CHAPTER 4 - ATTENTION Flashcards
what is attention?
the mental process of concentrating effort on a location, stimulus, or mental event
what is selective attention?
attending to one thing while ignoring others
what is a distraction?
one stimulus interfering with the process of another stimulus
what is divided attention?
paying attention to more than one thing at a time
what is attentional capture ?
the rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus
what is visual scanning?
movement from the eyes from one location to another
what did Colin Cherry discover?
that participants could report messages presented to the attended ear but could not report what is being presented to the unattended ear
what technique did Cherry use in his experiments?
dichotic listening
how does dichotic listening work?
presenting different stimuli to different ears
what was Cherry’s experiment procedure?
required participants to focus on one message in one ear and repeat what they heard out loud
participants focusing on one message in one ear and repeating what they heard out loud is called..
shadowing
what is the cocktail party effect?
the ability to focus on one stimulus while filtering out other stimuli
what are the 4 parts of Broadbent’s Filter Model of Attention?
sensory memory
filter
detector
short term memory
what occurs in sensory memory?
the holding of all incoming information lasting a fraction of a second before transfer to the filter
what occurs in the filter?
identification of the message being attended to based on physical characteristics and only lets the attended message through
what are considered physical characteristics from the filter’s POV
speaker’s tone, pitch, speed of talking, and accent
what occurs in the detector?
the processing of information from the attended message to determine higher level characteristics
what are the higher level characteristics that the detector determines?
its meaning
what occurs in short-term memory?
the holding of information for a short time period before transferring it to long-term memory
what kind of model is Broadbent’s Filter Model of Attention
early selection model
why is Broadbent’s model considered an early selection model?
the filter eliminates the unattended ear’s message near the beginning of information flow
what significant event occurred in Neville Moray’s experiment of dichotic listening?
participants were presented their name in the unattended ear’s message
why was the detection of participants’ names in Neville Moray’s experiment significant?
does not follow Broadbent’s filter model; the filter is only supposed to let in one message
explain top-down processing in terms of attention and hearing your name
attention is going from one ear to another based on the previously known meaning of a word