Cog 1-5 Flashcards
Sensory memory
Brief or literal copy of event: iconic memory, echoic memory
Focused/selective attention
A situation in which individuals try to attend to only one source of information while ignoring other stimuli
Divided attention
A situation in which two tasks are performed at the same time (multitasking)
Cocktail party problem
The difficulties involved in attending to one voice when two or more people are speaking at the same time
What is sound segregation?
From a mixture of sounds reaching someone’s ear, the listener has to decide which sounds belong together and which do not
Which is harder: auditory segmentation or visual segmentation?
Auditory segmentation
What is motion induced blindness?
When you focus on one thing and something else in your vision disappears
What is a dichotic listening task?
The listener hears two different messages coming through each headphone and is asked to repeat the ‘shadow’ one of them
How does Cherry explain that we can follow one conversation when everyone is talking at the same time?
We use selection; only crude information from unattended ear is encoded (e.g. sex of speaker); when voices are physically similar they are hard to distinguish; very little complex information is encoded
Define locus of selection
The point at which some material is accepted or selected for further processing, and some material is rejected and no longer processed; ‘your decision point’
What is early locus of selection?
Making your decision based on physical characteristics and filtering things out on this physical basis
What is late locus of selection?
All information in front of you gets processed to a high degree of processing level of meaning, and then important things are further processed from there
What is Broadbent’s filter theory?
Proposes an early locus of selection; multiple inputs are coded in parallel; one is selected on the basis of its physical characteristics; unattended stimuli not processed further
What is the problem with Broadbent’s filter theory?
Some information from the unattended ear is processed beyond the physical level
What did Moray find?
Looked at switching during shadowing experiments; found that people still recognised their name when it was presented in the unattended ear (cocktail part effect); when we direct our attention to a message from one ear and reject a message from the other ear, almost none of the verbal content of the rejected message is able to get through this block (EXCEPT important messages like our name)
Define attenuating
Things with a lower threshold (hearing your name) you are more likely to hear it
What is Treisman’s attenuation theory?
Designed to account for breakthroughs that can occur in Broadbent’s filter theory; words that are expected are more likely to be processed
What theory is evidence against Broadbent?
Treisman’s attenuation theory; because in the dichotic listening task subjects did switch to the unattended channel if the speech made sense, but quickly switched back
Define leaky filter
Explains why some unattended items receive further analysis (you can’t actually focus your attention)
Define slippage
Where attention suddenly shifts (your attention actually moves); attentional shift takes approximately 50ms
What is Lavie’s load account?
We are more likely to be distracted when the task we are doing has a low perceptual load (as if we have spare attentional capacity which can be captured by irrelevant things)
What did Normad, Bouget & Croziet find in relation to evaluative pressure?
Pressure increased distraction caused by task related features, and reduced distraction by irrelevant features
Define Feature Integration Theory
Suggests that when perceiving a stimulus, features are registered early, automatically, and in parallel, while objects are identified separately and at a later stage in processing
Define ‘feature search’
Things stand out well when they are unique in a single element
