Cognitive (CONTEMPORARY) - attention - MORAY

Question 1

selective attention

Answer 1

when people are presented with two or more simultaneous messages (one in each ear) and are instructed to process and respond to only one of them (dichotic listening)

Question 2

shadowing technique

Answer 2

forces participants to selectively attend (choose to listen) to one message and reject/ignore the other
first used by Cherry 1953 when he studied among many others the cocktail part phenomenon. This is where we can be fully immersed in a conversation with someone and completely ignorant of everything else going on around us at that one moment, then hear our name in a conversation across the room and switch our attention to that conversation

Question 3

inattentional block

Answer 3

process of tuning out most of the information that reaches our senses

Question 4

background

Answer 4

Cherry found that participants who shadowed a message presented to one ear were ignorant of the context of a message simultaneously presented to the other ear (rejected message). They could recall virtually nothing of what had been presented in the rejected message

Question 5

aims

Answer 5

1. to test the most basic of Cherry’s findings, that participants could recall virtually nothing of the rejected message (the one that was not being shadowed)
2. to test the effect of ‘affect’ on the inattentional block - in the context of the study the term ‘affect’ refers to the personal relevance of the information received
3. to test the effect of perceptual set on the inattentional block - if we are told before hand to listen out for numbers (been set to perceive them) would they break through the inattentional block if they were presented in the rejected message

Question 6

research method

Answer 6

lab experiment

Question 7

describe apparatus used

Answer 7

Brenell Mark IV stereophonic tape recorder modified with two amplifiers to give two independent outputs, one output going to each of the earpieces of a pair of headphones
matching for loudness was approximate by asking participants to say when the two messages that seemed equally loud to the experimenter were subjectively equal to them

Question 8

sample

Answer 8

participants were undergraduate and research workers of both sexes
12 took part in the experimental conditions in experiment 2 and two groups of 14 were used in experiment 3

Question 9

experiment 1 method

Answer 9

basic shadowing task was used with a story played in one ear which participants had to shadow
the rejected message was 7 words repeated 35 times over and over again
participants asked what they could recall of the rejected message
basic recognition test with 21 words - 7 from the shadowed message, 7 from the rejected message and 7 that appeared in neither message

Question 10

experiment 1 results

Answer 10

participants said they recalled
shadowed 4.9/7
rejected 1.9/7
neither 2.6/7

Question 11

experiment 1 conclusions

Answer 11

the inattentional black exists, info from the rejected message was no better recalled than information that was not there at all

Question 12

experiment 2 method

Answer 12

each participant conducted 10 shadowing tasks one after each other
in 3 of these an instruction including the participants’ name was included as part of the rejected message
in another 3 there was an instruction in the rejected message with no name mentioned
4 trials had no instruction in the rejected message, a repeated measures design was used
participants were asked whether or not they heard the instruction

Question 13

experiment 2 results

Answer 13

instruction with name heard 20/39 times
instruction with no name heard 4/36 times
therefore a significant difference was found

Question 14

experiment 2 conclusion

Answer 14

the inattentional block can be broken by meaningful info
this is the cocktail party phenomenon or the effect of affect
we process the rejected message for meaning not content
if it means something to us then we switch attention to it i.e. when we hear hear name we want to know what is being said

Question 15

experiment 3 method

Answer 15

2 groups were used - independent measures design
group 1 were told that they would be asked questions about the shadowed message at the end of the task
they were therefore set to perceive the shadowed message
group 2 were told to remember as many numbers as they possibly could - they were therefore set the perceive numbers
both groups completed a basic shadowing task with numbers presented in both the shadowed and rejected messages

Question 16

experiment 3 results

Answer 16

no significant differences were found between the groups in terms of how many numbers were recalled
those who were set to perceive numbers did not notice any more of them than those in the other group
numbers in the rejected message did not penetrate the inattentional block

Question 17

experiment 3 conclusions

Answer 17

it is very difficult to make neural information important enough to break through the inattentional block