Chapter Four - Attention Flashcards
What is attention?
-ability to focus on specific stimuli/locations in environment
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 a distraction?
-one stimulus interfering with the processing of another stimulus
What is attentional capture?
rapid shifting of attention usually caused by a stimulus (loud noise, bright light, sudden movement)
Why is selective attention an evolutionary advantage?
-wouldn’t be able to function well if we had to focus on every stimui
What is the Colin Cherry experiment?
- one message presented in left ear, another in right ear
- participant shadows one message to ensure he is attending to that message
What is the results of the dichotic listening experiment?
-participants could not report content of message in unattended ear
What is the cocktail effect?
-ability to focus on one stimulus and filter out others
In dichotic listening, is the info in unattended ear being processed?
- yes
- change in gender + tone is noticed
What are 3 models of selective attention?
- Early selection model (Broadbent)
- Intermediate selection model (Tresiman’s Attenuation Theory)
- Late selection model (McKay)
When does filtering happen in the Broadbent’s model?
-filters message before incoming info is analyzed for meaning
what are the 5 components of Broadbent’s model?
- messages
- sensory memory
- filter
- detector
- to memory
What does sensory memory do? (Broadbent)
- holds all incoming info
- transfers all info to next stage
What does the filter do? (Broadbent)
- identifies attended message based on physical characteristics
- passes on attended message
What does the detector do? (Broadbent)
-processes all info to determine higher-level characteristics of the message
What is Broadbent’s model also referred to?
bottleneck model
Does the filter slow down the flow of info in the Broadbent model?
-no, it just restricts information flow
What are 3 shortcomings/challenges to Broadbent’s model?
- we should not be conscious of unattended msgs
- participants name gets through
- participants can shadow meaningful msgs that switch from one ear to another
What is Treisman’s Attenuation Theory?
- intermediate-selection model
- attended message can be separated from unattended message early in info-processing system
- selection can occur later
What are 4 parts of the Treisman’s Attenuation Theory?
- messages
- attenuator
- dictionary unit
- memory
What does the attenuator do? (Treisman’s)
-analyzes incoming msg in terms of physical char. language + meaning
What happens to the attended message? (Treisman’s)
-let through at full strength
What happens to the unattended message? (Treisman’s)
-let through at a much weaker strength
What is the dictionary unit? (Treisman’s)
- contains words
- words have thresholds of activation
In Treisman’s Theory what happens to unattended inputs?
-attenuated, but not turned off
In Treisman’s Theory, How is selection based?
-in an ordered hierarchy:
physical cues, syllabic pattern, specific words, individual words, grammatical structure, meaning
What is McKay’s model?
- late selection model
- selection of stimuli for final processing doesn’t occur until after info has been analyzed for meaning
What was McKay’s experiment?
- attending ear: ambiguous sentences
- unattended ear: “river” “money”
What was the result of McKay’s experiment?
- participants had to choose which was closest to meaning of attended message
- meaning of biasing word affected participants’ choice
- participants unaware of presentation of biasing words
What was McKay’s final conclusion?
- biasing words affect subjects’ judgements
- so words must be processed to level of meaning even when unattended
What is processing capacity?
how much info a person can handle at any given moment
What is perceptual load?
difficulty of a given task
What are high-load tasks?
-use higher amounts of processing capacity
What are low-load tasks?
use lower amounts of processing capacity
What is the Load Theory of Attention?
- presentation of task irrelevant to stimulus slows response time
- effect is stronger for easier tasks than harder tasks
- perceptual capcity remains for harder tasks