Chpt 4 (Attention) Psy311 Cog Flashcards
Definition: Attention
the ability to focus on specific stimuli or locations
Either we decide to pay attention, or our attention is directed by our env.
Def: Selective Attention
paying attention to one thing while multiple things are going on.
Def: Distraction
a stimulus that interferes with another stimulus’ processing.
Def: Divided Attention
paying attention to more than one thing.
Def: attentional capture
when a stimulus like a loud noise, bright light, or sudden movement catches your attention.
Def: visual scanning
when you shift your eyes from one visual task onto another.
What’s Broadbent’s Filter Model of Attention?
Bradbent’s Filter Model of attention was made in order to explain results of another experiment done by Cherry.
Explain Cherry’s Experiment
Cherry was conducting an experiment abt dichotic listening.
The experiment was to have participants keep their attention on auditory messages in one ear and have them repeat what they heard out loud
Def: shadowing
when you repeat what you’ve heard.
What were the results of Cherry’s experiment?
Their participants were able to report the unattended message was male or female but not what was being said.
Def: sensory memory
hold incoming info for a couple of secs & transfers all info to the next stage.
What are the steps to your attention process?
Sensory Memory -> Filters out -> detectors -> STM -> LTM
Def: Cocktail Party Effect
when multiple things are going on around you, you’re able to filter out your best friend’s voice from all the background noise.
Def: Detector
when you process info from an attended message and determine the meaning. Your brain filters out which info seems important for you while ignoring info that isn’t important. The detector’s output travels to your STM then to your LTM.
Who predicted that we ignore all of our unattended info, we still can be conscious & try to remember that info bc it could still be important.
Broadbent
Explain Muray’s Experiment
participants listen & shadow a message that they heard in one ear & they were instructed to ignore everything in the other ear.
What were the results to Muray’s experiment?
⅓ of the participants heard their name in their unattended ear.
The participants were unable to filter out their name & it was already analyzed & encoded.
Explain the Gray & Wedderburn experiment
Participants were, again, told to shadow what they heard.
One hear (attended/shadowed) was the message “Dear 7 Jane” & the other was “9 Aunt 6”.
What were the results of the Gray & Wedderburn experiment?
Results of this experiment was that their attention went from one ear to the other and then right back to the 1st one.
This was explained to happen bc they were encoding the meaning of the words and put that together bc Dear Aunt Jane makes more sense than the other 2.
What were the changes to the filter model that Treisman made?
She replaced his filter with attenuator: analyzes the upcoming messages by its:
Physical characteristics - what pitch it is & the tempo
Language - how the syllables & words are grouped together.
Meaning - how these words make meaningful messages
This represents a process but not a specific structure of the brain.
However, she argued we analyze the message as far as it’s needed to identify what the message means.
After the attended & unattended messages are heard & identified, it’s then brought to the attenuator, but the attended goes at full speed & the unattended are attenuated - they are weaker. This is bc the unattended went thru the attenuator.
Def: Our Dictionary unit
what contains words, stored in our LTM, each of these has a threshold for being activated.
Has: words that have a threshold for being activated, words that are common have low thresholds & uncommon words have high thresholds.
Explain MacKay’s Experiment
how one simple sentence can be taken in other ways.
Participants heard an ambiguous sentence in their attended ear at the same time while biasing other words that were heard in the other ear.
The participants were also exposed to pairs of sentences and were instructed to indicate which of those sentences was closer to the meaning of one of the sentences that they heard earlier.
What were the results of Mackay’s experiment?
MacKay found that biased words affect what the participants picked.
This all happened when they weren’t aware that they were biasing words.
Even tho the phrases were also in the unattended ear, those were still processed.
How different were the late selection models of attention?
proposed that a lot of the info is processed to the level of meaning before further processing occurred.
What info did Lavie presented?
presented 2 factors to how we ignore stimuli that are distracting to us:
Processing capacity & perceptual load.
Def: processing capacity
which is the amount of info we can take bc there is a limit on our ability to process info.
def: perceptual load
related to how difficult each task is.
We don’t have unlimited resources for just one thing.
What’s the diff between a low load task & a high load tasks
LLT: tasks that take up only a small portion of our capacity that we can process.
HLT: are tasks that are harder & not practiced well which then causes us to use more capacity.
Explain Forster & Lavie’s experiment
Participants were instructed to respond to either target X or target N by pressing certain keys.
This became harder when the target became surrounded by other characters.
This was measured by their reaction times, the harder tasks took longer reaction times ofc.
Def: Load theory of attention
shows that after a low-load task we still have some capacity left. Our resources that are still there get processed & slows down.
Def: stroop effect
occurs bc some words have competing responses and slow responding to the target.
The relevant stimuli are very powerful bc reading words is often practiced & becomes so automatic that it becomes harder to not read.
Naming of the word interferes with our ability to name the ink color
Def: central vision
the ray of vision that has all of your attention.
Diff between your central vision and your fovea.
Central attention- area that you’re focusing on.
Fovea - the area INSIDE the central vision.
Def: peripheral vision
everything that doesn’t have your focus; the corner of your eye & everything on each of the sides.
