Chapter 4: Attention Flashcards
What is selective attention?
attending to one thing while ignoring others
what is divided attention?
paying attention to more than one thing at a time
What is attentional capture?
a rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus such as a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement… ballistic movement
What is dichotic listening (by cherry in 1953)
presenting two different stimulus in each ear and foucusing on one and filterning out the other
what is the filter model of attention? (broadbent)
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)
What are the 4 stages that the filter model of attention introduced as a flow diagram to cognitive psychology?
- sensory memory –> holds all incoming info for fraction of second
- 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
- detector –> processes information from the attended message to determine higher level charactersitics of the message like its meaning
- Short term memory/long term memory –> STM holds for 10-15 seconds and transferes info to LTM if rehearsed
Why is broadbent’s model of attention called the “early selection model”?
because the filter eliminates the unattended infromation right at the beginning of the flow of information
What are 3 problems with the filter theory?
- Salient words are undetected –> certain significant words are more recalled even if theyre in unattended channel
- stimulus coherence matters –> people follow the message and not the attended/unattended channel
- Processing effort matters –> channels are defined by meaning, task and goals
What was Moray’s experiment about Salient words being detected?
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
What was Triesman’s experiment on attended-unatetended coherance?
fluent prose message is swtiched from attended to unattended… participants follow the MEANING and not the channel
What is the Attenuation Model of Attention? What are the three ways it analyzed incoming messages?
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
What are late selection models of attention? And who developed it?
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
What is Processing capacity?
the amount of information people can handle and sets a limit on their ability to process incoming information
What is perceptual load?
related to the difficulty of the task
what are low-load tasks?
easy, well practiced tasks have low perceptual load and only use a small amount of a person’s processing capacity
What are high-load tasks?
use more of a person’s processing capacity and have a high perceptual load (high difficulty)
What is the Load Theory of Attention?
- low-load tasks that use few cognitive resources may leave resources available for processing unattended task-irrelevant stimuli
- 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)
what are 4 accounts for problematic results of the Resource theory/Load Theory of Attention?
- detecting or not detecting unusual events
- detecting salient events in unattended channel
- effects of attended task difficulty
- role of message coherence
What occurs in the stroop task in terms of attention?
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
What is overt attention?
shifting attention from one place to another by moving ur eyes
what is stimulus salience?
the physical properties of the stimulus like color, contrast or movement
what is cover attention?
directing our attention while keeping our eyes stationary
What was Schneider and Shiffrin’s experiment done on divided attention?
- subjects shown a memory test consistenting of one to four characters called target stimuli
- memory set followed by a rapid presentation of 20 “test frames” each of which contained distractors
- on half of the trials on one of the frames contained a target stimulus from the memory set
- a new memory set was presented on each trial, so the targets changed from trial to trial followed by new test frames
What was the results of the schneider and shiffrin experiment?
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
What is automatic processing? (2)
a type of processing that occurs
1) without attention
2) at a cost of only some of the person’s cognitive resources
What did Schneider and Shiffrin’s experiment show about divided attention?
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
What is inattentional blindness?
not attending to something that is clearly visibile (Mack and Rock 1998)
What is Change detection?
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
what was Rensink and Coworkers experiment on change detection?
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
What is change blindness?
difficulty in detecting changes in scenes (Rensink)
What is binding?
binding is the process by which features such as color, form, motion and location are combine dto create our perception of a coherent object
What is feature integration theory?
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)
What is the first stage in Treisman’s Feature Integration Theory?
- 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
What was Treisman and Schmidt’s experiment on early perceptual processes that may exist independently of one another to demonstrate preattentive stage?
- 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
What are illusory conjunctions?
combinatoions of features from different stimuli
What are features at early stage of processing reffered to as according to Treisman?
“free floating”
what is the second stage of Treisman’s Feature integration theory?
that these free floating features are combined in the second stage; once the features have been combined we perceive the object
what is illusory line motion?
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
What is a performance operating characteristic?
plot of a dual-task performance as a function of task priority
- allows inferences regarding unobservable performance resource function
What are some inferences (3) about the performance operating characteristic?
- slope indicates relative efficiency
- nearly horiztonal and vertical POC implies data limits
- Near zero performance implies minimum required resources
