing
What did Cherry find in relation to his dichotic listening task?
Participants could easily shadow a spoken message presented to the attending ear but not the unattended ear
The ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli
Cocktail party effect
Explain Broadbent’s model of attention
- Sensory memory holds incoming information for a fraction of a second
- The filter identifies the message that is being attended to based on its physical characteristics
- The detector processes the information from the attended message to determine higher-level characteristics
- The output of the detector is sent to short-term memory
Why is Broadbent’s model considered an early selection model of attention?
The filter eliminates the unattended information at the beginning
What differentiates Treisman’s model of attention from Broadbent’s?
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
Why is Treisman’s attenuation model of attention called a “leaky filter” model?
At least some of the unattended message gets through the attenuator
Contains words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated (attenuation model)
Dictionary unit
Explain MacKay’s late selection model of attention
Proposed that most of the incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be further processed is selected
Why is there no answer to the “early-late” attention controversy?
Both have been demonstrated under different conditions
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.
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
The amount of information people can handle (limit)
Processing capacity
Related to the difficulty of a task
Perceptual load
Easy, well-practiced tasks that require only a small amount of a person’s processing capacity
Low-load task
Difficult tasks that require a large amount of processing capacity
High-load tasks
What is the relationship between the load of a task and distraction?
High-load task = less likely to be distracted
Low-load = more likely
What is the ability to ignore a task-irrelevant stimulus a function of?
The load of the task and how powerful the task-irrelevant stimulus is
Explain an experiment that could be used to prove the Stroop effect.
Naming the colour of a word that spells out a different colour is more difficult than naming the colour of a shape (competing response)
The physical properties of a stimulus
Stimulus salience
People are unaware of a clearly visible stimuli if they aren’t directing their attention to them
Inattentional blindness
The process by which features are combined to create our perception of a coherent object
Binding
Explain feature integration theory (FIT)
- Preattentive stage - features analyzed individually
- Focused attention stage - independent features are combined causing conscious awareness of the object
What type of experiment provides evidence for FIT?
Illusory conjunction experiments
Inability to focus attention on individual objects
Balint’s syndrome
How are visual searches used to study binding?
Conjunction searches are more difficult than feature searches, providing evidence that attention creates our perception of objects
Describe the difference between the dorsal and ventral attention networks
Ventral - attention based on salience
Dorsal - attention based on top-down processes
