Chapter 4 - Attention

Question 1

attention

Answer 1

the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations.

Question 2

selective attention

Answer 2

attending to one thing while ignoring others.

Question 3

distraction

Answer 3

one stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus.

Question 4

divided attention

Answer 4

paying attention to more than one thing at a time.

Question 5

attentional capture

Answer 5

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

Question 6

visual scanning

Answer 6

movements of the eyes from one location or object to another.

Question 7

Broadbent’s filter model of attention

Answer 7

model of attention that proposes a filter that lets attended stimuli through and blocks some or all of the unattended stimuli.

Question 8

dichotic listening

Answer 8

the procedure of presenting one message to the left ear and a different message to the right ear.

Question 9

shadowing

Answer 9

the procedure of repeating what you are hearing.

Question 10

cocktail party effect

Answer 10

the ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli, especially at a party where there are a lot of simultaneous conversations.

Question 11

bottleneck model

Answer 11

model of attention that proposes that incoming information is restricted at some point in processing, so only a portion of the information gets through to consciousness.

Broadbent’s model of attention is an example of a bottleneck model.

Question 12

early selection model

Answer 12

model of attention that explains selective attention by early filtering out of the unattended message.

In Broadbent’s early selection model, the filtering step occurs before the message is analyzed to determine its meaning.

Question 13

attenuator

Answer 13

analyzes the incoming message in terms of (1) its physical characteristics - high-pitched or low pitched, fast or slow; (2) language - how the message groups into syllables or words; (3) its meaning - how sequences of words create meaningful phrases.

Question 14

attenuation model of attention

Answer 14

Anne Treisman’s model of selective attention that proposes that selection occurs in two stages. In the first stage, an attenuator analyzes the incoming message and lets through the attended message - and also the unattended message, but at a lower (attenuated) strength.

Question 15

dictionary unit

Answer 15

contains words, stored in memory, each of which has a threshold for being activated.

Question 16

late selection models of attention

Answer 16

a model of selective attention that proposes that selection of stimuli for final processing does not occur until after the information in the message has been analyzed for meaning.

Question 17

processing capacity

Answer 17

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

Question 18

perceptual load

Answer 18

related to the difficult of a task.

low-load tasks or high load tasks

Question 19

low-load task

Answer 19

uses only a small amount of a person’s processing capacity.

Question 20

high-load task

Answer 20

use more of the person’s processing capacity.

Question 21

load theory of attention

Answer 21

proposal that the ability to ignore task-irrelevant stimuli depend on the load of the task the person is carrying out. High-load tasks result in less distraction.

Question 22

Stroop effect

Answer 22

originally studied by J. R. Stroop, using a task in which a person is instructed to respond to one aspect of a stimulus, such as the color of ink that word is printed in, and ignore another aspect, such as the color that the word names.

the Stroop effect refers to the fact that people fins this task difficult when for example, the word RED is printed in blue ink.

Question 23

overt attention

Answer 23

shifting attention from one place to another while moving the eyes.

Question 24

covert attention

Answer 24

shifting attention from one place to another while keeping the eyes stationary.

Question 25

fixation

Answer 25

in problem solving, peoples tendency to focus on a specific characteristic of the problem that keeps them from arriving at a solution.

Question 26

saccadic eye movement

Answer 26

a rapid, jerky movement from one fixation to the next

Question 27

stimulus salience

Answer 27

bottom-up factors that determine attention to elements of a scene.

physical properties of the stimulus, such as color, contrast, or movement

Question 28

saliency map

Answer 28

map of a scene that indicates the stimulus salience of area and objects in the scene

Question 29

precueing

Answer 29

a procedure in which participants are given a cue that will usually help them carry out a subsequent task.

this procedure has been used in visual attention experiments in which participants are presented with a cue that tells them where to direct their attention.

Question 30

same-object advantage

Answer 30

occurs when the enhancing effect of attention spreads throughout an object, so that attention to one place on an object results in a facilitation of processing at other places on the object.

Question 31

automatic processing

Answer 31

a type of processing that occurs without intention and at a cost of only some of a person’s cognitive resources

Question 32

inattention blindness

Answer 32

not attending to something that is clearly visible

Question 33

change blindness

Answer 33

difficulty in detecting changes in scenes

Question 34

binding

Answer 34

the process by which features such as color, form, motion, and location are combined to create our perception of a coherent object.

Question 35

binding problem

Answer 35

the question of how an object’s individual features become bound together.

Question 36

feature integration theory

Answer 36

an approach to object perception, developed by Anne Treisman, that proposes a sequence of stages in which features are first analyzed and then combined to result in perception of an object.

Question 37

pre-attentive stage

Answer 37

the first stage of Treisman’s feature integration theory, in which an object is analyzed into its features.

Question 38

illusory conjunctions

Answer 38

a situation, demonstrated in experiments by Anne Treisman, in which features from different objects are inappropriately combined.

Question 39

focused attention stage

Answer 39

the second stage of Treisman’s feature integration theory. According to the theory, attention causes the combination of features into perception of an object.

Question 40

Balint’s syndrome

Answer 40

a condition caused by brain damage in which a person has difficulty focusing attention on individual objects.

Question 41

visual search

Answer 41

occurs when a person is looking for one stimulus or object among a number of other stimuli or objects.

EX: searching for a single face in a crowd of people

Question 42

feature search

Answer 42

searching among distractors for a target item that involves detecting one feature, such as “horizontal”

Question 43

conjunction search

Answer 43

searching among distractors for a target that involves two or more features, such as “horizontal” and “green.”

Question 44

topographic map

Answer 44

Each point on a visual stimulus causes activity at a specific location on a brain structure, such as the visual cortex, and points next to each other on the stimulus cause activity at points next to each other on the structure.