Chapter 4: Attention

Question 1

What is selective attention?

Answer 1

attending to one thing while ignoring others

Question 2

what is divided attention?

Answer 2

paying attention to more than one thing at a time

Question 3

What is attentional capture?

Answer 3

a rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement… ballistic movement

Question 4

What is dichotic listening (by cherry in 1953)

Answer 4

presenting two different stimulus in each ear and foucusing on one and filterning out the other

Question 5

what is the filter model of attention? (broadbent)

Answer 5

filter model of attention: model of attention that proposes a filter that lets attended stimuli through and blocks some or all of the unattended stimuli (by BROADBENT)

Question 6

What are the 4 stages that the filter model of attention introduced as a flow diagram to cognitive psychology?

Answer 6

1. sensory memory –> holds all incoming info for fraction of second
2. filter –> identifies the message that is being attended to based on physical characteristics like voice, pitch, …etc.. only this atttended message can pass through to the next stage
3. detector –> processes information from the attended message to determine higher level charactersitics of the message like its meaning
4. Short term memory/long term memory –> STM holds for 10-15 seconds and transferes info to LTM if rehearsed

Question 7

Why is broadbent’s model of attention called the “early selection model”?

Answer 7

because the filter eliminates the unattended infromation right at the beginning of the flow of information

Question 8

What are 3 problems with the filter theory?

Answer 8

1. Salient words are undetected –> certain significant words are more recalled even if theyre in unattended channel
2. stimulus coherence matters –> people follow the message and not the attended/unattended channel
3. Processing effort matters –> channels are defined by meaning, task and goals

Question 9

What was Moray’s experiment about Salient words being detected?

Answer 9

he said that words like the participants names, and swear words are more likely to be attended in teh unattended channel that other words

inconsistant with the simple filter idea

Question 10

What was Triesman’s experiment on attended-unatetended coherance?

Answer 10

fluent prose message is swtiched from attended to unattended… participants follow the MEANING and not the channel

Question 11

What is the Attenuation Model of Attention? What are the three ways it analyzed incoming messages?

Answer 11

Treisman’s modified version of Broadbent’s filter model of attention theory which replaced his filter concept with an attenuator which anallyzed the incoming message in terms of

1) physical characteristics
2) its language –> how message groups into syllables or words
3) its meaning

Question 12

What are late selection models of attention? And who developed it?

Answer 12

By Mackay and other theorists
- which proposed that most of the incoming information is processed to the level of meaning before the message to be further processed is selected

Question 13

What is Processing capacity?

Answer 13

the amount of information people can handle and sets a limit on their ability to process incoming information

Question 14

What is perceptual load?

Answer 14

related to the difficulty of the task

Question 15

what are low-load tasks?

Answer 15

easy, well practiced tasks have low perceptual load and only use a small amount of a person’s processing capacity

Question 16

What are high-load tasks?

Answer 16

use more of a person’s processing capacity and have a high perceptual load (high difficulty)

Question 17

What is the Load Theory of Attention?

Answer 17

1. low-load tasks that use few cognitive resources may leave resources available for processing unattended task-irrelevant stimuli
2. high load tasks use all of a person’s cognitive resources and dont leave any resources to process unattended task-irrelevant stimuli (stuff unrelated to the task)

Question 18

what are 4 accounts for problematic results of the Resource theory/Load Theory of Attention?

Answer 18

1. detecting or not detecting unusual events
2. detecting salient events in unattended channel
3. effects of attended task difficulty
4. role of message coherence

Question 19

What occurs in the stroop task in terms of attention?

Answer 19

the names of the words cause a competing response and therefore slow responding to the target (color of the ink used). In the stroop effect, the task-irrelevant stimuli are extremely powerful because reading words is highly practiced and has become so automatic that its too difficult to read them

target task: say the color
task-irrelevant stimuli: reading the words

task-irrelevant stimuli is more powerful in terms of color and interfers

Question 20

What is overt attention?

Answer 20

shifting attention from one place to another by moving ur eyes

Question 21

what is stimulus salience?

Answer 21

the physical properties of the stimulus like color, contrast or movement

Question 22

what is cover attention?

