Chapter 4 Selective and Divided Attention Flashcards
How do we channel relevant from irrelevant?
- Do we attend to everything?
-And then SELECT what is important
OR - Do we have a limited capacity system?
-That acts as a FILTER ‐ other material gets ignored
Early vs. late selection filters
Selection depends on resources.
* Complex stimuli involve more effort, leading to early selection.
* Easy stimuli involve less effort, leading to late selection.
Attentional blink performance in neglect patients
Shadowing paradigm- dichotic listening task
- Czech spoken with English sound
structure – sounded like English but
wasn’t – 4/30 detected peculiar nature
of input - hear list of words – within that list 7
words in unattended ear repeated 35
times in course of experiment – told to
mark on sheet words heard before – Ss
were random - Results suggest listener can only focus on separate channels
Dichotic listening task- no shadowing, just listening to both channels
Implications of dichotic listening task
- Limited capacity system
-We do not attend to everything
-What we do not attend to seems to be filtered out - Is there any information retained from the
unattended channel?
Dichotic listening task- how we put sentences together
Implications of how we put sentences together
Why your name?
- Overlearned, frequent
- Frequently activated more easily accessed, lower threshold
Why priming and effects of meaning?
- Overlearned
- Activation level changes
- More easily accessed even if it does not reach consciousness
These data suggest that
* we have a limited capacity system that ‘leaks’ information which allows
the system to effectively switch attention
* ignoring information requires an active mechanism
How can one show that ignoring information
requires an active mechanism?
- Require the subject to pay attention to something that they previously ignored.
Negative priming paradirm
- Two superimposed letters (e.g., red F & green R) are presented on each trial.
- Subjects are asked to name the letter in green as quickly as possible.
Results suggest:
- Attention requires focusing limited capacity resources
- Ignoring requires an active mechanism to inhibit response or activation
Think about a party. You want to hear what the group next to you is saying while you are with another group. What do you do?
How does attention affect perception?
- Attention allows the mind to “prepare” for a
stimulus - In some sense it primes for what is upcoming
Cued is same location as the target square, unqued is different location
What is priming?
Stimulus based
- Prior presentation of a stimulus (prime) influences performance
on another stimulus
Expectation based
- Prior presentation of a stimulus (prime) sets up an expectation/prediction on another stimulus
- e.g., Prime‐target pairs match or are semantically related 90% vs. only 10% of the time
Repetition priming: Prime: dog followed by Target: dog
Semantic priming: Prime: dog followed by Target: cat
Summary of selective attention
- Both facilitating desired input and inhibiting
unwanted input - Attention directed both to an object and to space
- Flexibility of early and late attention
- Attention is not a single process or a particular
mechanism
Divided attention- hypotheses
Explain divided attention
Subject hears a list of words in one ear that they
need to shadow while at the same time memorize a
list of different words that are presented:
- In the other ear
- On the computer screen as words
- On the computer screen as pictures
Which is going to be the most difficult to do?
Graph showing the types of errors in recognition based on type of remembered items
Implications of graph on previous flashcard
-The more similar the two tasks and the more they
recruit the same modality, the more difficult it becomes to do both
- Tasks will interfere with each other if they compete for
resources
-If the tasks are very different, there is less
interference
- BUT there are limits to this!
What happens to attention with practice?
- Tasks require resources, and you cannot use more
resources than you have. - Some resources are task‐specific and others are task‐general.
- If two tasks make demands upon the same resources, the result will be interference.
- Practice increases the automaticity of a task, resulting in a need for fewer cognitive resources.
- Task: subject hears a noun and must respond with a verb
