Chapter 4-Attention Pt. 1 Flashcards
Attention
The ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations in our environment
Selective attention
Attending to one thing while ignoring others
Filter out some information and promote other information for further processing
Divide attention
Paying attention to more than one thing at a time
Dichotic listening
Participant “shadows” one message to ensure he is attending to that message
Could not report the content of the message in unattended (overshadowed) ear
- knew there was a message
- knew gender of the speaker
Shows that unattended ear is being processed at some level
- cocktail party effect
- change in tone is noticed
- change in gender noticed
Models of selective attention
Early selection model
-Broadbent’s filter model
Intermediate selection model
-Tresiman’s attenuation theory
Late selection model
-Mckay (1973)
Broadbent filter model
Early selection model
Filters message before incoming information is analyzed for meaning
Sensory memory in broadbents filter model
Holds all incoming information for a fraction of a second
Transfers all information to the next stage
Filter in Broadbents filter model
Identifies attended message based on physical characteristics (e.g. pitch of speakers voice)
Only attended message is passed on to the next stage
Detector in Broadbent’s filter model
Processes all attended information to determine higher-level characteristics of the message
Short term memory in Broadbent’s filter model
Receives output of detector
Holds information for 10-15 seconds and may transfer it to long term memory
Broadbent’s “splits scan experiment”
1958
Letters are presented simultaneously to the left and right ears. After hearing all of the letters, the participant is supposed to repeat the letters in any order (Condition 1) or as they were presented in pairs (Condition 2)
Broadbent’s model could not explain
How participants name gets though
-cocktail party effect
Participants can shadow meaningful messages that switch from one ear to another
-Dear Aunt Jane (Gray and Weddedburn 1960)
Effects of practice on detecting information in unattended ear
- you can be trained to detect in unattended ear
- based on the meaning of the message
Dear aunt Jane is not only based on
Ear channels-also based on semantic information
Treisman’s Attenuation Theory
Intermediate selection model
- attended message can be separated from unattended message early in the information processing system
- selection can also occur later
Attenuator in Treismans attenuation theory
Analyzes incoming message in terms of physical characteristics, language, and meaning
Attended to message is let through the attenuator at full strength
Unattended message is let through at a much weaker strength
Dictionary unit in Treisman’s attenuation theory
Contains words, each of which have thresholds for being activated
- words that are common or important have low threshold
- uncommon words have high thresholds
Late selection model
Selection of stimuli for final processing does not occur until after information has been analyzed for meaning
McKay (1973)
- in attending ear, participants heard ambiguous sentences (“they were throwing stones at the bank”
- in unattended ear, participants heard either “river” or “money”
McKay experimental results
The meaning of the biasing word affected participants’ choice
Participants were unaware of the presentation of the biasing word
Load theory of Attention
Processing capacity: how much information a person can handle at any given moment
Perceptual load: the difficulty of a given task
High load (difficult) tasks use higher amounts of processing capacity
Low load (easy) tasks use lower amounts of processing capacity
Flanker
Irrelevant location (distraction)
Refer back to letters in diamond shape experiment and cartoon flanker.
Low load task got higher interference from the flanker
High load task didn’t report seeing it-they had less attention to to assign to the flanker
Another flanker experiment (letters)
Stimulus Flankers Result
B A B Compatible Fastest response
C A C Incompatible Slowest response
X A X Neutral Intermediate response
A or B is target. Press “z” if it is A or B. Press “m” if it is C or D in middle
Letter flanker diamond experiment
For low load task: incompatible condition was harder than compatible (people have resource to pay attention to the flanker)
High load task: compatibility of the flanker did not really affect the high load condition because participants had no resource to pay attention to the flanker
The Stroop Test
Not only the load but also the property of the irrelevant stimulus or dimension
Name of the word interferes with the ability to name the ink colour
Cannot avoid paying attention to the meanings of words
(Easy with shapes, challenging with words)
Stroop effect conditions
Congruent: colour and word same
Incongruent: colour and word not same
Incongruency doesn’t matter much for word reading
Incongruency hurts a lot for colour naming
You can’t stop yourself from reading a word. If you could then incongruent conditions wouldn’t slow you down in colour naming. Automatic tasks are harder to control