Answer 22

directing our attention while keeping our eyes stationary

Question 23

What was Schneider and Shiffrin’s experiment done on divided attention?

Answer 23

1. subjects shown a memory test consistenting of one to four characters called target stimuli
2. memory set followed by a rapid presentation of 20 “test frames” each of which contained distractors
3. on half of the trials on one of the frames contained a target stimulus from the memory set
4. a new memory set was presented on each trial, so the targets changed from trial to trial followed by new test frames

Question 24

What was the results of the schneider and shiffrin experiment?

Answer 24

subjects performance was only 55% correct in the beginning, and it took 900 trials for the performance to reach 90%. However, subjects reported that for the first 600 trials they had to continunally repeat the target items in each memory set in order to remember them, but after 600 trials it became automatic

Question 25

What is automatic processing? (2)

Answer 25

a type of processing that occurs

1) without attention
2) at a cost of only some of the person’s cognitive resources

Question 26

What did Schneider and Shiffrin’s experiment show about divided attention?

Answer 26

shows that divided attention is possible for some well-practiced tasks. However, in other experiments, it was found that if task difficulty is increased, then the automatic processing is not possible even with practice

Question 27

What is inattentional blindness?

Answer 27

not attending to something that is clearly visibile (Mack and Rock 1998)

Question 28

What is Change detection?

Answer 28

researchers have demonstarted how a lack of attention can affect perception by first presenting one picture, and then presenting another slightly after with some delay and slight difference in the picture

Question 29

what was Rensink and Coworkers experiment on change detection?

Answer 29

they presented a picture and then a blank field followed by the same same picture but with some item missing …etc..

• the pictures were alternated in this way until observers were able to determine what was different about the two pictures
• they found that the pictures had to be alternated back and forth a number of times before the difference was detected
• when rensink added a cue, it helped people find the image way quicker

Question 30

What is change blindness?

Answer 30

difficulty in detecting changes in scenes (Rensink)

Question 31

What is binding?

Answer 31

binding is the process by which features such as color, form, motion and location are combine dto create our perception of a coherent object

Question 32

What is feature integration theory?

Answer 32

by Treisman; tackles the question of how we perceive individual features as part of the same object by proposing a two-stage process

(integration of features to form one object)

Question 33

What is the first stage in Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory?

Answer 33

1. Preattentive stage: the first step in processing an image of an object where objects are analyzed into seperate features

i. e. rolling red ball would be analyzed into features such as color, shape and movement
- because each of these features is processed in a seperate area of the brain, they exist independently of one another at this stage of processing

Question 34

What was Treisman and Schmidt’s experiment on early perceptual processes that may exist independently of one another to demonstrate preattentive stage?

Answer 34

1. their display consisted of four objects flanked by 2 black numbers
   - they flashed the display onto screen for one-fifth of second, followed by a random dot masking field designt o eliminate any residual perception that might remain after the stimuli were turned off
   - subjects were told to report the blacnk numbers first and then report what they saw at each four locations where the shapes at been
   - in 19% of the trails, subjects reported seeing objects that were made up of a combination of features from two different stimuli like… they would see a small red triangle and a small green circle and say they saw a small red circle and small green trianle

Question 35

What are illusory conjunctions?

Answer 35

combinatoions of features from different stimuli

Question 36

What are features at early stage of processing reffered to as according to Treisman?

Answer 36

“free floating”

Question 37

what is the second stage of Treisman’s Feature integration theory?

Answer 37

that these free floating features are combined in the second stage; once the features have been combined we perceive the object

Question 38

what is illusory line motion?

Answer 38

attend to a location on visual field

• present a line with one end at the attended location
• line appears to be drawn starting at attended location
• shows taht attention can affect perceptual processing

Question 39

What is a performance operating characteristic?

Answer 39

plot of a dual-task performance as a function of task priority
- allows inferences regarding unobservable performance resource function

Question 40

What are some inferences (3) about the performance operating characteristic?

Answer 40

1. slope indicates relative efficiency
2. nearly horiztonal and vertical POC implies data limits
3. Near zero performance implies minimum required resources